Account Management Skills

Learn to Build, Maintain and Grow Key Relationships

The world of buying and selling is evolving rapidly and the trend is to select fewer preferred suppliers and build open, collaborative, strategic alliances with them. This means growth and prosperity for those suppliers who can respond appropriately.  Account Management Skills and Building Key Relationships is key.

Relationships are absolutely key in the world of business and the Account Management Skills and Building Key Relationships workshop explores some new thinking and methodology. Delegates will also have the opportunity to work with ‘live’ issues on their identified key accounts. This is an essential workshop for sales people and those in front line customer relationships such as account managers and customer support, who actively deal with relationship building as part of their roles.

An outstanding Account Manager possesses a number of key attributes. These account management skills include consultative selling skills, being a strong communicator, having strategic business skills and the need to be totally customer orientated and focussed. The focus here is upon building cross-selling, up-selling and client retention, in order to maximise and protect revenue across all key accounts.

Content of the Account Management Skills and Building Key Relationships Workshop

What is Account Management?

What are the qualities of a successful account manager?

Aligning client goals with your organisational goals

Up-selling, cross-selling, and retention planning

How to identify and leverage key relationships

Building rapport

Presentation & communication styles

Influencing & negotiation skills

Who are your champions?

Prioritising your accounts

How to develop a strategic, value proposition account plan

Action planning

Learning outcomes of this workshop

Key Account Management plays a vital role in the entire sales process. If strategic accounts are lost to competitors, revenue streams are immediately affected, putting the pressure on BDM’s to win more new business to cover the loss. You need to have excellent presentation and communication skills, alongside negotiation and influencing skills as well. This workshop provides some self-analysis on these points and much more, enabling attendees to critique themselves. There will also be group exercises and a case study to resolve, all of which will enhance the learning process.

Pareto’s 80/20 Principle

Pareto’s Principle, or Pareto’s Law, can be applied to a lot of things in our lives. In the world of business, it is often applied to measure how we as business owners generate (and retain) our top sources of income.

Simply put, Pareto’s Principle suggests that 80% of our revenue comes from our top 20 customers. If you are working in account management, this should send shivers down your spine, because if you lost half of your clients, in theory your revenue model just got cut in half. Therefore, it would seem a risky strategy would be not to have an account manager.

Benefits of Account Management Skills and Building Key Relationships Workshop

By having a dedicated resource in charge of relationship building and growing revenues from existing accounts, it is less likely that key clients will defect to a competitor. A good account manager is able to forge long term relationships with the right people, whether they are “champions”, stakeholders, decision-makers, or all three.

Taking longer-term strategic views are also essential, alongside really understanding the clients’ business and future plans. Planning is everything. Every key account should have its own dedicated account plan, updated regularly with everything recorded. As a minimum, a key client account plan should include the following:

Business overview

SWOT analysis

Client’s key priorities and initiatives

Client’s key people

Where is their pain?

Annual revenue to our business

Short term growth plans 6-12 months

Strategic revenue growth plans for 12-24 months

Our value proposition

Our internal resources (team)

Competitor knowledge

Client retention

One of the main reasons that businesses implement a strategic account management approach is to ensure that a profitable client, or one with potential, does not ever feel the need to migrate to a competitor. Key account managers are responsible for nurturing important accounts.

They must be skilled at building and maintaining relationships and engaging in negotiations that result in mutually beneficial outcomes. A strategic account management approach is a company-wide initiative and all employees must adopt a customer-centric mindset to make this succeed. The account manager owns the relationship with the client and that person is the lead in all discussions, responsible for developing that business over the coming months and years.