Speaker 1: So look, how do you grow your networks, get the right people on your side, and gain the trust of your clients? In this video, I will show you the exact steps you need to take to build healthy business relationships and become an influential key account manager. Sound good? Sit tight, I'm gonna be right back. Welcome back, heroes. I'm Warwick Brown, founder at Account Manager Tips, host of the Camp Club, and on a mission to help busy key account managers get results. If we've not met before, on this channel, we explore tips, tricks, and trends to help you grow client revenue, crush customer attention, and build a successful career in key account management. So with the introductions out of the way, let's talk about the building blocks of healthy business relationships, some tips on how to give advice, and a step-by-step guide to developing your networks. This video has been kindly sponsored by Buyer Assist, an enterprise sales execution platform with some fantastic tools to help you better understand your stakeholders, but more on that later. Key account management works best when you have strong relationships with your clients. You need to know the right people if you want budgets to be approved, decisions to be made, actions to be taken, and to become a long-term strategic partner. No relationship means no account growth, no retention, and no results. And look, I'm speaking from experience. I have come across this many times in my long career in account management. In particular, I had this one client where my key contact was my only contact. You know, I didn't even know who their boss was. And when they left, well, you know, I didn't have a single champion on my side. I didn't know a soul. Suddenly, I was scrambling to introduce myself to these people I should have met years before. And of course, it's no wonder within a few months, the new procurement contact found somebody else to do business with. So lesson learned. But growing your network and building healthy professional relationships isn't easy. As a key account manager, from the moment you meet your clients, you're supposed to be strategic, insightful, and ready to help. So look, here are some ground rules. You know, get the foundations right, and you're gonna be well on your way to building those relationships. First, you wanna be a subject matter expert and spend time explaining to your clients how things work. And remember, it's okay not to know it all. Nobody does. In fact, why not ask your clients for advice on problems or issues? That's what they're there for as well. Be valuable. You know, share insights and ideas that give new perspectives on strategic issues that your clients care about. You're the expert, right? Be trustworthy. Have honest, unfiltered conversations with your clients. You wanna be the first person they call, whether it's to fix a problem or to celebrate success. Be reliable, be consistent, deliver those promises, meet those deadlines, and provide quality products and service delivery. Don't have to go above and beyond. Just do what you're promised to do. So with the foundations out of the way, you wanna build on that. And here are some more tips to improve your credibility with your clients. It's from the book, Trusted Advisor, which I highly recommend. It's been around 20 years, and it's just as relevant today as it ever was. Link is in the description below if you wanna check that book out. Focus on your client. Now, you're probably gonna have to do more work than they will in keeping the relationship alive and growing. That's okay. It's not about keeping score. Offer value without expecting anything in return. Identify and solve problems. Find new ways to provide better service. Always know what your next step is and what your client's next step should be, and make sure you tell them. Do the right thing, even if it conflicts with what your company wants. This is about making sure that we are authentic and genuine, and we tell our clients what they need to hear, and we tell our companies what they need to hear. We're the middlemen in account management, and we have to balance the voice of customer with what our companies need, and sometimes we have to have tough conversations on both sides. Follow business processes, but only if they work. Work towards long-term goals, not instant rewards. We're talking about long-term strategic partnerships, not short-term wins. Believe in service and sales. That's what account management is all about. Sales is helping find solutions to problems with the products and services that you have. Service is about making sure what the client purchased works, and that the way that you work together is optimized, and you need to find the right balance. And understand that professional and personal lives overlap. Your client has other things going on besides talking to you and working with you. Lots of dynamics at play internally within their organization and with their personal life, so just respect that and be aware of that. And listen, I've got one more for good luck. Show appreciation. Find opportunities to pay a sincere compliment, and just don't take your clients for granted. So make developing and maintaining client relationships your highest priority. I promise you, if you do that, everything else falls into place. Now, before we jump into the relationship building plan, let me share some thoughts on how to give advice, because a big part of our job as key account managers is to help our clients benefit from our wisdom. You know, we're experts, we've got lots of knowledge, we've got lots of information, and just lots of experience. And we can leverage all of that to guide our clients to better results and business impact. Everyone from the highest level CEO down to the end user can use advice when it's outside their area of expertise, but it can backfire if you don't read the room and if you