A Key Account Manager is an interesting role as you get the opportunity to wear many hats including consultant, adviser, project manager, sales executive, colleague, team member, and friend. Many companies split account management responsibilities into different specialty roles such as Account Director, Account Manager, Solutions Architect, and Inside Sales Executive. However, based on my experience, a GOOD account manager is a special type of person with a varied skill set; they need to be excellent at building relationships, communicating, problem solving and personal selling.
To be a successful Key Account Manager, I recommend the following:
Be Customer Oriented: It’s all about the customer’s business and industry. Understand your customer’s business drivers, structure, and strategies to ensure your propose the appropriate solutions with the maximum business impact. You need to establish trust and create meaningful value for your client.
Be Knowledgeable: You need to be knowledgeable and understand the goals and priorities of your client. Know the industry and the company’s products or services. Understand the competition, as well as their strengths, weakness, and vulnerabilities. Be a subject matter expert and provide advise and insight to help your client differentiate its products / services, increase revenue, and improve their overall customer experience.
Be a Strong Communicator: Effective communication is crucial for making professional presentations to a group, establishing one-on-one rapport, writing detailed reports, and communicating via email and phone conversations. A good account manager clearly articulates the company’s products or services and explains the advantages to clients in a way that is persuasive without being pushy.
Be Results Oriented: A good account manager that understands their client's needs, builds trust, and establishes a rapport and build loyalty and maintain a profitable account. You should always look for opportunities to add value; monitor sales activity and actively seek ways to upsell products and services. If you're honest, trustworthy, and perceived as adding "value", you can foster a successful client retention strategy and generate referrals from existing clients.
Have Good Business Judgment: Account growth comes from business growth and helping your client win. Provide meaningful business insight, leadership, and solutions from the client's perspective.
Build Relationships: Continuously build and foster relationships with key stakeholders. Know your client's as a person - not just a work colleague. By understanding the individual you're better able to understand their thought process, motivators, concerns, ambitions, etc. Try and have a monthly "informal" meeting out of the office in a more relaxed setting. I suggest you not only build rapport with your project counterpart but as many of the project team members as possible Your objective is to be viewed as a "colleague" - not an external consultant.
Build Collaboration: A successful Key Account Manager creates a relationship that moves up the value chain away from a basic transactional relationship to an interdependent relationship. You want to build the relationship to the point where it's difficult for the client to switch suppliers because you have a strategic, high-value relationship. Your objective should be to build a partnership relationship.
To be an effective Key Account Manager, you need to have the following:
Personal Traits
- Trustworthy
- Tact
- Integrity
- Responsibility
- Creativity
- Self-Motivation
Skills
- Relationship Building
- Negotiation
- Communication
- Leadership
- Coordination
- Presentation Skills
- Conflict Resolution