Whether your organization has a dedicated Account Management team, or your salespeople are in charge of managing their own accounts, it’s important to establish account management KPIs to measure performance and effectiveness.
Put simply, strategic account management is all about responsiveness, problem-solving, customer satisfaction, and building long-term relationships that lead to additional revenue.
If these areas are well maintained, your sales team will be able to dig deeper into existing key accounts, increase customer retention, and maximize the revenue potential in each account.
Let’s look at the best way to set up KPIs for account managers or sales professionals
Your organization’s account management efforts should be focused on:
- Retaining customers
- Strengthening relationships
- Growing revenue
Keeping these larger goals in mind, you should identify the specific, measurable objectives you want to achieve in each area. Those objectives will help you decide which metrics make the most sense for your team to track.
Setting up goals and metrics will help each team member know where to focus, and they’ll be prepared when it’s time for their performance appraisal.
This Strategic Account Management Training Program will teach your salespeople how to build strategic account plans to organize, manage, and grow their key accounts. Watch the video below to learn more.
The Top 4 Account Management KPIs
KPI #1 – Retaining Customers
According to Gartner, 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers.
It’s far more profitable to retain existing customers than to find new ones, so it’s key that your team keep customer satisfaction top of mind.
Key Performance Indicators for Retaining Customers:
- Retention Rate – Percentage of expiring contract renewals vs dropoffs (for subscription business models)
- Customer Churn Rate – Percentage of customers who cancel their contracts or fail to renew them
- Customer Satisfaction Score – How satisfied customers are with your product or service (you can use client surveys to track this metric)
- Support Requests – Number of calls or emails from customers reporting issues or requesting help
- Support Calls – Number of calls made in response to requests for support
- Support Emails – Number of emails sent in response to requests for support
- Time to Resolution – How long it took to resolve customer support tickets
- Product Engagement – How much customers are using products that can be monitored, such as SaaS software
KPI #2 – Strengthening Customer Relationships
In order to recognize new business opportunities—and be seen as strategic advisors when making recommendations—your account managers and sales staff must demonstrate value to the client.
This requires monitoring each key account and making sure the customer feels supported and confident in working with your organization.
Key Performance Indicators for Strengthening Customer Relationships:
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Strategic Calls – Number of calls made to offer best practices, strategic advice, consulting, etc.
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Strategic Emails – Number of emails sent to offer best practices, strategic advice, consulting, etc.
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Customer Referrals – Number of new customers gained via referrals
- Outreach Engagement – The number of times a customer responds to account management outreach, such as calls and emails
KPI #3 – Growing Revenue
In the end, the goal of your account management effort is to increase revenue. For that reason, it’s important to measure growth with key indicators or performance measures.
Key Performance Indicators for Growing Revenue:
- Customer Upsell Revenue – Revenue obtained via upselling
- Customer Cross-Sell Revenue – Revenue obtained via cross-selling
- Contract Extension Revenue – Revenue gained from contract extensions
KPI #3 – Expanding Customer Relationships
Expanding the number of relationships within a key account involves breaking into other divisions and gaining introductions to other stakeholders.
The silver lining of uncertain economic times is they make your customers less likely to seek out new vendors (unless they have a problem) and streamline relationships with existing vendors. Take advantage of this by understanding who you know and don’t know in your accounts.
Key Performance Indicators for Expanding Customer Relationships:
- Internal Referrals – new contacts in existing accounts
- Opportunities with Internal Referrals – to specifically track revenue from internal referrals
- Contacts in other locations or business divisions
Hunting for new business within an existing account will of course come more naturally to some salespeople than others. The Brooks Group offers sales assessments to help you understand your team’s strengths, so you can leverage your sales teams’ talents most effectively to deepen existing customer accounts.
Measurement Controls Sales Behavior
Remember, what you measure will steer salespeople’s behavior. If a salesperson knows they’re being measured on upsell revenue, they’ll focus on that. If they know they’re being measured on referral appointments, they’ll focus there instead.
If you focus on more than 5 KPIs your salespeople won’t know where to focus their efforts. So, pick your KPIs very carefully and evaluate them on a quarterly or biannual basis to make sure you’re getting the results you’re looking for.
If your team struggles with asking for internal referrals, then it may be time to reevaluate your sales training programs. The IMPACT Selling sales process naturally aligns with the buyer’s journey, resulting in great rapport with customers so salespeople can close more deals, more often. Learn more about IMPACT here.
Implement a Strategic Account Plan
You can use the account management KPIs that make sense for your organization to measure how effective your team is at retaining, growing, and developing long-term relationships with your key clients.
Remember that establishing these measures is just one part of sales performance management. To set your team up for success, provide them with the training and tools needed to develop their own detailed account plans.
The Brooks Group’s Strategic Account Management training program teaches participants a highly-practical system for developing each of their key accounts in ways that will strengthen client relationships—and drive additional revenue for your company.
