Are your key accounts dear to you?
I understand. For most b2b, key accounts contribute the majority of revenue. Thus, their success is dependent on how they keep and grow these key accounts. B2B leaders would leverage a Key Account Management Software to enable this imperative.
Which brings us to the question, how does software help grow key accounts?
Account Intelligence
Where should an account manager go for account intelligence?
- A company’s financial information and growth details,
- Key Employees with their titles/ social profile/ function/ contact detail,
- Top management changes, organization structure,
- Important announcements or news and other business initiatives?
The account planning tool provides all the above account intelligence in a matter of clicks.
Account Understanding
The software also helps the Account Manager:
- To understand the level of relationship with the account – Strategic or Tactical or in between (cooperative/interdependent).
- To understand the attractiveness of the account through parameters like future growth, type of long-term contracts, and level of relationship mappings.
- Conduct competitor analysis of the account.
Thus, helping the Key Account Managers build the account landscape to map the products/services to buying centers. In turn, identifying ‘White spaces‘ of growth.
Account Planning
The software makes annual key account planning easier by providing all the data for planning and providing ready-made templates to complete their plan. The plan will include strategy, activity planning, and revenue goal setting. A good Key Account Management software also helps the Account Manager to present and track the plans anytime anywhere.
Account Collaboration
Key Account Management software provides a perfect platform for various internal stakeholders often globally spread to collaborate on planning, activities, and analysis of the key accounts. The software also serves as a single source of truth for all account-related data.
Analytics
Key Account Management software provides the Account Manager with analytics and dashboards to make the right decisions and take the right actions. Some of the key metrics it provides are,
- Revenue target vs achievement,
- Account growth, farming and mining effectiveness,
- Pipeline,
For the executive leadership, the software provides powerful analytics using aggregated data of all key accounts. It helps answer – what do all the account plans together indicate, which product/solution you won/lost industry-wise, and much such analytics to enable effective decision making.
Productivity
Account manager runs the risk of doing many repetitive tasks that are non-revenue bearing. Automating repetitive tasks improves the productivity of Account Managers. Some examples are creating the account plans, presenting the plan directly from the software, exporting account info pdf, preparing for QBRs, tracking activities and financials, generating reports, notifications, and reminders, ease of creation, and consumption of data across devices.
Platform
The importance of Key Account Management software is that it is a single platform for account managers to create and consume data. It provides account intelligence, account financials, opportunities, contacts, account plans, account engagements, and dashboards in a single platform.
The platforms provide a single source of truth and save the account manager the hassle of logging in to various enterprise applications for accessing data. All in all, Key Account Management software enables account growth through deeper analysis, better planning, and reliable governance. In the future, this will get even more powerful with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.
A Good Key Account Management Software
A good key account management software helps analyze, plan and govern the strategic accounts of a b2b company. It is used to build account landscape and organization charts easily using CRM data.
It helps analyze key accounts – both qualitative and rule-based. It also provides account intelligence through external web sources. The creation of a strategic account plan is integral to such software.
It has productivity tools like presentation, export, plan trackers, and in-app training/adoption. The executive leadership should use key account management software to analyze aggregated data of multiple accounts to make the right decisions. Organizations that base their revenue growth on key accounts are guided by a key account management software that prompts insights to expand key accounts.
