Make Account Management Great Again

I have been doing Account Management at Stuart since over a year now, and I realised many people have asked me what is exactly my job.

Account Management is a term suitable to B2B businesses in particular where you deal with big accounts which can bring a lot of revenue. It is similar to CRM in B2C companies where you handle individuals and not businesses as clients.

First #fakenews: Account Management is not Customer Support. We are in touch with clients but don’t deal with daily requests and calls about a live Stuart delivery which would go wrong.

It is not Sales although we do a lot of Sales, but rather on the up-sell part. We do not hunt for new clients, we take care of clients once the Sales team has “closed” them, ie has managed to make them agree to use our service.

Account Management is not Operations, but we do deal with many operational issues affecting our clients.

As you can see, it is a function at the crossroad of several teams. We need to be informed of everything, so we can help our clients use the service the best way possible and scale with us.

Account Management is all about building relationships and trust with our existing clients basis. It is the people touch that makes the difference, the person who comes visit your store or give you a call to get feedback on how you’re using the service and how we could improve.

It is all about treating the clients the best and keeping them informed of the changes we are making to make the product fitting their needs more and more. Actually, it is about involving them in these changes.

Which skills do you need as an Account Manager?

Account Management is a lot about multitasking and being open to handle a whole range of topics, from a client scaling with us and needing operational help to pushing through some tech projects to automate further and increase client usage at scale.

So the two first skills an Account Manager should have is to be people-oriented and to be open to handle a variety of topics in a both rigorous and creative way. There are never blockers, always solutions to make your clients happier and happier. This is the mindset any Account Manager should have.

The people touch is extremely important, even at scale — especially at scale, should I say! Using automated tools to communicate with a large database of clients, like Intercom, is effective but cannot be enough — pick up your phone and call shall be the mindset here. Nothing more effective than a face to face meeting or call to build some solid relationship and get to know someone well.

The pre-requisite here is to be able to focus your efforts the best way, so you can still use these mass-communication tools, but you’ve identified when you should talk in person. For this, a bit of data analysis and crunching is necessary, to pull together some reports that will give you the info you need, and if needed put some triggers on these reports that will tell you when you need to call a certain client (for instance when they had a bad experience, that you would define as XYZ). More on this below :)

Which tools can help you being the best Account Manager?

Main tool for Account Managers is a comprehensive CRM system that enables to keep track of every discussion with clients, such as a Salesforce. I have looked at other tools as well (Kapta is one of these for instance), but so far I haven’t found an alternative to Salesforce which can be used by both Sales and Account Management teams.

Indeed, as the two teams work closely together, it is optimal to keep a common database of clients for Sales and Account Managers. Sales input clients who were approached, and assign them to Account Managers when the handover is done. Different fields can be used for Sales and for Account Management, as the metrics tracked are not the same, but this is way easier than using two different databases, especially for reporting purposes and for the consistency of the information recorded.

Once your startup grows and you have more tech capabilities, it is ideal to integrate the CRM tool with your backend so that some information such as the number of orders per client can directly update in the CRM tool.

Which brings me to my next point: it is extremely important to be able to get clients performance data. Depending on your industry, key KPIs to monitor on a daily basis are essential to guide your action as an Account Manager. We use Periscope for this at Stuart, on a daily and weekly basis. Based on the numbers I see for my clients, I defined some follow up actions which can be calls, meetings, etc.

When I need to send out communications to the whole clients basis, I use automated emailing tools such as Intercom and Mailchimp. Like most of the people in this world, your clients will likely need multiple reminders of something before being able to remember it and that’s why it is important to build a multichannel communication strategy. New feature in your product? Send it through the client newsletter, then through an automated email to the whole client basis (Mailchimp enables enough personnalisation through data exports to make it look like customised) and then define the list of clients who would benefit the most from this feature and organise 1:1 calls or meetings.

All these tools will enable you to build relationships with your clients in a structured and organised way, to follow up with them and communicate efficiently, in a nutshell to use your time the best way for you and for your clients!

Account Management is a mindset

I wasn’t fully aware of the power of Account Management before having to dedicate myself to this function at Stuart. To be honest, I didn’t even considered it as an actual team in a startup — for me, it was more about some tasks to be done here and there by the Sales and Operations teams.

I haven’t seen many startups which recognise the value of Account Management and dedicate enough ressources for it. And yet, it is a powerful lever of growth for any business, and one of the first to consider. It makes no sense to invest in Sales and having a team dedicated to go find and close clients, if these clients are not taken care of and churn. Not only does that waste Sales team time, but it also spread a negative word of mouth about your business.

In general, Account Management is about adopting a partnership mindset, where you get committed to work with someone in a way where you can’t cheat on each other because it would break the win-win partnership. You state the terms of your collaboration in a contract and you build relationships through trust and communication. I am extremely transparent with my clients, because lies would not enable to build the confidence and make them feel confortable to grow more and more with us. In that sense, Account Management is fostering some values that are key to maintain an ethical work environment, and beyond!

Since I started to take the Account Manager position fully at Stuart, I’ve become a strong advocate of adopting an Account Management mindset in everything you do, including in your personal life, ie keeping up building relationships with the people you know even if you don’t see them regularly anymore. That’s the case of university friends from my schools that now live in another country, but we are still in touch and helping out each other whenever we can.

So Account Management to build a better world? Yes We Can!

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +369,832 people.

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