If you’re like most salespeople, account managers, and business owners I know, there’s a lot on your plate.
Chances are you’re investing a lot of time and resources in lead generation and prospecting –> You hustle to close deals
–> Finally, you get to celebrate big wins.
From there, depending on your role, the next stage can vary…
source: Ian Carroll, https://www.flickr.com/photos/iancarroll/4856006353
If you’re in a multi-faceted position in a small company, you have to work hard to do well by your new buyers. You scramble to hit your deadlines. You keep a clean inbox. You’re constantly on call for your customers, colleagues, and superiors.
Your customers take you off your sales game, and your prospects steal you away from your customers. You’re in a bind, because winning with both groups is imperative.
As the main relationship manager, it’s your neck that’s on the line. Not your team’s. So maybe that means you’re always picking up the slack for other departments.
If you’re a full time salesperson, after a big win, you start hustling again for more leads. You’re cold calling, sending emails, and trying to land appointments with strangers. It’s a never ending treadmill. You have to constantly de-value yourself by knocking on someone’s door and trying to get them to trust you.
The problem is this: your future business is determined by what you did or didn’t do weeks or months prior. Yet, it’s easy to let selling fall by the wayside when you have a new lineup of high-value customers demanding things from you.
This is what causes the condition of feast and famine in so many organizations. It brings so much overwork and stress.
Regardless of your role, the condition is the same: sooner or later, you don’t know where your next customers will come from.
Only the very savvy minority of businesses take the time to build a repeatable account management process. And when they do, they tend to win big.
Here’s why:
“The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%”
– Marketing Metrics
“It costs 6–7 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one”
– Bain & Company
Put simply, your best opportunities are probably your existing customers. They are the most-neglected, low-hanging fruit. It’s much cheaper and easier to convince an existing customer to buy once more than it is to convince a stranger, who doesn’t know or trust you, to purchase for the first time. Yet such few companies invest in account management. It’s crazy!
From personal experience, I can tell you, yes, it feels good to prospect, go on weeks of sales meetings, and finally get a signature on a dotted for a $20k engagement. But do you know what feels better than that?
Hearing the phone ring, picking up the receive, chatting for five minutes with an existing client, and then sending them an SOW for a $50k, $75k, or even a $100k re-engagement. That’s much sweeter. The one-off wins are nice, but the big, low effort, sustained business is what builds million (or billion) dollar companies.
But maybe you don’t care about that. Maybe you just want to help customers get stellar results, or perhaps your goal is simply to create compelling work. The thing is, the customers that lend themselves to those victories are the ones that stay with you for the long haul, and re-engage over and over.
Getting to that lucrative, five-minute inbound sign up does not happen out of thin air. Strategy and key steps had to happen before, during, and after the prospect becomes a customer. Those 5-minute, six-figure phone calls come from a Repeatable Account Management System.
Here’s what that looks like…
Account Management System Overview
It happens in 4 stages. (I’m covering a portion of this process in my upcoming free crash course [thrive_2step id=’1647′]The Six-Figure Account Manager)[/thrive_2step]
Stage 1. Find New Time and Freedom
You have to start here because it’s so easy to adopt new strategies without first setting up the right schedule, and tools for implementing them.
This is where you lay out KPI’s and visualize outcomes; you’ll learn to balance sales, customer serve, and everything else your’e up against.
Stage 2. Win New Customers
This starts with your first call or meeting. It’s really where you set the stage for long-term, repeat business, and preferred vendor status. It’s where you qualify and persuade, without falling back on pushy or self-defeating tactics. Those cause bad matches and short-term, bill-paying, one-offs.
This is a system that’s built to grow your business and scale with it. It’s all about investing yourself in the right opportunities, and sidelining all others.
This fills the space between your first meeting and the close with a logical set of next actions. You add value to the decision making process, and you blend consulting and sales to add value until closing is the last logical step.
Stage 3. Delight Current Customers
The fact is that customer or client service and farming new business are inextricably linked. Yet, they are often soloed. So whether you’re a salesperson, account manager, or business owner, this is where you over deliver on expectations so you can increase repeat, recurring, and up-sell revenue.
Thankfully, you can do all of this without working yourself to death. It just means going through a specific set up steps for each and every engagement. It means building your customer service machine.
Stage 4. Grow Your Accounts
Finally, we’re to the core of account management: the process of building lucrative, long-term accounts. This is where that five-minute, six-figure call happens.
Again, you won’t have to reinvent the wheel. You go through a specific process with your customers after each engagement.
As with Stage 2, you focus most of your energy on your best opportunities when it comes to farming. You sideline the rest with low commitment actions like referrals, testimonials, and case studies.
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I know what you’re thinking – this is all much easier said than done. There are so many blanks to fill in. Don’t sweat it – we’re going far beyond this article…
