5 account management mistakes you may be making - and how to avoid them

Many have heard statistics on the value of existing accounts: 80% of future profits come from 20% of customers; 65% of revenue comes from existing customers; it costs 5% less to retain a customer than to gain one.

You probably know a few more as well.

Yet account management is still one of the least studied and trained aspects of a sales team’s responsibilities, and most account management teams continue to make mistakes that cost them money every year.

The Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) is a nonprofit association with more than 11,000 members worldwide seeking to close the gap and elevate the role of account management and growth.

In a talk with Harvey Dunham, managing director at SAMA, I asked him to tell me the most common mistakes complex b2b sales teams make in account management, and what to do about it.

1. You’re looking at accounts from your perspective, not theirs

In my article How to turn account planning outside-in to grow faster, I suggested that salespeople and their managers should begin account planning not with what they want out of the relationship, but with what the customer wants.

Dunham confirms that most organizations approach account planning and management from the wrong perspective. Salespeople and their managers spend a lot of time thinking about what they want from an account and how to get it. Instead, says Dunham, it’s much more productive to focus on what the customer wants and whether you can meet those needs.

2. You think you already know what the customer wants

If you’ve navigated past the first mistake and begun to think about what the customer wants, be careful not to fall into the trap of the second mistake: Assuming the customer knows what they want.

“Even I will fall into that trap sometimes,” says Dunham, “because the customer is so clear about what they think they want and why they want it. But often, just a few more probing questions will open up a whole new avenue that neither of you had considered.”

Dunham says it’s important during customer conversations to press forward with deep questions to help the customer really think about what they want and dive deeper than what they think they want.

3. You misunderstand the role of the “farmer”

Account management is often referred to as “farming” in the sales world. Dunham says that metaphor makes it easy to get lazy.

“You’ve got these fields and this farm and you produce what you produce,” he says. “And that picture stays static in your mind.”

In reality, farming is much more active. Successful farmers are constantly evaluating what’s happening in the world and around them, considering different treatments and types of seeds, different fertilizers, and other things to help their business succeed. Farmers who don’t innovate and look for ways to improve their farm don’t succeed for long.

Likewise, sales teams should think about account management similarly. Sure, the salesperson doesn’t have to go out and “hunt” for the “food.” But they should be tending to the farm carefully and constantly looking for opportunities to improve the yield.

4. You’re not thinking past the immediate opportunity

Much traditional account management is reactive, rather than proactive. Salespeople wait by their phones for the customer to call and ask for something.

“Salesforce encourages this mistake,” says Dunham. “In Salesforce, if you identify something as a deal, that means somebody from the customer company has said that they want to buy it, and you try to win it.”

Great account managers, on the other hand, look forward for future potential, not just the immediate opportunity. In Membrain, we provide tools for account growth that go beyond the immediate opportunity and help salespeople and their managers organize an approach that helps customers get what they really want and need, while growing with your company.

5. You’re using outdated tools

“In the account growth world,” says Dunham, “there’s such a lack of tools. We’re starving for tools that enable visualizing and aggregating and collaborating. Nobody thought to build those things when they built the CRM, because they were assuming that salespeople just know what to do and needed to simply log what they’d done.”

If you’ve followed my blog for long, you can imagine that I was very pleased to hear Dunham say this. We built Membrain’s account growth module to address this lack and provide the visualizing, aggregating, and collaborating tools that the account management world needs. I’d love to show you what we’ve done - book a personalized demo today.

Great account managers look forward for future potential, not just the immediate opportunity.

~ HARVEY DUNHAM, SAMA

About SAMA

Founded in 1964, The Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) is a unique nonprofit association with more than 11,000 members worldwide. SAMA offers numerous training, professional development and networking events throughout North America, Asia and Europe each year in addition to research, publications and other knowledge resources. For more information, visit: https://strategicaccounts.org/en/