-- Account Manager interviewed for this blog
This blog benefits from interviews with 50+ Sales and Ops leaders. It uses the term Book of Business (BOB) to denote an account list worked by a Customer Success Manager (CSM) or an Account Manager (AM). We use the term ‘rep’ as a generic way of talking about either a CSM or an AM that exclusively works with existing customers. We especially want to thank the below CS & AM leaders for their contributions:
-- William Shakespeare / Reps during planning season
When you’re an AM or a CSM, planning season is nerve racking. You just spent the year shepherding your accounts through the customer journey. You learned their businesses, earned the respect of their people, and acted as the face of your company.
But next year, you’re not sure which accounts will be yours. Your manager asked you in a meeting which ones you’d like to keep and which you’d be ok to relinquish. But there doesn’t appear to be a clear process. Next will come the political nightmare of ‘horse trading’ accounts back and forth, where you’ll be an innocent bystander caught in the mess and without influence. You start to think, maybe Forest Gump was right, “"I don't know if we have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze.”
You cross your fingers and hope to get your account list (box of chocolates?...ok ok…we’ll stop) soon, so you can get to work. You hope that it was thoughtfully designed and gives you a shot to achieve the goals that will be set for you. You hope that it will be fair so that you’re judged on merit. You hope… but you feel a little helpless.
When we started researching for this blog, we couldn’t find articles, webinars, or content detailing the best practices for designing books of business (“BOBs”). It made us think that the quote above is right…there is no process! But we couldn’t figure out why. From our team, which is made up of former AMs and Sales Leaders, to the 50+ Sales and Ops leaders interviewed for this article, everyone had a horror story from book design.
To customers, CSMs and AMs are the face of the company. They own the relationships and act as shepherds for the customer journey - the main points of contact. This means handling both renewals, upsells, and product adoption. If a customer is experiencing a revolving door of reps, has someone assigned that doesn’t fit, or doesn’t even have a supporting rep, the risk of churn skyrockets (insert data here). Recent economic turmoil has reminded companies that renewable revenue is their lifeblood. Churn from rep instability puts that at risk. Amber Milks reminds CS and AM leaders, “'Your job is net retention, net retention, net retention'”
For Dani Rojas, Football = Life. It is where he makes his living, spends his time, and gets his identity. For CSMs and AMs, Accounts = Life! Most reps hold some combination of renewal quota, upsell quota, or customer milestone bonuses. If they aren’t put in a position to succeed (i.e. trying to sell software to a company that is going out of business), it directly impacts their compensation. Michael Ordoff explains, “oh, there's a lot of churn happening in the individual BOB and then we lost that account manager. And then you go back and look at the data, it's like that person was probably checked out for the last six months and overworked for the last year and a half because we had a hiring freeze and we couldn't resource and we couldn't reshuffle the books of business and put them under.” And it’s not just compensation, high-priority accounts translate into visibility and growth in the company. If Dani has to sit on the sidelines (Ted would never), he’d have no choice but to find another team.