Speaker 1: Would you like to be a key account manager? I mean, it's a great job. You get to partner with your clients to understand their challenges. You get to share your advice on how to overcome their problems. And you get to help them get better results faster. It's all about those long-term business relationships that create value for your clients and for your company and for you. But what does that all mean day to day? Let's explore a day in the life of a key account manager, what they actually do in the real world. Sit tight. I'm going to be right back. Welcome back, heroes. I'm your host, Warwick Brown, founder of Account Manager Tips, host of the Chem Club, and on a mission to help busy key account managers get results. Now, on this channel, we explore tips, tricks, and trends to help you grow client revenue, crush customer retention, and build a successful career in key account management. So let's get onto the topic at hand with those introductions out of the way. Let's talk about what a typical day is like for a key account manager. Now, side note, I'm not going to cover all the crappy stuff, right? There is crappy stuff in every single job. Not going to be talking about those, you know, like updating CRMs, replying to emails. Every job has its boring admin stuff, and key account management is no exception. So yeah, if you want to be a key account manager because you think you're going to be escaping all that crap, you'll be very disappointed. In fact, I think there's probably more of it in key account management than most jobs. All right, with that out of the way, the biggest chunk of your time is Now, you're going to be building relationships within your client's organization because key account management is a team sport. You need to meet your client's stakeholders. You need to discuss their needs, and you need to figure out how you can help them achieve their goals. Now, you don't want to just rely on your main point of contact. There is way too much risk if you put all your relationship eggs in one basket. When it comes to key account management, you're going to be spending a lot of time on developing relationships. You're going to be spending a lot of time putting all your relationship eggs in one basket. When a single person becomes your only contact, we start to see everything through their biased lens. How do you really know what's going on when you're hearing only one side of the story? And then what happens if that person leaves? So you need to constantly nurture and expand these relationships to find champions that support your mission and people that will help you unlock opportunities and make sure you stay in supply long term. Now, around 10% of your day or an hour will be spent on account growth, which is how to make customers more profitable. You are always looking for ways to upsell, which is to sell more of the same product, to cross-sell, which is to sell complementary products, to increase your share of wallet or market share to capture more of that available spend, to improve margins by increasing prices or being more efficient, and just to avoid costs. And once you have figured out where those opportunities are, you need to develop and execute an account strategy and plan, which is where you'll spend the next 10% of your time, about an hour a day, on developing your goals and your objectives and then creating a plan to achieve them. Now, you're going to start with analysis, which is to take a close look at where you and your client are today. Where do you want to be in the future and how will you get there? Now, you'll have a big list that you'll need to filter down into what is the most important, what is the most impactful priorities. You can't do everything at once. We want to go for those big, big goals. You know, don't be afraid to be ambitious. Now, when you set those goals, think about what do you want to achieve to find your objectives. Make sure they're, you know, smart, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. Then you're going to develop your tactical plan, right? How are you going to get those results? That involves identifying specific actions that you're going to take to reach your goals. And then finally, once your account plan is developed and ready to go, you need to implement it. Make sure that it's executed, that people know what they're supposed to be doing and that you monitor and review your progress against your goals to make sure that you're on track. Now, the next part of your day will be spent coordinating resources. Speaking of implementing your account plan, it doesn't happen on its own. You're the architect of the plan, but you need people in your client's organisation as well as your own in order to turn it into reality. So you will spend about 10% of your day or about an hour coordinating resources and people to make sure that your objectives are met in a timely and efficient manner. You know, you want things done on time and on budget. That's a priority. Now, you might be thinking, why do I have to worry about making sure other people do their job? Won't they just do it? Well, short answer is no, they won't. Everybody's busy. They have lots of competing priorities. You are just one of the projects, one of the people, one of the customers and one of the account managers that they deal with. So you need to ensure everyone knows what's expected of them, how they should do it, when they should do it, that they are constantly informed of developments and that they are reminded to do their part. Otherwise, your plan is never going to get off the ground and it's, you know, it's doomed to fail. Now, another part of your day is dedicated to internal problem solving. Around 10% or an hour of your day is just fixing issues. Problems happen. It's the way of the world. And that means it's going to take you time to investigate because you need to reach out to your internal teams, like product, like service, like delivery, to come back to you with their findings, even if there are alternate routes or developed processes for resolving issues and you're not first point of contact. Invariably, at some point, something will get escalated to you where you have to step in and just make sure that things are investigated properly and concluded to the customer's satisfaction. So that's when you tend to get involved designing and implementing a solution. Now, you're not just waiting for the problems to happen. You want to address issues before they become serious. And generally speaking, you should also be looking for ways to improve efficiency, to improve decision-making and to improve customer satisfaction. Now, a fair amount of your time will be dedicated to providing information, around 10% or an hour of your day. Now, that's