#20: The Best in Class Account Management

Building an Exceptional Account Management Team: Recruiting, Key Roles, and Core Metrics. Today, we're shedding light on the inside processes employed at Belkins.

Many TV series start with a recap of what happened in the previous episode. Here's a quick catch-up for those who missed my last newsletter and for those wondering "Where is Michael?"

Last week, I delved into the topic of perfect client onboarding. We discussed the process itself, the structure of calls, playbooks that can be used, and all the nuances leading up to the actual kick-off.

Today, we'll talk about the essential steps for crafting a team capable of effectively representing your brand to clients. While I'll primarily focus on building an Account Management team tailored for service businesses like Belkins, many of the insights shared are universally applicable across various industries.

Recruitment

It all begins with the recruitment process, akin to Takashi Shimura's role in the renowned film “The Seven Samurai,” directed by Kurosawa. Just as the main character seeks to assemble a team of samurai to protect the village, your aim is to gather individuals aligned with your objectives. Each recruited warrior in the film possesses unique motivations, contributing to the team's depth and complexity. The lesson is clear: understand your goals and the specific qualities you seek in your team members. While in the movie, wielding a sword was enough, in our context, the criteria are a bit more nuanced.

Below, I'll outline a few fundamental criteria we've developed for recruiting within our service business, accompanied by a few comments:

• A minimum of several years' experience in the role of an Account Manager. Direct interaction with customers and managing hundreds of client calls cultivate unique qualities that cannot be acquired through any other means. Hiring individuals with such experience accelerates the onboarding process and effectively covers a multitude of fundamental aspects.

• Experience within the target market is paramount. An effective Account Manager embodies confidence, adaptability, and adherence to local business practices. These qualities are crucial during negotiations, which can vary significantly depending on the client's background. While some skills can be acquired on the job, the decision to take such risks hinges on the maturity of your business.

• For us, hands-on experience in outreach and crafting marketing strategies is indispensable. While this requirement may differ based on your business's nature, we prioritize a department where Account Managers serve as both the primary points of contact for clients and the principal strategists orchestrating the process. In our case, we aim to recruit Account Managers with a strong background in outreach.

  This expertise could be PPC, video production, content creation, or any other skill vital to your unique domain and company's success. The ultimate goal is to have account managers who not only excel in interactions with clients during calls but also function as knowledgeable consultants, offering valuable insights and guidance.

• Exceptional presentation, communication, and relationship-building skills are essential. In addition to reviewing CVs and conducting interviews, consider tests to effectively assess these skills. While many companies believe that tests are unsuitable for customer-facing positions, I hold a different view. Through testing, candidates can be asked to describe potential marketing strategies for clients, respond to open-ended questions, or demonstrate their communication skills by composing an email to address an unsatisfied client.

Beyond these specifics, it's crucial to have a clear vision of the ideal Account Manager you seek. For instance, do you expect them to excel in upselling, cross-selling, and consistently growing client portfolios? While such individuals may drive revenue, they may require additional support positions, such as operations assistance, to manage details effectively. Remain pragmatic and tailor the candidate profile based on the KPIs you establish.

Once you've assembled your team, what comes next?

Outlining the Key Roles and Basic Frameworks

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This iconic line from a world-famous classic book sets the stage for what I'll discuss here. While there could be countless reasons why a team might fail (maybe I'll cover that in another newsletter), one big thing that all successful teams have in common is a strong structure. Trying to grow a team without a solid foundation is asking for trouble. Here's a funny picture I've found from one of our monthly all-hands meetings:

In this picture, you can see a united, collective representation of a Belkins person that I required at the moment to illustrate the situation. Those were the summer months during COVID with high client turnover, but we persevered and eventually stabilized the situation. However, if it were an Account Manager, there would be a chain of individuals supporting each other. Here are a few essential roles you'll definitely need besides Account Managers:

1. Head of Department: This role is self-explanatory. This person is primarily responsible for solving long-standing client issues and overseeing the entire clientele. They're also responsible for recruitment, finances, team motivation, and growth. Key KPIs: Churn rate, upsells, and NPS of the whole department.

2. Account Management Operations Lead: This title encompasses overseeing operations within the department, refining processes and frameworks, and translating data into actionable steps. This role is indispensable, and once hired, you'll wonder how you managed without them. Key KPIs: OKRs depending on your current goals, LT, and LTV.

3. Team Leaders: In my experience, this role is often overlooked and undervalued. Account Managers juggle multiple responsibilities in a stressful environment, serving as mediators between clients and their teams while orchestrating workflow. Without a well-established Team Leader structure, maintaining a healthy team dynamic is nearly impossible. Key KPIs: Churn rate, upsells, and customer satisfaction of their team.

4. Operation Assistants: As mentioned, at Belkins, Account Managers handle a multitude of tasks: communication, contracts, upselling, customer satisfaction, retention, and strategy development, all while overseeing team execution. If your role mirrors these responsibilities, consider adding support staff to assist Account Managers in their daily tasks. Tasks such as managing CMS and CRM systems, paperwork preparation, and deadline management can be delegated, freeing up Account Managers to focus on client relationships and revenue generation. Key KPIs: Average time of onboarding, percentage of delays with playbook execution, tracking their influence on AMs workload.

