Today’s ever-competitive business environment, coupled with a shift toward more informed and demanding customers, has made the need to develop deeper customer relationships more critical than ever. This evolution is seen even more clearly in business-to-business (B2B) customer interactions that are becoming more service-oriented and cloud delivered. When a business can successfully tie account management to customer success, they can produce enormous benefits, including increasing customer trust, creating higher lifetime value, and greater profitability. The challenge is that most companies struggle with the time and investment needed for effective account management. When account management struggles within a company, organizations are handcuffed from developing deeper customer relationships. Is your organization realizing its full sales potential with existing customers and growing your accounts? Ask yourself these questions to find out:
- Of our current customers are we capitalizing on cross-sell and upsell opportunities?
- Do we know what complementary solutions to offer our customers and when to offer them?
- Are we communicating with our customers regularly and strategically?
- Are we confident we’re not missing key opportunities?
If any of these questions raised eyebrows, it might be time to re-evaluate your account management strategy and consider outsourcing. One of the most significant benefits of outsourcing customer account management is that it can significantly improve customer satisfaction and retention, and it can free up internal teams for other core responsibilities. When done right, strategic account management can also prevent competitors from moving in on your customers. Also, by aligning with an outside account management team, B2B companies can have access to highly trained experts who can provide account management best practices, technologies, and guidance.
What accounts should you outsource?
As business grow and scale, it’s easy for some customers to slip through the cracks. Outsourcing ensures clients are well cared for at all times. By outsourcing account management roles for smaller clients to a highly trained team, internal account managers can focus on more significant accounts and nurture more profitable relationships with all customers. Outsourced account managers may take on the role as the first point of contact for customers. Or it could include following up with customers via a customer service call to ensure their recent customer experience was successful. Or it may require the outside team to place calls to ensure the customer is fully aware of other complementary products and services available. By outsourcing accounts that were once seen as ‘less of a priority’ customers get the attention they deserve. Companies also benefit from increasing their upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and their ability to meet customers better long-term needs.
Keeping customers engaged
We all know that customer retention is the key to business success. It’s all about keeping customers engaged and interested in your services to grow customers’ lifetime value. Enhancing customer retention is done by nurturing as many of your customers as possible with regular engagement efforts and by knowing which customers are ready to buy, and knowing which products and services to offer when the time comes. Researchers tell us that existing customers are worth much more than newly acquired ones.
Keep in mind: 80% percent of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers, according to Gartner.
So, finding experts that help you focus on account management and those that identify ways to derive additional revenue from existing customers will pay off big. When evaluating account management partners, look for those that can help with a full range of account management responsibilities.
- Routine but critical account management tasks – Maintain your existing business contacts and nurture relationships with continuous communication, including service, follow calls, and targeted email campaigns.
- Analytics or data enhancement – Can your outsourcing partner help you cleanse and enhance data to improve the effectiveness of your engagement campaigns? With CRM and ERP technologies integrated you can build better data profiles and predictive models to accurately address customer needs and access opportunities.
- Marketing follow up – Your team can increase conversion rates with the proper follow up to your marketing campaigns. Those account managers that can track progress and pull customer purchase history, profile information and attribute data, can help you deliver the right message or offer to the right person at the right time.
All for one
With a steep learning curve and significant time and investment required to get account management right, many companies are looking for outside help. Luckily outsourcing account management is a valid option. If you want help beefing up your account management resources, talk to Outsourcive today – we can help!