Establish a structured account management process to ensure customers realize ROI from your product—increasing satisfaction, adoption, retention, and expansion revenue.
Bi-Annually Company Stage: Early Traction
As soon as a prospect signs his contract, he becomes a customer. As a customer, the expectations set during the sales process to secure the contract are now promises the firm must deliver. Among those promises, one of the most important is the return on investment demonstrated.
While you will be creating a generic account management process applicable across your company as it scales, it is crucial to manage accounts with an informed and empathetic approach. You are forming a lasting, interconnected relationship with a person.
The impact: By outlining an account management process, you proactively work to improve customer experience, leading to the fuller adoption of your product, higher retention, and greater revenue. One ounce of churn prevention is worth pounds of preserved top line growth rate.
The goal: Create a thoughtful, thorough process to guide account
How can Golden Section Assist?
At each stage of account management, it is crucial to set proper expectations for customers. Typically, your customers have hired you to provide a service outside their expertise, and it is your responsibility to lead the way and to proactively share what they should expect at a given stage, what they are going to see, who is responsible, and what the customer is responsible for.
Set realistic expectations. There is no need to engage in an underpromise, overdeliver set-up. Be transparent at all times.
Throughout the entire account management process, it is important for the account manager to know the customer. The account manager needs to be informed on the individual customer's priorities, needs and expectations. To be empathetic, they must read the customer and judge how to effectively deliver information. Your company needs an account manager who knows how to inform a customer that he knows what is important to that customer.
Finally, an account manager is your customers' advocate within your company. Your account manager needs to have access to different teams within your company to communicate the customer's experience -- how needs are changing, how their needs are not being met, where are there opportunities for increased embedding into a customer's workflow. Generally, your account manager is focused on hospitality and should have a good sense of the business case your product is being used in.
The account management process has four stages. These include onboarding, value established (or adoption), renewal and offboarding. These four stages are designed to follow the customer lifecycle from the promises established in sales through to the realization of those promises and onto continued expansion and value delivery.
The last stage, offboarding, may seem strange. Why would we plan on offboarding a customer? The reality is that not all customers are a fit. Hence, a good process ensures orderly offboarding for the sake of the company's reputation and the benefit of the customer.
The first stage, onboarding, is the most crucial. Sales has closed the customer with an emotional and empathetic appeal by demonstrating the promised land. The customer is expecting to arrive in the promised land. If they find the desert, they won't be happy.
Hence, you need a handoff from sales into account management to ensure proper knowledge transfer on the definition of the promised land from the perspective of the customer.
The second stage, adoption, is similarly important. Its success is a function of high quality onboarding. Without adoption, the customer will not reach the 'promised land.' For the customer to be a raving fan and refer new business or be a reference, they need to reach the promised land.
The third stage, renewal, is administrative in nature. If the prior two stages are done well, the renewal stage will feel automatic. In fact, this stage can become so smooth that some companies are tempted to overlook it. This is a mistake. This low drama, but crucial step will ensure that the hard work of the first two stages is realized into a renewal. SaaS company multiples are heavily impacted by the customer churn metric. Renewal is the process whereby customers are 'anti-churned.' Of course, its the work of the sales team, the onboarding process, and the adoption process that ensure the customer will not want to churn at renewal.
The fourth and final stage is offboarding. It may seem strange to focus on that as an account management step. The reality is that no process is perfect. Motivated sales people will push deals through qualification, customers will outgrow solutions, management will take a flyer on a new market\... things happen. Your company can no
longer get that customer to the promised land or if a better promised land emerges for that customer (you get outcompeted), having a well designed offboarding process is crucial. Without one, each customer exit is a drama laced, self-induced dumpster-fire. You don't want to keep a customer that wants to go.
While you will be creating a generic account management process applicable across your company as it scales, it is crucial to manage accounts with an informed and empathetic approach. You are forming a lasting, interconnected relationship with a person.
While you will be creating a generic account management process applicable across your company as it scales, it is crucial to manage accounts with an informed and empathetic approach. You are forming a lasting, interconnected relationship with a person.
At each stage of account management, it is crucial to set proper expectations for customers. Typically, your customers have hired you to provide a service outside their expertise, and it is your responsibility to lead the way and to proactively share what they should expect at a given stage, what they are going to see, who is responsible, and what the customer is responsible for.
Establish a structured account management process to ensure customers realize ROI from your product—increasing satisfaction, adoption, retention, and expansion revenue.
While you will be creating a generic account management process applicable across your company as it scales, it is crucial to manage accounts with an informed and empathetic approach. You are forming a lasting, interconnected relationship with a person.