The Extraordinary Power Of The Account Manager Role

Almost every business growth story comes up agaisnt this problem - the owner/boss starts to lose touch with their clients. What can be done? Fortunately there is a solution which is often deployed too late due to nerves on the part of the owner. Find out how the Account Manager solves this problem, and why it works so well.

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There is one role which too many small businesses take too long to establish properly - the roll of the account manager.

When a small business is founded, the entrepreneur/owner is doing absolutely everything. Over time they typically delegate some admin, and then the junior technical roles. If they are successful and grow, then maybe more senior technical roles, as the staff headcount increases, maybe frontline managers to manage the staff. But in my experience of my own business, and working with so many others in the past thirteen years, what I see too often is the founder continuing to try to maintain relationships with all of their clients. The result is a very stressed business owner with absolutely no life, loss of clients who become unhappy but the boss never finds out and business growth stagnates despite bringing in new clients.

The reason this happens is because in addition to performing the task the client needs, the business also needs to maintain a relationship with that client. When little things go wrong, as they inevitably do, or the client discovers what they believe might be a better product or service offering than yours, they typically don't tell the technician who's providing their service, and they've observed that you, the owner is flat out busy, so they don’t tell you either. It is too few a client that picks up the phone to you to tell you what they're unhappy about. More often, they have met a competitor of yours at an event and have been convinced to move their custom over to that competitor.

What's missing at this point is the account manager. So just what does this role do and how does it solve this problem? Their first responsibility is relationship management. Their job is to be talking to the decision maker at your customer regularly and making sure they are happy, delighted even. Clients will most often not complain to the person who directly providing the service, it's just human psychology. However they will talk to a different person if they have issues. It's important that the account manager is not providing the service of your business (ie a dual-role), they are only there to make sure the client is happy.

Their second responsibility, is sales - selling more to the same customer. You may have heard of hunting and farming as sales terms. Hunting is going out and finding new customers, that's your BDM, farming is selling more to your existing customers. In regularly speaking with your clients, your account manager is on the lookout for more things you can do for your customer - more problems to solve - more products you could provide.

The technician or worker who actually provides the service simply doesn't do this. In fact in my experience the technician is busy, has a lot on his or her plate and when the customer mentions in passing that they would like XY or Z, the technician, being only human, more often than not, simply drops the ball. But when that customer mentions some additional work to the account manager, the account manager eagerly sees that request through because that's their role. You may even consider putting them on a sales commission similar to your BDM, the hunter.

This was very much my journey. I have mentioned in the past that my business was providing IT infrastructure and support - so products and services. By the time I got to about 20 staff, I was completely overworked, out of control and customer service was suffering. I had this belief that being a very technical company, my clients would only want very technical people meeting with them.

But somehow I had heard about the role of account manager and decided to give it a try. The person I put in the roll had worked in the industry for many years, however more in administration, sales and management roles. She had an solid overview of the technology but wasn't herself a technician. I asked her to have her first account management meeting with a client with whom I had a great relationship, and I knew would give me honest candid feedback. I called him with some trepidation the following day to find out what he thought of this new means of providing service.

He was glowing in his praise. He was particularly enamoured with the way she took careful notes, documented everything he needed or was concerned about, and by the time I had spoken with him, she had solved half the issues, and raised tickets for the rest. He also loved the fact that, and I quote "she spoke English"! [In case you are wondering what he meant by that, remember mine was an IT business, an IT technicians have a reputation for using too much jargon, and/or assuming too much prior technical knowledge). So my fear that the client would not find the account manager technical enough was not only unfounded, but completely wrong. The non-super-technical background was actually an advantage.

There were plenty of occasions when the conversation with the client required understanding their business needs and proposing some highly technical solutions. This is where the account manager would take a senior engineer with her. In much larger organisations this role is called "pre-sales engineer" - it's not only a role, it's actually a career. They are trained to analyse the client's needs carefully and brief the BDM or account manager so that they can respond strategically, especially in a highly competitive environments. They are trained to keep their mouth shut when required.

Establishing this role in my business, (I ultimately had two very good account managers), did create a kind-of problem. They would come back from clients having discovered some shortcomings in our service. They would take these up with the operations manager in my business but were getting no traction. The solution which ultimately worked very well was to establish a continuous improvement register. This is worthy of an episode in its own right. However the lesson is that it is far better to have the arguments within your business then between your business and your client. Once we sorted out that little problem, our service became better and better over time, and it was only because of the feedback we were receiving from the account managers.

On the sales side, my account managers were also very successful. The reason why it works so well is that the account manager is sitting in front of a client and discussing my company's services, the client is immersed in the details, and that's when they think of all the extra things that they want done. Whereas left to themselves, they would only pick up the phone to discuss additional work once it had become urgent. Without account managers, so many things we could have done for them to make things more efficient or more reliable, we're just not done.

So where might you find an account manager? It's often a good idea to promote from within. You may have some technicians who are excellent at getting along with people, understanding the business context of how your product or service helps your customers, but they don't have to be technical mega-brains. This would also be a brilliant career opportunity for them, which helps your retention no end.

But if you don't have anyone internally, this is not a difficult role to find particularly because They don't need that very deep technical background.

So there you have it, the role works so well because the client will tell the account manager exactly what they like and don't like, but they won't tell the technician or person carrying out the service. Because the account manager is meeting regularly, they find out about little problems before they become big problems because clients typically don't pick up the phone until it's a big problem.

The best way to grow your business is by selling more to the clients you already have. The account manager's role is to understand your client's business and how your business can help them to get where they want to go faster.

If you need help designing the responsibilities and metrics of an account manager role, make contact, I'm always happy to help. I'm Mark Jackson