A few years back at a small IT support company I owned in Sussex, I took a call at about 8am from the MD of a company who was a client of ours.
I had not yet met him personally so, after brief introductions and taking down the details of what was a relatively minor issue, it gave me the opportunity to chat some more with him.
It ended up being a very pleasant call that lasted a total of 48 minutes. It also resulted in the client asking my opinion on some items which he then asked me to provide a proposal for. As I had not had any previous dealings with the client it was very easy for me to start talking about all manner of things because I had no prior knowledge of them.
After the call I went downstairs to hand the enquiry to the Account Manager, who had just scraped in at 9am on the dot. After reading my notes I was told, ‘I’m sorry Matt I know the guy pretty well. I won them about 9 months ago but he doesn’t buy those items – he only buys the cheap stuff‘.’ Taken aback by the slightly dismissive nature of the reply I said, ‘oh is that true – tell me then, what else do you know about him?’
I then stood there horrified as, despite us having them as an account for 9 months, we knew nothing more than publicly available information about the business and, whilst checking on our CRM, saw only the bare minimum about the individual at a contact level.
For the benefit of the business, and the Account Manager, I personally spent the next 5 minutes updating the CRM with:
The names of his wife and children and the fact that he and his son were season ticket holders at Charlton Athletic (I suppose somebody has to), that he had a holiday home in Sete, South West France and that his daughter had a horse called Ginger.
I’m not suggesting that all of this information is relevant to selling him more IT services but I do think good account management includes a focus on developing and enhancing the relationship.
Aside from lacking CRM data, the other key point of the conversation with the Account Manager was that he had incorrectly assumed that the client only ever wanted to purchase the cheaper products because we simply hadn’t articulated the benefits of the premium product that he then went on to purchase.
Despite it never being good to lose effective personnel, I’ve seen numerous occasions where a new face has been able to extract considerably more from a relationship than their predecessor.
