Account management is one of those core areas that you MUST get dialed in as you look to grow your Managed Service Provider (MSP). Your Account Management process and people that fill those roles are vital to your MSP. Your Account Management practice is one of the best ways to make sure that your clients are buying everything they can through you. Proactively managing your existing clients is the easiest path to generate additional revenue for your MSP. Another core benefit to your organization is that you get a pulse on your clients’ view of your company. Keeping clients happy is far easier than finding new clients to replace lost revenue from clients hitting the eject button.
My name is Adam Hannemann and welcome to Ramblings of a Geek. I’ve been in and around the Managed Services space for the past couple of decades in a variety of roles. In a previous life it was my job to help migrate account management FROM the owners of the company to a stand-alone department.
Today is the first of a couple of posts /about Account Management. Today we will cover the evolution of the role as you grow your business, the types of Account Management that I’ve seen in the wild, and some compensation options for your Account Management Team.
Evolution of the Account Manager Role
Owner does all the things
When you first start your MSP, the owner wears all of the hats. One of which is the Account Management hat. The role appears because of a need to check in with clients rather than a planned out process. The role grows over time, and processes start to form by nature and muscle memory.
You build processes like like business review meetings, managing some sort of roadmap, and dealing with the client service side of things by doing what feels good in the moment.
One of the things that happens is that the owner of the MSP starts to realize that the business review process is smart. Then they figure out how to build a process around this because your business review meetings are amongst the most beneficial meetings you can have with your clients. This is where you continue to have good business conversations about how you can help your clients’ businesses grow through the use of technology. If you do one thing at this stage, building this process is the thing that moves the needle the most for your business.
Getting some help
As you grow your MSP, you find that you can’t manage all of the Account Management items all by yourself. You end up needing some version of an administrative person to help with things. Whether it’s scheduling, preparing the materials for meetings, or helping with quotes and ordering you can quickly find yourself in a situation where you have FAR more work to do in any given week for this sort of thing.
Usually, by this point you’ve hired a couple of techs and could use someone to help with some of the administrative work so this could easily be an office manager, admin assistant, or even a virtual assistant. The key is to offload the tasks that you should NOT be doing. There are better uses of your time.
This is where you offload scheduling the meetings and doing the follow-up tasks at a minimum. A good administrative person can be a MASSIVE benefit to you and your organization. Find a good one once you need to offload some of that stuff and you’ll be better off for it.
Hiring your first Account Manager
Eventually, your MSP will have enough clients where you start having trouble keeping up with the schedule of your business review meetings. At this point you need to start looking to bring on someone to begin the process of offloading your Account Management Practice.
You will likely run into a couple of things as you start this shift.
- The processes you’ve built so far will probably need to be modified. What worked for you as the OWNER of your MSP doesn’t always work when you hand it off to someone who is not an owner.
- You may want to keep some relationships at your clients even if it’s a check-in with the owners/C-suite on occasion. This is a little bit of a challenge as you do NOT want things to run through you, so your conversations must be in support of your account managers. Do NOT undermine your Account Manager’s relationships with your clients.
Eventually, you will fully step out of keeping relationships with all but a few clients. You still want to be approachable and available when really necessary, but the goal should be to have your Account Management staff do 99% of the work and relationship management.
As your MSP grows, you will need someone to manage the account management staff. Just like any other manager, you must find someone that can appropriately manage the people and the process. When this happens, you should interact with the manager for any concerns you have with the Account Management practice.
Ultimately, knowing how the your Account Management practice develops and evolves as you grow your Managed Service Provider will set you up for success. The Account Manager role is vital to your MSP, so don’t ignore it.