Account management and Upscaling
How to satisfy your partners and grow your accounts
session objectives.
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Understanding why account management is crucial
How to track your accounts
How to upscale your accounts
Account management, used primarily in B2B sales, is the process of nurturing and growing your existing customer relationships. When creating an account plan, you seek to understand your customer’s business by identifying their key initiatives, problems, and challenges. Your objective is to deliver value that helps them achieve their goals and increase their sales.
Besides every strategy, tool and plan, account management is also about art, creativity and having good relationships with your customers. Keep that in mind!
Account Management
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ACCOUNT PLANNING
Where to start?
Make sure your predecessor shares with you everything related to the history of the partnership, the current context and ongoing projects, results achieved and possible ways forward.
You should also be introduced to the stakeholders ands have access to the tools and spaces.
1. Transition
Make sure you understand the context of the company, their focus and the projects that they are running within and outside the departments you work with.
You can also prepare some questions for the partnership manager, so you can have first hand information.
2. Research
Now that you have all the necessary information, you can start planning how the next year should look like for your account.
Besides the projects you already have in place, map out other opportunities that could result in a valuable proposal for your partner. What solution can you offer to them?
Make sure you involve your partnership manager in this process to ensure a relevant planning.
3. Plan
account planning and tracking tool example
Tips for account planning
Identify the value they receive from working with you
Map out possible ways to grow the account
Make sure you understand the deliverables according to the contracts
Understand their decision making process and key stakeholders
Identify targets and revenues per initiative
Establish clear strategies and routines with your partner
After planning
Partnership visits are an excellent opportunity to get to know your partner more in-depth, identify points of improvement and build trust.
Plan your next visits
Regardless if it’s virtual or physical,
prepare an agenda including:
● Results
● Challenges
● Planning review
● Upscaling ideas (how to nurture
the collaboration)
● Stakeholders involved
● Any other relevant information
During the visits
Hopefully, and if everything goes as it was supposed to, make sure to have the next steps clear, as well as sending the output over an email to the partnership responsible.
Have always a next step
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ACCOUNT TRACKING
CURRENT STATE
You need to make sure you know everything that is happening with your account everyday, so you are able to adapt your strategies and ensure things are on track.
PREDICTIONS
When tracking your Accounts it will enable you to predict possible future challenges, future changes that you might need to make and it will enable you to be proactive with your account. On the other hand it will give you predictions on the amount of Revenues and the timing you will be able to receive them.
why do we need to track our accounts?
tips for tracking your accounts
Always use your CRM and planning tool to keep track and document for your successor.
Follow a constant routine that allows you to have constant communication with your partner.
Take some time to review the strategies for your account besides the daily deliverables.
tracking examples
crm
planning tool
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REPORTING
ROI
Showcasing the Return of Investment of the partnership and showing the things we have achieved together. Your partners need to know how many people watched a livestream, how many people attended a conference, how many people you reached with a digital campaign, therefore you will need to provide the data in order to measure your success.
DOCUMENT
Reports are a great way to document the achievements and the history of your partnerships. If you store it in your CRM also future generations will
be able to go back to them and gain insights about the partnership.
why is it important to do reporting?
WAY FORWARD
Once you created a report you can analyse it and then create together with the partner a way forward, since you know what things worked well and what could be improved. It can be also a great chance to upscale the partnership.
when do you do reporting
To take into consideration when reporting
Identify include data and compare and analyze it to show the implications to your partner.
Add qualitative insights such as feedback or insights from surveys about the partnership.
Add an evaluation and conclusions and suggest next steps.
Understand their decision making process and key stakeholders
Add pictures if you have taken any.
Examples of reporting
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UPSCALING
PARTNERSHIP MODEL
You can also analyze your account, defining key criteria
that assess and determine the performance and
health status.
Each criteria can be allocated a weight based on reality
and overall sales strategy and focus.
conferences, digital initiatives etc.
national budget
classify your accounts
Before upscaling
Ideas for upscaling
time to rock your account management!
Thanks