Are You an Account Guide?
How do you walk with your customers through their challenges?
Are you an account guide, internally and externally? How are you helping your customers engage with your internal team? How do you help your internal team engage with your customer? This post is probably for more established companies that will have several team members interacting with the customer.
Your internal team needs to engage with your customer on some level. It may be to help ensure the product is installed corrected, or the right level of service is delivered. It could be to ensure that invoices make it to the right team for approval and payment. Like it or not this is part of the sales process. The sale is not complete until you get paid for it, after all that is when revenue actually counts. As a part of your sales process are you guiding that internal team in their interactions with your customers? Make sure they have the contacts that they need for the billing process. For customer support make sure they know how to engage with the end users to provide support and to get feedback. Make sure that your team understands the customers personality and vice versa. You do not want someone that is short and direct to ruin a good relationship by offending someone that is a talker. Think about things like DiSC assessments. Do you know your team well enough? How can you learn about your customers personalities? This is all part of the communication process for establishing customers and building the relationship between the two companies.
What about your customers interacting with your organization? Do you guide your customers through the key touch points to ensure that each job will be successful?Customer engagement is a two way road. It takes lots of communication and guidance. The successful sales folks that you know are great guides. They will not complete every step of the process themselves, but they will know every step. They know the people to engage for each step, and how to stay ahead of the next step. When questions arise they know the contacts to answer those questions and ensure continued success. When there are failures or issues along they way, they learn from them and prepare for them on future projects. They continue to push the organization to get better and learn from previous challenges.
So Remember:
Being an account guide applies internally and externally.
Communication is key to being a good guide.
Know the steps in the process and help improve them with each account you build.
Thank you for your time reading this post. If you found any value please share it with a friend or colleague. I also appreciate any feedback or questions you have.