How To Create A Playbook For Account Management

As an Account Manager, nailing first impressions is a game-changer! Here's a playbook I swear by for kickstarting strong client relationships and seamless onboarding: 1. Discover Their Story: Dive into their world, ask about their business, learn how their year unfolded. Building rapport starts with genuine interest.🌍 2. Know the Players: Uncover the cast of characters. Who's who in the deal? Mapping out stakeholders sets the stage for smooth collaboration. ��️ 3. Goals in Sync: Together, chart the course. Align their goals with your solutions, whether it's software, product, or service. Unity breeds success. 🎯 4. Unveil Future Horizons: Peek into their tomorrow. By exploring future plans, projects, and dreams, you unlock pathways for growth. 🚀 5. Ears Wide Open: Swap "reply" mode for "understand" mode. Active listening unveils golden insights. 🎧 6. Notes to Connect: Little things matter. Jot down details - their dog's name or vacation plans - to spark warm conversations later. 📝 7. Value Exploration: Map the uncharted territory. Where can you enhance their journey? Dig deep for ways to amplify success. 🔍 8. Proactive Reach: Flip the script - reach out with solutions before they ask. Proactivity shows you're their ally, not just a vendor. 📞 9. Renewal Dance: Don't procrastinate on renewals. Extend a helping hand early, guiding them through changes and updates. ⏰ 10. Feedback Loop: Wrap it up with humility. Seek feedback - your compass for growth. Sharpen the saw to be an even better partner. 🔄 💬 Your Turn: Did I capture all the vital steps, or do you have more to add? Let's exchange wisdom in the comments below! 👇 #AccountManagement #ClientEngagement #RelationshipBuilding

In 2 years, we cut Aligned’s sales cycle from 75 to 22 days, while moving up market and increasing ACV 44%. The key? Our team meets EVERY WEEK to optimize our sales playbook. Here’s our end-to-end workflow: 1. Playbooks get old within a few months—Build a regular update cadence How buyers evaluate you and make decisions constantly changes as your product, market, competitors, and economy change. Discussing these changes weekly forces us to adapt. We figure out if we need new enablement assets, training, or if our workflows need a refresh. 2. Most playbooks are “Set & Forget”—Build a system to monitor & analyze At Aligned, we use Deal Rooms to run our playbook. We analyze our best and worst-performing rooms weekly based on buyer engagement. This helps us understand what aspects of our process are effective and identify gaps. For example, an AE might create a new tab to run competitor comparisons or a business case framework that drives more exec engagement. 3. Most wait too long—Quickly turn gaps into sales or buyer enablement assets Most teams lack a routine to find OR fix gaps. Also, most teams put too much weight on sales enablement assets like scripts or training materials. Last week, Kevin "KD" Dorsey told me he sees deal rooms as an excuse for constantly creating buyer enablement assets like ROI calculators and guides. He said, “Investing in buyers must become a habit, or you’re not going to get far”. I couldn’t agree more. 4. Most skills stop at training—Embed every new skill into a dedicated template I’m a 4x sales leader. One thing I was NEVER able to do right is to get the team to consistently follow the playbook. At Aligned, we’ve tackled this by updating all customer-facing workflows in our deal room template (e.g. How we run MAPs, POCs, Business Cases...). We then use the internal-only view to templatize resources like discovery and demo frameworks. Centralizing it in one place makes it easier for the team to follow our processes. 5. Over-standardization is as bad as winging it—Encourage breaking your process A sales leader’s dream of having the ‘perfect’ process executed by their team can also be their worst nightmare. Yes, you want AEs to see what good looks like and follow what works. But do it too often, and you end up killing intuition and creativity. THE essence of what makes complex selling work is knowing how to dance. That's why our biggest updates to our template come from our team on the front line, not top-down. TAKEAWAY: There’s no quick fix for improving Deal Velocity metrics. Simply increasing price 15% won’t magically solve ACV. There are multiple potential root causes to identify. And multiple ways you can address them. But what you truly need… Is a structured way to enhance your process. Monitor, Analyze, Iterate, and Scale. That’s what has worked best for us. You have to be strategic about it. EDIT: People asked—Aligned is the Deal Room we use. It's 100% free to try https://lnkd.in/dwX_Zizk

