Account management: A guide and best practices

Customer loyalty is made by nurturing trust and confidence, which is hard to do if you’re not regularly engaging your clients. Account management allows organizations of all sizes to stay on top of essential customer relationships by fostering a personal connection between a buyer and a business.

Account managers have different functions, from responding to and anticipating customer requests, managing issues or disputes, or offering updated products or services. All of this makes account management essential to both customer satisfaction and a business’s bottom line.

In this article, we’ll define account management, outline why it’s important, and show you how to do it better than your competitors with the help of monday CRM.

What is account management?

Account management is a structured approach to managing a customer’s relationship with your business to maximize value. It involves nurturing the relationship between clients and your business by learning more about customers’ needs and creating solutions and services that match. This generally encompasses providing customers with service, support, and improvement or expansion opportunities that increase their consumption of a product or service and maximize retention.

In simple terms, account management is getting to know your customers better and earning their trust so that they stick around longer.

To keep a customer’s trust, you have to innovate and provide value continually after an initial purchase or conversion. Account management consists of guiding product usage, offering ongoing training, and providing personalized customer service.

What is the role of an account manager vs an account executive?

An account or customer manager achieves the goals discussed above primarily by developing relationships with existing customers. They want to truly understand their clients and their unique needs to better understand how to offer them more relevant products or services.

On the other hand, an account executive’s focus is on acquiring new clients and getting new business. They often work on generating new leads, sales pitches, and closing deals. After a client is onboarded, they may be transitioned to an account manager to continue to nurture and support the relationship.

Benefits of account management

Organizations know that it can cost up to five times more to find and acquire new customers than it does to keep your current ones happy. If nothing else, account management saves you time and money. There are more benefits to it than only that, though.

• Account managers focus on long-term relationship building and business success instead of immediate gains like sales teams
• Helps develop trust and loyalty with new and existing customers so that they’re more likely to stay with your company
• Your company will be better able to sell additional products and services to customers who are consistently happy and engaged
• The potential for business growth increases if your organization can sustainably nurture large accounts
• Satisfied clients are more likely to refer your business, creating opportunities for even more sales in the future

Essentially, account management is about increasing customer satisfaction. According to surveys, the rate of customer retention increases by 5% for every 1% increase in customer satisfaction. It’s no rocket science that happy customers are more likely to stay with your company, but achieving this with potentially hundreds of clients is no small feat, which is what makes the role of account manager so essential.

How account management varies by industry

It’s difficult to establish set ground rules for account management as it can be different from one industry to the next. Still, there are some best practices, as we’ll see soon, that an account manager can model on any account, no matter the field. To make the most of these best practices though, it’s a good idea to first be aware of the variances in account management by industry:

• SaaS account management: Focus on upselling additional services based on customers’ unique needs and on retaining customers by engaging them deeper into the ecosystem
• Wealth management account management: Emphasize deep relationships with fewer clients to lead to higher retention, lower attrition, and individual goals
• Advertising account management: Acts on behalf of clients to monitor campaigns, oversee projects, and optimize performance while maintaining consistent results
• Healthcare account management: Serves as a liaison between customers and medical suppliers to manage contracts, secure products, and ensure patient support resources

Account management challenges

Nurturing each customer account comes with different challenges. Since account management is all about relationship building, relationships can be easily strained when not provided the care they need. Being aware of the different challenges account managers face can help you stay ahead of them. Here are some of the most common account management challenges:

• Balancing multiple accounts with different expectations, needs, and deadlines can be overwhelming
• Staying aligned with other departments such as sales, customer service, or marketing is essential to appear as a unified front, but it can be easy for account managers to get caught up in their own tasks and forget to collaborate
• A lack of tracking and insights can make it difficult to gauge your impact as an account manager, but monitoring can make your strategy that much more effective
• Not using the right tools as an account manager can lead to sloppy work that your customers feel, impacting your ability to stay on top of each relationship
• Being reactive instead of proactive as an account manager means you’re always trying to put out little fires rather than prevent them altogether
• Having inconsistent processes for workflows such as sales handoffs, feedback collection, or onboarding can make it difficult to maintain strong customer relationships

While the challenges of account management can be a hindrance, with the right mindset, tools, and processes in place, it’s possible to overcome all of these roadblocks. Next, we’ll look at some best practices that will help you avoid any fallout from these types of challenges.

