According to Survey Sparrow, the top five companies in the market maintain a customer retention rate of 94%. If it is any indication, the secret to a thriving business is retaining key existing customers with consistent effort. 

While every company intends to grab more business from existing clients, the key account management playbook can help streamline these efforts.

What is Key Account Management?

Key account management is the practice of looking after the essential customers who contribute the highest to the company’s revenue and profits. This is a group of clients that is ideal for any growing business. With key account management, companies can pay attention to their important existing clients.

It aims to look after what the customer is working on, their aim, their returns, and following through the commitments. The goal here is to find risks and opportunities in advance and take the right course of action accordingly. Such care for existing clients can help companies create customer loyalty, maintain consistent business, upsell to clients, and create a brand identity around excellent client satisfaction. 

What is a Key Account Management Playbook?

A business key account management playbook is a method to guide account managers and sales professionals in dealing with their customers. It can standardize account management through proper steps and strategies to understand and grow the business with existing customers. 

A playbook is to help your account managers be aware of standard practices, approaches, and policies and rehearse their daily scenarios. It can act as a guideline as to when to perform a task, how to perform it, and who is responsible. Such a playbook can provide ins & outs about the whole customer account, from nurturing a new prospect to upselling existing clients, 

On top of it, there are digital key account management playbooks that can operate as a Software-as-a-Service. These digital tools outclass the traditional out-of-date playbook documentation and assist account managers in doing their jobs better.

What are the benefits of a Key Account Management Playbook?

Key account management plays a critical role, and any loose ends over there can directly and significantly impact the company’s revenue. Having a set standard and guidelines in the Key Account Management Playbook can simplify account management for an organization. 

Such a playbook allows a handful of advantages to companies as given below:

–   Deeper client business understanding:

You can reach the client’s pain points and goals through well-defined account management to look after them. This can help companies understand the client’s expectations and find areas to add further value. A clear understanding of clients is the first step to achieving better client satisfaction.

–   Increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV):

Customer Lifetime Value is the average of the total business amount different clients spend with a particular company over a period of their lifetime. A key account management playbook can guide account managers to upsell and retain clients to increase their lifetime transactions.

–   Helps establish a brand identity:

Consistent practice in key account management is the key to creating a brand identity among clients where a client and their peers have a set of expectations and reputation built towards the business over time. It can lead to referral business as well where the client could vouch for the company.

–   Improved business prospecting:

Business prospecting & qualification is the key for companies to understand where they should invest their efforts and to which extent. Understanding the client and prospecting future opportunities through them allows account managers to tap into them when the right time comes.

–   Training your account managers:

A playbook can also make it easy to onboard and train new members into the team. They can go through the guidelines to learn every precise detail of the job, including which questions to ask clients, how to find pain points, how to follow up, and how to make a proposition.

–   Cross-functional teamwork:

Key account manager often has to rely on different teams and team members. Cross-functional coordination is a tricky job and the account manager must follow standard operating procedures for smooth and effective progress. A playbook can guide account managers to ease and streamline cross-functional operations.

–   Reliable & solid contracts:

A playbook can also make sure that all the contracts shared with a client are accurate, definitive, and error-free. This consistency avoids any back-and-forth with the client and can lead to a shorter turnaround time.

What are the steps to implement a Key Account Management Playbook?

It is important to understand that a key account management playbook is only as effective as its implementation. Here are some of the steps that can help you:

–   Define clear processes for your team:

Before jumping into the implementation of a Playbook, you must first understand and finalize all your internal processes relevant to key account management. Defining processes with clarity and detail can help you implement a key account management playbook effectively.

–   Understand different roles and tasks:

Different account management tasks need different assistance from multiple roles. Before setting that up on a Playbook you may want to internally finalize which tasks would involve which roles for account management.

–   Setup triggers points with touchpoints:

Another thing to be aware of is which particular event results in which responsive actions. There are different trigger points that can lead to unique action items. This is among the most crucial steps as it plays an important part in your account management strategy.

–   Create a template as a framework for your Playbook:

A template can be a framework of what your Playbook would be like. It is a documented static form of a Playbook that will bring the actual digital tool to a functioning state. Use a free template or make one of your own to ensure that you have a ready framework for your Playbook.

–   Implement, measure, and iterate:

Lastly, one must find an ideal key account management tool that can streamline the processes, automates them, and measure them against results. If needed, one can also iterate these account management practices until they reach the expectations.

What do you need in an ideal Key Account Management Playbook?

There are different Key Account Management tools available online and some of them are suitable to serve as a Playbook. However, it is critical to verify some of the things from the given list to identify the right tool:

–   Personalization:

The ability to personalize or customize a key account management playbook is as important as the extent of personalization. It is important to realize how much personalization is needed and if the platform allows it.

–   Automation abilities:

If it was just about task management or reminders, then any task management tool would suffice. However, a Key Account Management Playbook can be further helpful and take care of some account management activities automatically based on certain set parameters.

–   Integrations with existing system:

Often, users overlook the provision to integrate their existing ecosystem. This mistake could cost hours of migration efforts and loss of data for an organization. As such, it is important to make sure your Playbook gets along with your peripheral software ecosystem.

–   Collaboration abilities:

Another important thing to check for is the ability to work together as a team. It is crucial that the tool can engage and interact with different roles for their assigned tasks.

–   Measurable results:

Lastly, a business must operate on results, and for the same reason, your key account management playbook must provide some quantified results and outputs that you can verify over time to experiment, find gaps, and perform improvements. 

Get your free Key Account Management Playbook template today! 

If you are now clear about the need for a Key Account Management Playbook, then the next step is to begin the implementation. As such, we, at SmartKarrot, provide a free template that you can refer to and use for your business.

Grow your business by nurturing your key accounts! 

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