5 x Account Management Best Practices To Succeed
Learning, and then implementing account management best practices can have an excellent result and impact on your overall sales efforts, and relationships with your clients.
In this guide, we’ll detail our top five account management best practices that have brought excellent results for our students – and hopefully for you too.
5 x Account Management Best Practices To Succeed
What Are Account Management Best Practices?
Account management best practices are simply principles that you can embody and implement, that will not only help you close more sales consistently, but also ensure that you keep the current clients you have happy and satisfied.
To thrive in business, is it equally important to not only win more work and sales, but also keep your current client base retaining their relationship and service with you.
Many Sales Professionals and Business Owners make the mistake of continuously going after new work and clients – and although this is important, once they land clients, they can let the ball drop by becoming complacent.
It’s important that you have two aligned systems in place – one being a process to win more clients, and the other to continuously provide an excellent experience for your current clients.
Related article: What Is Key Account Management?
1 – Keep Communication Flowing
The first on our list of account management best practices, is to ensure that you keep communication flowing and not come to a bottle neck.
Open communication is key for all relationships, and the same is true between account managers and their clients.
Both you and your clients want the same positive outcome; and to achieve this, you’ll need to proactively communicate what you think the issues are for them achieving their ideal outcomes, any bottlenecks that may prevent things from going smoothly, and your preferred solutions to help get them there.
Being the account manager – it’s also important to stay in control of the communication process.
If you feel they’re not communicating enough; set up a meeting and let them know your thoughts, and why you’d like them to communicate more proactively.
Taking this stance will be beneficial for more honest communication, and also show your client that you truly want to serve their needs.
Related article: Strategies For Communication – 3 x To Implement
2 – Get To Know Their Business
The second of our account management best practices, is to get to know your client’s business in more detail.
Nothing is more frustrating to a client, when they sit across from an account manager and try to explain a situation within their business – only to get asked a bunch of questions by the account manager because they don’t enough detail about their business.
Clients aren’t expecting you to know everything, and of course you’re not expected to.
However, it goes a long way when an account manager has shown that they’ve done their due diligence and made the effort of wanting to learn their client’s business in more detail prior to issues arising.
By doing so, you’ll demonstrate that not only do you care about their success, but you’re in it for the long run.
Business is all about relationships; making this one of our key account management best practices.
3 – Use A Sales Process
One of the most important account management best practices, is to use a sales process whenever you’re speaking with new potential clients.
So many Sales Professionals wing it with their sales; meaning they’ll have one particular approach with one potential client and use a completely different approach another day.
This creates inconsistency; not only with your clients’ experience, but also with your closing rate and results.
A sales process should be the key number of steps you take, which leads you to either:
- Find out whether someone is qualified
- Take them on an experience, and win the sale
- Get more referrals once you’ve landed the sale
To learn more about implementing a sales process, read the related article below.
Related article: The Sales Process – A Step By Step Guide
4 – Meet With Decision Makers Early
Time is money, and as an account manager; it’s imperative to spend your time as effectively and as wisely as possible.
One of our account management best practices, is to meet with decision makers as early on in this process as possible.
This is for two key reasons.
Firstly – you’ve probably been in meetings, only to learn later that they ‘need to speak to someone else’ for permission.
As a Sales Professional, it’s important to learn and meet with decision makers prior to giving your presentation; this will prevent any further I need to speak with sales objections.
Secondly – when you’re giving your presentation to your ideal clients and the decision makers, who would you want it to be?
It can be either you, and the person the decision maker has sent to get more information.
Always ensure it is you that gives the presentation to your potential clients, so you can effectively present and close the gaps from there they are, to where they need to be – by investing in your product or service.
5 – Never Stop Learning
Our final list and tip of account management best practices is to never stop learning and investing in your personal development.
There are so many opportunities today such as sales training, lead generation training and much more – that’ll enhance your capability of being an excellent account manager.
The best asset you can invest in will always be yourself.
Just as Professionals across most industries invest in their learning and development; as a Sales Professional, you should too.
To learn more about training opportunities, read the related article below.
Related article: 5 x Ways To Measure The Impact Of Sales Training
Final Thoughts On Our Account Management Best Practices
These account management best practices will help you go a long way if you learn them in full, and more importantly – implement what you learn.
Have you got any other effective tips you’d recommend? If so, feel free to share them in the comments.
And remember – these will only work if you do.
Want To Close Sales Easier?
Are you committed to closing sales a lot easier, and consistently?
If so, you should check out our self-paced and affordable online sales training program; The 5% Sales Blueprint.
It’ll give you everything you need to close sales consistently.
To learn more, simply click on the link below for more information.
Our Online Sales Training Program – The 5% Sales Blueprint.