because your clients want to know how they're performing against key performance indicators. How much they're spending? Is that spend within their policies? They want industry news. They want insights. They want product updates. And then, of course, your manager wants to know about your sales pipelines, about competitor threats, the status of your renewals. And then you're also communicating updates and information to your internal teams and also within your client's organisation just to let them know about your progress and anything else that's going on in the business. Account managers also have to interpret information and transform that information into knowledge. So you need to explain what that information means and what your clients should do with it. It's important as a key account manager that you develop your industry knowledge. So you'd be spending around 5% of your time or half an hour of your day just being informed or keeping yourself abreast of industry developments. So you want to read trade papers. You want to read press releases, analyst reports. You want to listen to podcasts. You want to watch interviews with industry leaders. Knowing what trends are emerging and how that might shape your client's strategy and give them a competitive advantage or reduce risks is what it's all about. Now, it's your job to be an expert, not just on your products and services, but where your industry intersects with what your clients want to achieve. That's why they have a key account manager, right? That's very integral to the role. The next part of your day is around implementing new accounts. Now, 5% of your time or around half an hour will be something related to new customers. Now, it doesn't matter whether you have a customer success team or a dedicated implementation or onboarding team. There is always a role for key account managers in making sure new customer expectations are met. Around 5% of your day or half an hour will be dedicated to aligning with internal teams. What do you need from them? What do they need from you? How can you work better together? It's important that you both understand current priorities, challenges and performance expectations. It's absolutely vital so that you can pivot your strategy and adapt it according to changing business needs. There could be new initiatives that you can exploit or there could be major challenges that put your goals at risk, but you won't know if you don't spend time talking to colleagues. As a key account manager, part of your day will be dedicated to understanding internal capabilities. Again, around 5%, half an hour is focused on product knowledge. What do you do? How do you do it? What are all the steps involved in getting your products and services to your clients? And importantly, what changes are coming? There are so many moving parts in an organisation. You have IT, product, HR, sales, facilities, operations. Anyway, you get the idea, lots of people involved. And something as simple as a change in account software or a relocation to a new building or delays in hiring developers, they might not seem like things you would need to know as a key account manager, but these could all potentially impact your client's experience and ultimately you're responsible for making sure it's a good one. Another part of your day will be dedicated to promoting your company. That ubiquitous 5% or half an hour will be around, you know, promoting your organisation. There might be a trade show that you need to attend. You might be a guest on a webinar. You might be having to push out a white paper or invite clients to focus groups or summits or other events. Maybe you're sharing new features or product roadmaps or organisational changes. There's always something to promote to your clients to build awareness of what's happening within your organisation. And last but certainly not least, training and education. Allow yourself 30 minutes a day to be able to learn how to be a better version of yourself. What are the skills you need to be successful in the job and how can you improve them? Maybe you'll be sent on a course. Maybe you'll have access to some self-paced learning. Maybe you'll shadow someone. Maybe you'll find a mentor, read a book or do some extracurricular education. But keep learning. Very, very important. Now, before we wrap things up, are you on Telegram? I've just set up a channel on Telegram where I just post when I have created some new content. So when I do a new video, when I do a new blog post, when I publish a podcast episode or a download or do a webinar, something like that. So if you want to stay in touch and if you want to make sure you don't miss out on any of my content, then head over to t.me.com or check out the link in the description. So quick lap recap on how a key account manager spends their day. They spend it developing relationships. They spend it growing accounts. They spend it developing strategy and planning, coordinating resources, internal problem solving, providing information, developing industry knowledge, implementing new accounts, internally aligning with their stakeholders, promoting their company, training and education and understanding internal capabilities. It is quite a list. And mathematically among you may have noticed that all of this comes to nine and a half hours. And I guess that's my final point about a day in the life of a key account manager. It ain't a nine to five job, right? You're the ultimate owner of the customer relationship. There is always something that goes wrong. There is always a deadline and there is always something unexpected. You're frequently reacting to events rather than controlling them. That's just the nature of the job. And that means sometimes you might have to work through lunch. You might have to start early or you might have to stick around longer than you planned. But you know what? That's a minor quibble. All things considered, key account management is a fantastic position where you get to put your knowledge and abilities to work by helping your clients in overcoming obstacles, achieving breakthrough objectives and making a difference. That's what I love about it. And you are the company's growth engine. You encourage everyone in your organization to bring their best so that your business can establish long lasting relationships and lucrative long lasting relationships with their most important customers. So that's a wrap heroes on a day in the life of a key account manager. If you would like to keep watching, check out my video on how to become a key account manager when you have no experience. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to catch me on Telegram. Check the description for links and I'll see you in another video real soon. Bye for now.