GeneralFriend

Account Manager

Moving from Training Team to Account Management

Was offered the opportunity to join our AM team at my SaaS start-up. We've quickly grown to over 1000 clients and more than 800 of them will be eligible for renewals next year. I was selected because of my product knowledge and interest in getting experience in sales.

I want to hit the ground running in the new year once I start this position and would love any advice on how to be effective in this new role. For those of you who have made the switch, what helped you?

🧠 Advice

🎯 Career Development

💵 Finance

14 comments

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ChickenWings

Opinionated

Tom Callahan's Son

Keep your confidence in the product, but let it take a back seat.
Your accounts will be less interested in being told what you know about a product but instead how it is relevant to a problem they need to solve.
Focus your efforts on learning strong discovery.
What brought them to your company? Why you vs someone else? How are they currently using your solution? What are they working on next?
You’ll run into plenty of BS pricing or admin tasks. You’ll have accounts that just dont want to engage. Focus on what you can control until you can become surgical.
Establish the current value you serve to each account. Your inherent knowledge in your product will come back in knowing where to take that account next in time.

punishedlad

Tycoon

Business Development Team Lead

Really can't add anything else here. @ChickenWingsnailed pretty much everything.

I will say it doesn't hurt to try and get on friendly terms with your clients. A big part of sales is just remembering who people are and being able to relate to them.

GeneralFriend

Fire Starter

Account Manager

This is great. Thank you so much!

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

1. Congrats this is a great move and outs you in a better spot if the economic situation doesn’t change!

2. Make sure you understand why each customer bought in the first place, and what they consider success using the platform to be.

Then try to figure out how often you need to meet with them. You want every meeting to mean something so don’t try and meet to often.

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

Sales Rep

Not an AM but this is what I would do. Connect with the top AM to learn what they do different. Connect with AEs for the large customers with renewal to understand what they were sold, and connect with their old AMs to know how its going. The connects with old AMs and AEs dont need to be 30 min, just emails or quick 5 min clarification calls. However meeting with the top AM should be 30 min so you will learn more and build rapport so you can ping them questions.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

I approve this message 💯

totesmcgrotes

Opinionated

Sr Account Manager

I’m in a similar position, following along to this thread!

Gasty

Notable Contributor

War Room Community Manager

@GeneralFriend

1) Congratulations on the move
2) Welcome to the War Room
3) Great first post, keep at it and you might see yourself in this week's leaderboard for newby category

harleyfatboy

Opinionated

Sales Director

Some simple advice I learned when I started in sales years ago - 1) follow up 2) don’t ignore calls or emails and respond to them quickly even if you don’t know the answer - simply acknowledge your customers communications 3) be your customer’s advocate

Anker

Opinionated

SAE (Senior Account Executive)

Nailed it! Especially #2. Nothing keeps people from escalating like just knowing their issue has been acknowledged and they can move forward with their day.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Relevance is key. Active listening. Communication is also critical.

cashingchecks

Personal Narrative

VP of Sales

Actually focus on the client and ask their opinions on things before you just dive into a renewal. I lead a sales team and I can stand when the tech stack companies I work with don't really stay connected all year and then are magically interested 90-days from the renewal. You should be learning a lot from each customer so take the time to understand how they are doing on your product, how it's performing, and is it meeting their expectations. If it isn't spent the time that before moving to renewal conversations

scottiePIPpen

Account Manager

You're going to get a ton of different recommendations I bet and hopefully your company training will help you more than anything. Here's some random little things I've picked up outside of having a good coach and mentor (find someone at the company with good habits and successful to learn from if you haven't already!)

Recently saw this thread that I thought was a neat crash course into things you will read more about and topics to review more:

https://twitter.com/selfcarecanvas/status/1609867164277694469?s=42&t=kFvpMNu2PC8mRzl9Je7aCw

The Masterclass on negotiation by Chris Voss was pretty interesting to me regarding human psychology of negotiation and how they perceive fairness or interest. Made me a better business conversationalist (not just negotiations).

I liked using Blinkest for digesting sales books (like Atomic Habits, Smart Brevity, etc) in a quick and much more digestible way during my work commute.

Hard work, being creative, being coachable, and having fun with it will serve you the best. Sometimes it'll suck but if you "embrace the suck" - it'll be so much easier.

Good luck!!

Jdemetsky

Enterprise Sales Executive

Good luck. I would just encourage you to go into your job expecting to work longer hours and more days during your first year.

Remember that what you do each day defines your pipeline 5 to 6 months down the road. I have seen lots of rookie salespeople get terminated due to poor performance and lack of pipeline. They usually were on cruise control the first few months when they started and don't begin prospecting until they are behind quota.

Last, I would encourage you to record your statistics for prospecting activities. You can analyze the data and determine how many activities equal one discovery call, demo, proposal, POC, etc. Then when you get that number add 20% minimum to it and you will always do well.
Example:
Your Average :100 cold calls = 3 Scheduled Discovery Calls = 2 Demos = 2 Proposals = 1 Sale

Add 20% : 120 cold calls 4Scheduled Discovery Calls = 3 Demos = 3 Proposals = 1.5 Sales

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GeneralFriend

Moving from Training Team to Account Management

14 comments

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