The SaaS Technical Account Manager

B2B SaaS companies who serve enterprise accounts may benefit from the creation of a Technical Account Manager role, aka TAM. The TAM is situated above day-to-day Support and adjacent to the Customer Success Manager, and is a named account team resource whose responsibilities are as follows:

• Provide deep product expertise to clients
• Develop a deeper understanding of assigned clients’ business practices and operating environment
• Manage escalated Support requests
• Liaise with engineering for escalated technical issues
• Monitor Support request flow for assigned clients and aggregate common issues for broader resolution (e.g. training, product enhancements, etc)

They should not handle direct Support inquiries. Instead, the TAM should develop an understanding of their clients’ technical environment, product configurations and business processes. The TAM prevents client power users from having to re-explain their environment and configuration each time they contact Support which improves the overall customer experience.

The TAM role ensures that Customer Success Managers do not become Support resources for your largest clients.

Should clients pay for Technical Account Management?

TAMs invest significant time in learning their clients’ operating environment. This is an inherently non-scalable business activity, and for this reason the TAM should typically be a paid, add-on service provided by the SaaS company.

However, depending on the complexity and maturity of the product as well as market dynamics, it may be critical to the success of the product but not something that customers are willing to pay additionally for. In that case, consider baking the TAM into a premium product package. It may be a reasonable way to accommodate for the added cost over time, and a differentiator in the overall pricing model and competitive strategy.

Because TAMs are focused purely on issue resolution and customer issue management, they typically fall into Cost of Goods Sold from an accounting perspective, and therefore impact Gross Margin of the business. So charging more fees to clients who utilize the TAM can help reduce any Gross Margin compression.