don't think carefully before you speak. So before you rush into telling your clients what their problem is, here are some tips. Make sure you understand your client's situation. You know, don't jump into solution mode without the facts. I'm guilty of that myself. I do it far too often still. I'm always working on this. Do your clients really need advice, or are they just looking for a sympathetic ear? Maybe they just want it to vent, you know? Let off some steam. Clients want to remove worry, not add to it. So whenever you're giving advice, think about how can you reduce hassles? How can you provide reassurance? And how can you inspire confidence? Ask questions that guide clients to a conclusion. So don't give them the answer. Make them think the ideas are their own rather than telling them what to do. Questions like, why do you think you have this problem? What could you do differently? How would the business react if you did that? Other clients have tried this. What would prevent you from doing the same? Do you see any benefits to trying this? You know, those type of questions can really be helpful. Those open questions that guide them to conclusions. Now give them options, trim it to the best few, and make your recommendations and let them choose. I prefer to keep it binary. You know, you could do A or B. I recommend B. What would you like to do? So with my advice about giving advice out of the way, well, let's move on to the step-by-step guide to building strong client relationships. Step number one, define your relationship goals. Your objective is to build the right relationships with the right people and encourage that two-way dialogue. You know, that exchange of ideas and information sharing. You want to build an army of champions that advocate for you even when you're not around. That's the point. That's how you're going to become a strategic partner. So while ultimately we want everybody to love us, the path to converting those people into champions is going to be different. So do your research, find out about your client's business, the industry they operate in, explore their old chart, you know, to figure out who you need to know, who you already know, and then learn about their current challenges and priorities. Step number two is to build a relationship map. Keeping up with who's who in the zoo is hard work. Facts. Purchasing decisions are made by committee, stakeholders come and go, and somewhere somebody always seems to have an opinion that they are not afraid to share. It can be really chaotic and you really need a system in place. The system I recommend is a relationship map. Now, relationship maps are the blueprint to identify and engage and grow your network of client contracts in the most effective way. It answers questions like, who are the key stakeholders? What are their goals? How influential are they? What level of interest do they have in your business relationship? What do they need from you? What do they feel about you? Do they like you? Do they hate you or somewhere in between? And then what actions can you take to grow client engagement? When you understand the quality and strength of your relationships, you know what the risks are and where to focus your time and energy and on who, most importantly. So to get started with building a relationship map, you wanna make a list of everybody at your client's organization who might help you achieve your objectives or has the power to continue or end the partnership. That includes people you know and people you don't know. Anybody, anybody involved in the decision to appoint and retain you as a supplier, number one. Number two are the budget holders, people that have money to spend and might need some additional services. Then you've got people with influence who can help you get things done. You know, they just know people. And anybody who likes to make a lot of noise and might cause you trouble. That could be anybody in the organization. Then you wanna categorize your clients. You know, are they influencers? Are they leaders? Are they executives? Are they decision makers, budget holders, users? Whatever it might be, label them. All right, so we have made our list of stakeholders. We've applied a category to them so we understand where they sit in terms of influence and the role in the buying process or working with you. Next, you wanna figure out how people feel about you, your company and your solutions. This is gonna help you set the right tone for your engagement strategy. Don't worry if it's guesswork at first. You'll soon find out if your theories are correct once you start talking to people. You wanna think about who are your supporters? Who are your detractors? Who doesn't like you? But not only do they not like you, they're actively telling people in your client's organization, why are we with these people? And who's your champion? Who absolutely loves your company and sings your praises whenever you're not around? You know, the people that will do the selling for you. So then once you know how they feel about you or at least have an idea, you wanna dig deeper. What are those individuals, business drivers? What matters most to them? What are their personal agendas and goals? Don't forget about those. What projects are they working on? And then how do they interact with your company or use your solutions? Once you've done all of that, you wanna think about the overall relationship quality with each person. Is it good, poor, neutral, non-existent, that type of thing? It's important to know because there is definitely a strong correlation between relationship quality and your ability to achieve goals and become successful partners. It's more than just the good personal relationship you have. Your client could love everything about you. You know, they could be your best friend as a key account manager, but they might be really unhappy with the