Noob Sales

Manager - Sales and Business Development at Centilytics

Need to derive more business from account management!

Hi soldiers,

I head up the Account Management team at my company. There is a lot of potential to do more business with existing customers but all my account managers are busy fire fighting. Can't blame them either because if they don't, the customer would just exit.

Right now each account manager has 50ish accounts. Mixture of Enterprise, SMB and startups.

What I am planning to do is hire more folks to get that number down to 30 accounts per account manager.

What else can I do to ensure we derive more business from existing customers?

Guide me warriors.

✍️ Sales advice

👑 Sales Strategy

☁️ Software Tech

19 comments

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Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Hiring more AMs so the accounts are manageable is a really good start. How do you compensate your team for the added revenue they bring in?

Manager - Sales and Business Development

We have our incentive program in place. Its a bit complicated for me to explain over a text here but rest assured they are fairly compensated for any additional business they bring in.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

Ehh...my two cents...if you can't explain your comp easily then more than likely it's not as great as you think 🤔

Manager - Sales and Business Development

I agree. It doesn't sound good. It is complex. Really not possible to explain it over a text.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Ours is a straight % of net new revenue. Easy.
Sounds like you have customer satisfaction issues to get ahead of first, though. Hard to sell anything more when the customers aren't getting value from what they already have.

pirate

Big Shot

🦜☠️ Account Executive

If AMs ask for something, help them help the customers. Can you give anything to thank existing customers for their loyaltyCan any customers be offered discounts and in turn make them a reference customer? Or offer them combination of different products?AMs are farming. Any prizes internally that can be given out for farming?
I'm just brainstorming :)

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

This is a good point

Manager - Sales and Business Development

I loved all these ideas. We are implementing a few of them like discounts, product bundles.

My only issue is that our customers are facing a lot of issues which is common in our industry. And when my account managers are fixing the issue, they can't be asking for additional business because that doesn't make sense.

I am trying to create internal processes so that the fire fighting charter is offloaded to the engineering/support team.

pirate

Big Shot

🦜☠️ Account Executive

That sounds good! I have recently been dealing with a lot of legal requests because our website tells to contact sales about it... It just takes a lot of time then. Sounds like you are taking some good steps there to make AMs more productive

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

Do you work with BDRs in your company? Are they very much occupied? I would have BDRs reach out to see if there is any expansion opportunities so the AM can spend time on the right account at the right time. Of course you can hire more AMs as you mentioned if that can solve the problem.

Manager - Sales and Business Development

We do have BDRs in place. So opportunity identification lies with AM and then the BDR is supposed to execute it. But the problem remains. Too busy fire fighting to identify the opportunity. :/

SoccerandSales

Big Shot

Account Executive

Are there consistent fires that are seen with current live accounts? If so, if product can address said issues, should also do the job of freeing up AM’s to have upsell convos

Manager - Sales and Business Development

So our offering is a combination of product and people. And one of the cons of the service industry is that people don't appreciate the days when everything is working fine but also never forgets to criticize you for a single day or hour when the service didn't deliver properly.

CPTAmerica

Opinionated

President/CRO

The assumption that reducing their account load will free them up to sell if often not accurate. Are you hiring AM's that have sales backgrounds and are comfortable selling? Most of the time that is a no. Therefore, they will always find reasons why they are "too busy" to focus on revenue generation. It's not a bad thing, it's a different role requiring different skills. It's simply something to be aware of before moving forward with new hires.
You may think about hiring a sales person/s to a speciality hybrid type role where they do reviews with existing accounts and make recommendations to the client on ways they could get more from the product.

Manager - Sales and Business Development

Thanks for making this point. I can add sales experience as a pre-requisite for the hiring process for AM.

That being said, we do enable our AMs in order to find the opportunity since they spend a considerable amount of time with the customers. For executing the said opportunity, we have BDRs in place.

Filth

Politicker

Live Filthy or Die Clean

As an account manager in the same boat I have some biased thoughts:
Sure, like @Sunbunny31 says more account managers isn't bad but you probably need more/better support for the AMs. If they are firefighting and not able to come up for air and sell to happy customers, then the fires aren't getting put out and that is your core problem. I'd be pissed if I heard I had to get rid of accounts (unless you are telling me I get to pick and choose what I keep and drop). I bet your AMs know everything that is wrong and would love to sell more so you should be asking them what they need is a very transparent setting. They'll tell you and they've probably got a full sheet of notes.
I know I told my org I need more (in actual personnel terms) support, more implementation, better dev visibility and ETA (more dev in a perfect world) and a more transparent roadmap and/or BETA program for new initiatives. As an AM I'm your client advocate and of course I want to sell everything and make money but you can't sell more into a customer that isn't happy with what they already have.

Maximas

Tycoon

Senior Sales Executive

Definitely hiring more reps will help a lot,hiring more AMs is a plus too!

thesearentleads

Member

Account Executive

How much white space is in these accounts for upsell? I don’t know your solution but depending how much opportunity and the amount of stakeholders that need to be engaged 30 accounts per AM could be a lot. If you’re running a land and expand model where there’s a lot of upside that’s more of a sales role vs lean towards CS

lowhangersalesbanger

Executive

Director of Sales

Is the product that problematic that clients are always trying to churn?

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Noob Sales

Need to derive more business from account management!

19 comments

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