Want to drive more expansion? Here's the playbook I learned at Salesforce - Find gaps with customers - Create offers to address gaps - Market this to your expansion list - Introduce offer in sales and CS mtgs - Lay the groundwork and spark interest - Start sales conversations with stakeholders - Close Expansion Opportunities and grow Accts! Whitespace is a key way to find those gaps. 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗗𝗨𝗖𝗧 𝗪𝗛𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗦𝗣𝗔𝗖𝗘 - What products does each customer have? - What products does each customer NOT have? - Which products have you yet to present to them? *This is pretty basic but so often not executed well! 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗞𝗘𝗛𝗢𝗟𝗗𝗘𝗥 𝗪𝗛𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗦𝗣𝗔𝗖𝗘 - Which key stakeholders do you know? - Which key stakeholders do you NOT know? - Where can you open up new key relationships? OVERLAP - Where do these overlap? - You can sell a new product to an old contact - You can sell more current product to a new contact - But man is it easier to sell new products to new contacts Let me share some examples from my days at Salesforce: - VPs of Sales bought Salesforce (Sales Cloud) - VPs of Service/COOs bought Service Cloud - CMOs bought Pardot or Marketing Cloud - CFOs bought more licenses at discounts We had a different play for each product and each stakeholder. It wasn't this cut and dry though. Sometimes VPs of Sales bought Service Cloud or Marketing Cloud. CFOs often wanted the best contract terms and were my bread and butter for expansion, but it wasn't always them driving this. Most often, though, our relationship started with the VP of Sales who bought Sales Cloud and didn't really care about anything else we had to sell. This playbook is how Salesforce "landed and expanded" accounts and doubled spend for the average customer within 12 months of the initial purchase when I was there. More details in yesterday's 📰 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗢𝗽𝘀 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸𝗹𝘆 📰 https://lnkd.in/ezX9iMjr ✌️

Expansion and retention are new revenue, yet here is the reality (and the playbook we use. 1/ AEs desperately send outbound messages to other business units, stakeholders or regional teams. 2/ AEs don't collaborate with marketing, but marketing is challenged to drive expansion revenue. 3/ Marketing has limited overview of the deal history and doesn't have access to Champions and power users. 4/ Relationship with enterprise accounts is managed by account owners that don't cross-share the insights about the strategic initiatives of the key client, the value they get from the product. 5/ There is no culture to leverage client success process to build relationship with key clients and accelerate their time to value. In these companies retention = locking an account into an annual contract and sending product press-releases. Expansion = doing same old school lead generation to the same account but different business units. When I was ABM lead I've developed a framework that we adjusted later at Fullfunnel.io to drive expansion revenue. 1. Embed expansion/upsell signals in the client success process. You must embed onboarding and in-depth customer interviews with Champions and power users. Start with strategic initiatives and how they are impacting other regions, business units and teams. Understand your Champion's role and KPIs. Define business triggers that led them looking for your solution. 2. Incentivize your CS team to accelerate time to value for accounts with high expansion potential 3. Track customer satisfaction and set up milestone interviews tracking before/after. Debrief Champion and power users on the positive impact of your product on their KPIs and JTBD. 4. Create an internal case study. Even if you under strict NDA, agree with your Champion to create an "internal" case study that you'll be sharing only with the teams and units of this account. Define which units are likely to benefit from your solutiuon. 6. Embed engagement and relationship building with the buying committee members of your target units on the channels they are active in. 5. Develop a series of account-based events co-hosted with your Champion. The best way to nurture a bigger group from a target account -> hosting an event where you address a strategic challenge while your Champion presents how they solved it. 7. Suggest 1-1 strategy sessions with your SMEs to audit & refine strategic challenges of other units and create a logical bridge between their priorities and your product. -- Expansion ≠ 21 outbound touches supported by programmatic display ads. Expansion & retention = accelerating time to value for your enterprise customers. Building strong relationship with your Champion and making him a hero of the organization. Developing meaningful engagement touchpoints with other units that are likely to have a similar to your Champion's challenge and create activities that develop a logical bridge between their priorities and your product.