5. Account Managers: The Account Manager role is at the heart of everything discussed in this newsletter, so I won’t repeat myself with many details. The role involves client interaction, operations, upselling, retention, and strategy development. Thus, we need versatile individuals with excellent communication, sales, and operational skills. Key KPIs: churn rate, upsells, and customer satisfaction.

These are the essentials. You can delve deeper by incorporating Subject Matter Experts for various services, Onboarding Managers, or R&D personnel to test hypotheses, among other roles. However, I won't delve into further detail, as promised to Michael, to avoid overwhelming his readers with a lengthy tome akin to Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" in seven volumes. Keeping that promise =)

Remember, "everything you can imagine is real," so feel empowered to choose your own course based on your company's stage of development. Depending on your size and whether you're in a product-centric or service-centric industry, you may also consider a structure with roles such as Chief Customer Officer, VP of Customer Success, Director, CSMs, and Associates.

Performance Review

Alright, you've assembled your team, established a structure, and are eager to start operations. Yet, there's another crucial factor to address: implementing a motivation and performance review system. The question is straightforward: how do you construct a system that not only keeps your peoples motivated but also establishes clear goals and provides you (and, most importantly, your Team Leaders) with comprehensive visibility into their growth and progress? Let's start from the end and read this email:

I know what you all thought. And no, these are not “Letters” by Pliny the Younger. This example email offers a sneak peek into our performance review system, highlighting the use of KPIs, OKRs, and the identification of strengths and growth areas. Let's delve deeper into each component to gain a comprehensive understanding of how our system operates.

Block on Metrics, KPIs, and OKRs.

This is where absolute alignment becomes crucial. Your entire team must understand the specific targets you aim to achieve. To ensure clarity, we've streamlined our team KPIs to focus on three key areas:

1. Churn rate. The primary objective for Account Managers is to retain clients. It's imperative that there's no ambiguity here; everyone should be aware of the monthly, quarterly, and yearly churn rate targets. I’ve stumbled upon another meme from our monthly all-hands that is quite self-explanatory and shows that despite being a rigid KPI, you can approach it with humor (obviously, I’ve removed the clients’ names, imagine if we had clients called “Client 1” or “Client 2” =)).

2. Upsells/cross-sell. Whether facilitated by a Client Partner or with Team Leads' involvement, it's essential that the team understands our expectations regarding upsell numbers.

3. Customer satisfaction. Measurement methods vary, ranging from tracking NPS to setting goals such as the number of customer reviews on platforms like Clutch or G2, case studies, and referrals.

Over the years, we've learned that setting identical goals for Account Managers of different seniorities isn't practical. Hence, goals vary for each AM based on their seniority level. Here's an example of what we would expect from a Junior AM to progress towards a more senior position: (This is one of the first drafts that we created years ago, providing a basic overview of how tracking mechanisms can be established)

Key Results

So, these pillars outline our objectives, but of course, we haven't overlooked the importance of key results. After all, merely stating that we aim to retain at least 90% of clients isn't enough. Each account manager has a set of actionable tasks to accomplish in order to meet these KPIs. Let's break down the targets mentioned earlier and provide at least one actionable next step for each. Below is unique Belkins key results:

1. Decrease churn rate? - Ensure zero deadlines on leads, templates, creatives, or communication are missed this month.

2. More upsells? - Conduct a portfolio analysis and pitch additional services to at least 25% of your clientele. Ensure every call is followed by a recap, and opportunities are added to the CRM.

3. Increase customer satisfaction? - Ensure your average onboarding time is less than 8 days.

There is a mechanism described by Marx that can be summarized as follows: "The quantitative increase in some entity, reaching a certain threshold, gives rise to a qualitative change." These examples may vary from case to case, but they provide measurable actions that, when taken collectively, propel us towards a leap that will take you to the goals set for the team.

Individual Focus Areas

While these actionable steps could certainly be part of our key results, we maintain a fairly rigid structure when measuring our OKRs and KPIs. However, when it comes to individual focus areas, we adopt a more relaxed and flexible approach. We recognize that not every improvement in this category may have an immediate impact on metrics like churn rate, but they can yield long-term benefits. For example, these focus areas might include recommending a course, a book for team members to read, or suggesting some traits or small nuances they could work on while engaging with clients.

Performance Review

Lastly, to ensure that these rules aren't just imaginary concepts (last I checked, we weren't in Middle-Earth), but are actually put into practice and monitored, you'll need to establish a performance review system. While this topic also deserves its own newsletter, we've developed our system tailored to the seniority of each Account Manager and aligned with the metrics described earlier. Each Account Manager has a performance review calendar, and these dates serve as milestones for tracking progress.

As for the frequency, we adhere to the following schedule:

The End

I understand that the number of nuances is incredibly vast. Each paragraph in this newsletter could potentially be expanded into a separate piece. Ironically, even if I had access to this newsletter six years ago, there's no guarantee I wouldn't have repeated some past mistakes. History has shown us that the only real lesson it teaches is that we often fail to learn from it.

Nonetheless, I sincerely hope that this material has provided you with a coherent framework or template to use in building your Account Management team or refining existing processes. Even if we talk about a small change, it could potentially have a positive impact on your clients, so I can consider my mission accomplished ;)

Next week, I'll delve into the topic of mastering client communication, so stay tuned. See you next Friday!