7 account management best practices

As an account manager, it’s your job to not only sustain a customer relationship but actively improve it.  Depending on a number of factors like your industry, the level of your relationship with the customer, and the services you provide, account management can look different. Still, there are some best practices you can adopt to enhance the customer experience no matter what type of relationship you have with your clients.

1. Keep the program intentional

If you want your account management program to succeed, you won’t be able to make just any client a “strategic” account. Instead, find a way to deploy a simple cutoff that decides which customers deserve an extra set of eyes and ears. This could mean being selective about accounts with a higher degree of average recurring revenue (ARR) or accounts with the potential to improve ARR. Strategic account management could also be an extra layer of service that accounts can pay for, which would help justify and offset additional costs.

2. Use technology to keep relationships strong

Creating a culture that breeds customer success starts and ends with the tools your company uses. For example, monday CRM provides the flexibility to create a custom account management workflow that will integrate into all areas of your business. It’ll help you store all your customer data and keep track of all your tasks and client communications while providing ongoing insights that will allow you to nurture and grow customer relationships.

3. Keep account growth top of mind

As a key account manager, customer retention is always priority number one but account growth is a close second. A strategic account manager knows how to keep customer engagement up and knows exactly what features or products they’ve purchased and how much more room for growth exists. To keep track of it all, you need consistent reporting. A platform like monday CRM can help keep your growth goals top of mind at all times with detailed reporting and dashboards.

4. Gain more bandwidth with the power of automation

38% of workers feel like they could save 5+ hours each week if they had tools to automate their repetitive tasks. By setting automations to trigger workflows on their own, like notifications, follow-up reminders, and customer communications, you can save precious time to focus on nurturing customer accounts. Many CRMs give you access to custom automations, like monday CRM, allowing you to stay on top of every relationship without losing track.

5. Make sure sales handover is seamless

The initial transition of a new client from a sales representative to an account manager shows a lot about your business. It’s important to ensure there’s a formal process in place so that the process is consistent and painless on the client’s end. Communication should be clear, which is why having a CRM to track messaging and important documentation between teams is so important.

6. Set a communication cadence

As an account manager juggling multiple customers, it can be easy for certain accounts to fall through the cracks. To avoid clients feeling unappreciated or forgotten, create a schedule for communication with your contacts, whether this is a quarterly meeting, monthly check-in email, or regular follow-ups. This allows you to stay ahead of customers’ needs and remain proactive on any issues they may have, creating stronger customer satisfaction.

7. Track performance to stay ahead of critical decisions

As an account manager, you need to know where the account stands at all times. That means keeping constant communication with your customers from top to bottom. It also means surveying the decision-makers for satisfaction at regular intervals. Track your performance on various accounts through surveys, questionnaires, and reports. Watch for feedback and customer reviews to get a sense of customer satisfaction or monitor analytics to see which customers may be at risk of cancellation to stay ahead of customer churn and dissatisfaction.

Deploying strategic account management with monday CRM

monday CRM is a powerful ally in the account management space with the functionalities to become your defacto strategic account management platform. monday CRM gives you a competitive edge in account management with its easy-to-use interface and features that are able to handle even the most complex accounts. Let’s take a closer look at some of the features that make it ideal for account management:

Built-in communication tools

Stay connected to other team members and your clients through monday CRM. You can communicate directly from the platform, integrate popular work apps such as Mailchimp, Google apps, or social media platforms to keep all communications in one space and build custom forms to regularly gather customer feedback from your accounts.

Powerful automations

If you’re juggling multiple accounts, monday CRM’s automations can help lighten the load of staying on top of each one. With custom automations that can help you follow up with each of your accounts, trigger workflows, send communications, or notify a customer when a task is complete, you can rest assured you’re not letting any account fall by the wayside.

Robust reporting

monday CRM allows you to create automated reports based on critical data so you can better understand your accounts, track metrics such as customer lifetime value, and anticipate what they need. Additionally, with an analytics dashboard, you can always get a reliable overview at a glance of where you stand so you know where to focus your efforts.

Build stronger relationships through effective account management

The key to retaining the customers you have is the tools in your arsenal. A strong CRM, like monday CRM, allows you to store all your customer’s contact info, keep notes on each interaction, organize all your files, automate customer interactions, and tie your software together. As a result, you’re more productive and infinitely more effective at nurturing customers.