Business success goes much beyond selling. It is all about building long-term relationships with your customers, that too with the ones who are capable of making your business grow and thrive in the future. This is exactly what account management focuses on. Whether you run an established business or have just started up, you need to invest in nurturing your key accounts.
As a startup, you may not be really sure about the role of an account manager considering the limited number of accounts you have. Further, you may be apprehensive about the costing aspect because of the budget constraints that new businesses typically face. But here are some good reasons why you should prioritize account management even as a startup.
Ensures smooth onboarding of new customers
Obviously, you will onboard new customers as your startup grows. Since you are new in the domain, you need to focus as much on customer experience as on your product or service quality. An account management strategy enables you to make the customer onboarding process smooth and seamless. Since they always have an account manager to connect with, the chances of customer frustration are minimal and the collaborations are likely to go long-term.
Promotes long-term customer retention
Customer satisfaction and retention are critical for all businesses, even more for the startups. Alex Raymond from Kapta (https://kapta.com/) says that while it’s good to seek new clients, it’s more important to focus on keeping your current clients happy. This requires less work and time than acquiring new customers, which probably can make all the difference for new businesses. Account management serves a vital role in promoting customer retention by nurturing relationships through personalized connections.
Gathers valuable product/service feedback
Another reason why startups should absolutely invest in account management is that it gets them valuable product/service feedback from the customers. This really matters at the initial stages of the business, when there is a great scope for improvement. Genuine feedback enables you to enhance and align your product/service with customer expectations. Further, you can also keep it in mind while developing new products as your business grows. An account manager who is in direct contact with your customers is best placed to get you genuine inputs from them.
Produces referrals and testimonials
When you start a new business, every avenue of growth is important. Referrals and testimonials, in particular, can be valuable because they give you access to new customers through word-of-mouth. Further, they can strengthen the reputation of your startup as well. Having an account manager to nurture relationships with your “hero” customers serves a great opportunity to produce referrals and testimonials for your business.
Generally, startups are not keen to invest in additional resources such as account management personnel and tools because of their cash constraints. However, having an account management strategy is the smartest thing to do because it can push your business on the growth route. It can play a significant role in making your business scale by nurturing the accounts that matter the most. Rather than cringing on the cost, this is one expense that you should happily make for your startup!
