“You have to care about your clients.”
Kevin Vitale is a Senior Managed Services Account Executive here at Integris. In this 3 part Discussions by Integris series, Kevin gives us an account management playbook. He discusses client success, growing relationships, and how to handle at risk clients.
The importance of growing a relationship.
Kevin: “You’re in an extremely important position to grow that relationship, and that is really everything when you’re thinking in terms of a service provider. When people think about growing the relationship, it’s always maybe giving them things they don’t need. That’s exactly what not to do. “
Kevin: “You want to know what their business goals are and you want to give them what you know they need because you were listening throughout that process. Listening is super important.”
Kevin: “It’s important to understand from a high level business concept, it’s much easier to keep a client that you have rather than going to get a new one. You’re talking about offboarding a current one if you lose them, and you’re talking about onboarding a new one. So it’s cost effective to keep the clients you have.”
Promote your clients.
Kevin: “I know as a goal for a lot of the businesses we in particular work with, is being on social media. Everybody knows that you have to be there. The best thing you could do as an account manager is to be on those platforms and be promoting the businesses that you’re working with.”
Kevin: “Hop on there, promote them, be an ambassador. That’s who you are. Whether you’re on social media promoting your clients or even internally to your team, you are their ambassador technically. You have to care about your clients. They’re paying you. Why would you not care how their business is doing? They grow, you grow.”
Report and get feedback.
Kevin: “In order to be held accountable for anything, you have to set up some kind of reporting that tells you where you were and where you’re going. If you don’t have that, you never could be held accountable because you don’t know. As a client, how do you know that the services that you paid for are getting done well? How do you know if it’s moving the needle? You have to set up that reporting so that you can track milestones as it goes.”
Kevin: “You build a checklist of what do these clients need, and make sure that checklist lines up with their expectations. You have to check this every single time. Another big one is a CSAT score, customer satisfaction.”
Kevin: “You need that feedback, because you could be doing things exactly the same for the whole course of your contract, but at the end of it you could have pleased nobody as a company. So you have to make sure that you’re keeping a close eye on that.”
Review your account.
Kevin: “There’s internally and externally. Externally, make sure you know what’s going on with a company. Did they just win an award? What are they trying to do? You want to know that kind of stuff.”
Kevin: “Internally is a little bit more important. You want to know in your organization that you’re working for, what’s going on when they’re there? These people are also working with these clients. There’s nothing more frustrating for a client than when people don’t talk to each other internally. You want to make sure you have internal conversations and everybody’s on the same page. It just makes things a lot easier to kind of move the needle.”