overall service delivery or the products or the features. Overlaying that relationship quality along with how they feel about you, along with the role they play in, you know, partnering with you and their level of influence is gonna give you a really nice 360 degree holistic view of that person. And you can build on that from there and it's gonna help you decide on your engagement strategy. So where do you put all that information? I recommend you get started with the spreadsheet. It's really the easiest entry point, but once you start to get deeper into the strategy and the engagement, you really need a tool that's been purpose-built from the ground up to help you with making those connections, understanding buyer sentiment and helping you build your engagement strategy. So talking about relationship mapping, check out Buyer Assist. They have an amazing platform built for just the purpose to help you identify who's who, to track their sentiment, to understand the power dynamics in customer organizations and help you build that success plan to transform all those people into champions. To start, you import your existing contacts into Buyer Assist. You can upload them or they've got integrations with Salesforce. And then all you gotta do is drag and drop your contacts onto the stakeholder map and get started. There's visual cues that will help you figure out if they are positive or negative, to identify the roles like champion or economic buyer and to capture the relationship strength as well as your key contacts so you know who are the important people in the partnership. You can do edits directly in the map, which I love. You don't have to like click and navigate to different tabs. It's all inline editing. So fast, so easy. One of my favorite features is that you can assign relationship owners and partners. As account managers, you know we're bringing in subject matter experts. We might have executive sponsors that are going to help us expand and grow our networks and you can document them right within Buyer Assist relationship map. There's also quick reference notes, which are perfect to just jot down little tidbits of information that you come across as you do your research or you engage with your contacts. Integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Gmail, Outlook, enterprise grade data security. Buyer Assist honestly takes all of the hard work and does all the heavy lifting when it comes to mapping people in your client's organization and helping you build that engagement strategy and focusing on the people that you need to keep informed, that you need to convert to champions and that you need to reduce the noise. So check it out. They've also put together a very comprehensive relationship mapping guide as well as a free Excel template to help you get started on your relationship mapping journey and building those influential relationships. So visit the link below and check that out. And yeah, thanks to Buyer Assist for sponsoring this video. Step number three is to create a contact plan. A relationship map on its own will only get you so far. So it's time to put that strategic hat on and decide how you'll strengthen, expand and develop those relationships. So ask yourself, what motivates your stakeholders? How can you help them achieve their goals easily, especially in ways that you hadn't considered? What else can you do to turn them into champions? What do you need from them and what do they need from you? How has your success linked to theirs? What's your course of action to develop these relationships? How are you gonna communicate with them and how often? So lots to think about as you're building out your engagement plan. It's not just picking up the phone. You've definitely got choices about how you interact and how you engage and try different things. Don't just rely on email. Leave a voicemail, send a video message, use an in-mail on LinkedIn. Somebody I've been struggling to get by email for the last two months, no answer. I drop them a message on LinkedIn and we had a conversation. So yeah, mix it up, do what needs to be done to go where they are so that you get that engagement happening. Always include a next step. Even if it's just asking a question, you wanna keep the conversation going. Step number four is to follow up. Now don't let silence be the end of the conversation. Otherwise you are never gonna get those relationships off the ground. Don't dismiss contacts because you had an awkward conversation or you thought maybe they're not interested or you didn't really see an opportunity. Don't worry about being pushy. Sometimes a prompt is all somebody needs to take action. And if you don't get a response after several attempts at following up, well then maybe it's time to let them go. Step number five is to reflect. Think about how your strategy is working and what you need to change or switch up. How did your key contacts respond to your outreach? Was it as you expected they would? Were there any anticipated moments that you didn't know how to react to? What discussions led to a dead end? Why do you think that was? What could you do differently? Really important, otherwise you have, what's the definition of madness? Doing the same thing over and expecting a different result? This is the case if you don't spend some time on reflection. So that's a wrap here on this step-by-step guide to building strong customer relationships. Leave a comment. Let me know something you're going to do differently. Now you know the power of relationship building. Thank you to Buyer Assist for sponsoring this video. Be sure to check out their guide to relationship mapping and grab that free Excel relationship mapping template, link in the description. And if you want to keep watching, check out this video all about the right questions to ask your client to get to know them. Until next time heroes, bye for now.