Make your Account Manager work for you

I've been an Account Manager at Gartner just over a year and I've learned a tremendous amount about my clients' businesses, their various technologies, and the markets they play in. But more than anything else, I've learned (and continue to learn) what an Account Manager can do for our clients.

Believe it or not, Gartner Account Managers are not given a handbook on every possible way to provide value to clients. If you work at Gartner and have a version of that, please let me know. I've got a continuously improving 70% solution and would love to add to it or share it.

Below I've summarized a few things I've learned that I can do to support Gartner clients. Since Account Managers have varying levels of experience, you may need to ask your Account Manager to do some of the following things. Fellow Account and Area Managers, please feel free to comment below or email me with other best practices and I'll add them to this list or my "Account Management Handbook".

Analyst Interactions:

Recommend analysts: With over 2,000 analysts, there are at least 100-200 analysts that could give you valuable insight on your Product, Customer, Competitors, Corporate Strategy, Sales & Marketing Strategy, Procurement, IT infrastructure...you get the idea. Give your AM access to your leadership team and they can align the best analyst to the priorities and challenges that your entire team is working on.

Create an engagement plan with those analysts: coordinate vendor briefings (tied to your major customer successes or new product launches) and scheduled inquiries based on your strategy, priorities, and challenges. Without this you'll be asking for meetings as you need then (and waiting a week for that conversation to happen). If you plan it in advance, you can get the advice you need BEFORE you build your slides for the CEO.

Schedule face-to-face meetings. Analysts travel and when they do, they sometimes have free time between meetings. Work with your AM to book a meeting with analysts face to face. It's a great way to break through the video screen and get to know each other.

Event Concierge:

Account Managers can work with your entire team (not just seatholders) to schedule hotel booking (as soon as they become available), plan event agendas, and schedule your 1-on-1 analyst meetings (they fill up VERY quickly, some analysts within hours of the window opening).

Deliver event presentation material (slides, audio, and occasionally video) after the conference. If you miss a specific speaker or the event completely, work with your AM to get the material that you wanted to see and then schedule an inquiry with the analyst for a 1-on-1 call-- that's better than being in the crowd anyways.

Arrange meals with your team and analysts. WHAT?! Yeah. Work with your AM to get breakfast or dinner with specific analysts that you want more than a 30 minute Q&A with. Just like the hotels and 1-on-1's, ask early to get on the analysts calendar.

Competitive Comparisons:

Gartner captures how many times vendors and technologies are searched for on our portal. Even if you aren't in a Magic Quadrant, you're likely being searched for. So are your competitors. If you have access to Search Analytics, your AM can aggregate all the searches on you and your competitors and show how you stack up-- by industry, region, and enterprise size.

We also capture when vendors are discussed with tech buyer clients. If you have access to Inquiry Analytics, your AM can do the same thing as above but with much more granularity. We can show who you went head to head with in Q1, how often you were discussed in strategy/planning versus vendor selection, or what types of roles are asking Gartner about your products and services.

In summary, your Account Manager can work for Gartner and manage you...or they can work for you and manage Gartner. The more you bring them in to your team's decision making the more they can help you.