MSP Account Management 101: Client Reviews & Satisfaction

Developing a cadence of activities for your Account Managers is one of the keys to their success. Managing MSP clients requires organization, planning, and execution. That’s what we’re talking about today. Today’s video will cover Business Review Meetings, core Account Manager activities, and keeping clients happy.

This is the third post in my Account Manager series. The first was all about the Evolution of the Account Manager role as you grow your business, the second was all about the types of Account Managers and how to pay them, and today’s video will wrap up the series with building routines for success for your Account Managers.

My name is Adam Hannemann, and welcome to Ramblings of a Geek. I’ve been in the MSP space for a couple decades now and spent a bunch of time working with my Account Management team in previous lives.

Business Review Meetings

Let’s start with Business Review Meetings. In my opinion, getting your Business Review Meetings dialed in is the most important piece for your Account Manager’s success. These Business Review Meetings might be called a number of different things. I’ve heard them called:

• QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews)
• TBRs (Technology Business Reviews)
• SBRs (Strategic Business Reviews)

You can pretty much call them whatever you want, but I might stay away from using the term Quarterly.

How often should we have these meetings?

This can be quite simple, but is easy to overthink. The short version is that you should meet more frequently with clients that pay you more per month. At my day job we often talk about for every $1000 per month your client spends with you, you should meet that many times per year. I’m a fan of bumping that to $1500. This means that if your client pays you $1500 in MRR you’d meet with them one time per year. If they pay you $6000 per month you’d meet with them four times per year.

The reality is that you would only use this as a barometer. Your smallest clients probably don’t need to meet more than once or twice per year, and your largest may need to meet 4 or more times per year. In fact, if you have clients that pay you north of $10-15K per year you probably want to meet monthly or thereabouts.

Who should be at these meetings?

Ideally, you want the CEO/Owner at least once per year, and more if you can get them there. Depending on the client you may have a number of contacts you work with. You want to make sure that the key decision makers are in the room at least once or twice per year, so aim for at least that.

With smaller clients you will likely find that the CEO/Owner is more likely to come to these meetings since they are representatively smaller.

What content should we cover?

Speaking of content: The content for your meetings goes hand-in-hand with who your audience is. It’s important to know who you are targeting for the meeting when considering the content for your meeting. It’s unlikely that the Owner/CEO wants to talk about tickets for an hour, and it’s unlikely that an Office Manager is going to approve big projects and talk about the direction of the company.

So, what does this mean? First, I think it’s important to build a schedule of the content you’d like to cover with your client each year. Make sure that you are covering the different bases that need to hear from you on a regular basis. Presuming you have more than one meeting per year I would target at least 1-2 of their meetings per year to be heavily strategic and the others could skew more tactical.

For example, if you have four meetings for the year you could focus Q1’s meeting on tactical items like service updates, machine replacement conversations, and topics that speak more towards the Office Manager or IT Liasion.

You could focus Q2’s meeting on the direction of the company, the IT roadmap, and work to get a higher level conversation going with the CEO/Owner. In this meeting you wouldn’t talk about tickets or tactical things like that at all.

For Q3 you could swing back towards tickets and other more tactical topics like that.

Then, in Q4, when they’re working on their budget you would help them craft their IT budget for the following year.

You would want to know your client’s normal cadence for the year as if they budget in Q3 instead of early Q4 you would want to adjust those meetings accordingly.

Another option would be to split the focus of the meetings into half strategic and half tactical. Front load the strategic conversation to get the CEO/Owner to attend. Then once you’re done talking strategic you would let them know so they could leave if desired. Then spend the back-half of the meeting talking about tickets, problem users, and more tactical topics.

You could even build a cadence of strategic topics to talk about.

• First quarter could be security and the company’s security posture.
• Second quarter could be the future state of their business.
• Third quarter could be roadmap where you help connect the dots from the future state meeting to what you recommend.
• Fourth quarter could then be the budget conversation.

Something like that would work nicely, especially if you can get the key decision maker(s) in the room.

This is a massive opportunity for you to show your value in your services.

Core responsibilities for an Account Manager

This topic will be dependent on the types of Account Managers you have in your business. Generally speaking, your Account Managers do a variety of proactive and reactive things to help their clients move their businesses forward.

Reactive Tasks

Common reactive tasks revolve around helping with escalations, helping quote one-time hardware purchases, helping quote projects, and dealing with complaints. It’s vital to track these reactive tasks in your PSA including the time spent on them. Time spent from an Account Manager should impact the agreement, and in many cases break-fix situations as well. Ultimately you should track the time, and whomever is doing invoicing can make the time spent billable or not. In short, it’s important that your Account Managers track their time in the PSA just like everyone else.

Proactive Tasks

Proactive tasks could be anything from a check-in email, a phone call, or a Business Review Meeting. The key item that I think is worth paying attention to is that your Account Managers should be spreading their time amongst their entire client base. There is a better than average chance that your Account Managers spend more time with clients they like better or their noisy ones. There’s probably a swath that don’t fit either of these two, so make sure someone is paying attention to them at least a little.

In my former life we used activity points in ConnectWise. Lower value activities such as emails were worth minimal points, and Business Review meetings were worth much more since they were high value activities. We had a point threshold for all clients and the Account Managers were responsible for spreading those points around. If you don’t use ConnectWise you could do this in a CRM, and I imagine that other PSAs have other similar options.

Planning Client Activities

One of the key pieces was that we wanted our Account Managers to have a written plan for the quarter. Part of this plan was to identify the clients that needed a Business Review meeting, which clients needed attention, and projects they were trying to get signed. It became a valuable exercise for the team to think ahead. Knowing what their goals for the quarter gave them targets to aim for.

Client Productivity

The last piece that someone must pay attention to is client profitability. Agreement profitability should be an Account Management task. Someone MUST take control of agreement profitability, and must check in on it regularly. Reviewing agreement profitability tells you a LOT about the client. You will find projects, training opportunities, and clients that need a price increase.

It also helps you find clients that need some extra attention. Clients that are under utilizing your services might be on the way out. Spending a little time with these quiet clients might be in your best interest.

Client Satisfaction

Let’s talk client satisfaction before we wrap up this ramble. Client satisfaction can be measured in a number of ways, but I think that two are vital to your organization. One is Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) check-in, and the other is a client heartbeat/NPS type of check in. As I mentioned in one of my previous videos paying attention to both of these things is important because you will get different feedback depending on when and who you ask.

With a CSAT tool, you generally ask clients for feedback after each ticket your MSP completes for the client. These are important because you get tactical feedback from your clients.

The problem with CSATs is that they don’t give you the full picture. It’s possible to lose a client because “service was bad” with a 100% positive CSAT rate from the client. You should query your clients overall satisfaction on occasion. This is where an occasional broader survey is important. Tools like NPS do well here. You want to ask the decision makers: the Owners and C-Suite of your clients how their perception of your service is.

In both cases, when you receive less than stellar feedback your Account Management team gets involved. You may also want your Service Manager involved, but your Account Manager should be involved.

Keeping clients from leaving out the back door while your sales team is trying to bring new clients in is vital to the growth of your organization. Your Account Managers serve a big part of this effort. They bring forward value to your clients with strategic conversations, they help move tactical items forward, and generally help keep clients happy with your services. If you have a well run account management team it’s likely you have some pretty happy clients. I was fortunate to have a great team in my past MSP life.