Account Management

Account Management

Thought account management was tough? Well here is the framework I follow, see if this helps you in your job. This framework isn’t very generic but inclined towards account management in software services industry.

What is Account Management? A lot of people confuse Account Management with Delivery Management, which is not correct. Account Management is a process of penetrating customer account and finding new avenues for generating additional revenue, building long lasting relationship with customer, acting as an alternate point of escalation apart from Delivery. In other words it is a salesman job but instead of focusing on new customers, you focus on improving revenue from existing customers and making sure that your customer delighted from your services.

Profiling

When you take up a new Account just make sure that you profile the account in detail, typical questions you should raise are

·         Business model of your customer?

·         Customer Revenue? No of employees? Business Locations?

·         Board members? Management team? Key stakeholders? Decision Makers?

·         What do we do for them? Team involved? Revenue per month? Opportunities?

·         Customer Satisfaction? Current Issues/Resolution?

·         Projections/Targets?

Building Rapport

Once you gather this information, it is best to have a face-to-face meeting with your stakeholders to understand them better and build a rapport, without a good rapport it would be hard to gain good insight about your customer.

During your meeting with the customer try to understand what you are doing well? And things which you are not? If the customer is fairly happy with your services, it is possibly a good time to check if there are new opportunities coming by and work accordingly.

See if you can take the customer out for lunch/dinner, informal conversation are far more engaging than the formal ones.

I have witnessed account managers, who land-up on customer site with zero or less than required preparation and they end up asking pathetic questions, which only makes them look bad. Asking intelligent, thoughtful and meaningful questions makes you look good in front of customers and you are considered to be valuable resource than just a manager.

Sometimes it may take multiple meetings to build rapport, be patient and wait for the right time. Don’t try too hard; customer may feel you are pushy.

Idea Generation

Can you increase profitability and productivity of your customer, one of way to do so is to study the needs of customers, study their industry, study their current products, study their competitors and see what else you can provide them which would help them. Come up with new ideas, detail them and showcase these ideas to relevant stakeholders explaining how this would help them.

Ideally your presentation should describe the idea, value proposition, mockups, schedule and cost involved in the project, this would help stakeholder in quicker decision making.

A lot of time account manager and delivery team rely heavily on customers to tell them the exact requirements. If your customer is clear on what is needed you are lucky but if not then it is best for you to take a consulting approach and tell the customer what needs to be done than just giving-up because your customer is unclear.

Sometime customers aren’t able to provide you much needed information because they may be busy, you got to treat this as an opportunity to impress the customer by taking the initiative to come-up with first level requirements and proposal, a lot of time this also helps in knowing what the customer doesn’t want.

Who is the decision maker?

Once you done with your initial analysis of the account, it is time to identify the real decision maker and see if you can make a contact with him. Real decision is the one, who actually decides whether to buy your services or not. Your odds of winning a new contract or renewing a contract is much higher if you can establish a direct contact with the real decision maker. In the event you are not able to meet the decision maker, make sure you provide all the required information to your immediate stakeholder so he looks good in front of his boss while presenting your case.

Proposal

Foremost qualify the opportunity by checking if your customer has enough funds, time for execution and real need. Once you are done with the qualification process, make sure that your proposal presentation covers the following.

·          Executive Summary

·          Scope of the project

·          Proposed team structure

·          Cost and Timeline

·          Assumptions

·          Engagement Details

·          Relevant Past Experience

·          Process to be followed

·          Value Proposition

There is lot to account management, will cover more in my upcoming blogs.