Small businesses in India must prioritize leveraging account management to drive massive business growth. Many startups often tend to operate with a motive to sustain. Thereby, they overlook that having formal systems and design at an initial stage can take the business to a new level in no time. The difference between businesses that succeed and don’t is the ability to scale their strategic execution. Each business, irrespective of its size, must focus on building ideal customer relationships. It is easier to generate strategic accounts from loyal customers. Because selling to an existing customer is much easier and more profitable than otherwise. As a business owner, you need to acquire resources as you expand. For instance, when the customer base increases, you need to hire more professionals to serve them. Scaling primarily refers to adding adequate revenue. In contrast, businesses add resources at a marginal rate. Retaining customers in today’s competitive world can be devastating for businesses. One way to achieve this aspect is to scale account management. The strategic accounts represent at least 40-50% of the revenue and margin of an enterprise. Thus, businesses must reassess the systematic approach toward top customers. This article is a comprehensive guide to small business owners in India. After having done thorough research, we have laid out key strategic methods. Find out how you can grow your business without overcomplicating account management.
What is Account Management? – Importance
Account Management is an extension of the sales process. It starts once the sales transaction is carried out successfully. Strategic management helps to handle customer accounts regularly. It is a process of building long-term relationships with valuable customers. They drive more profit to the enterprise, and account management helps convert them into business partners. A key account manager who carries out the management processes provides necessary resources, periodic meetings, and offers. Modern businesses automate financial management processes from inception to keep track of each transaction. Current online accounting software for small businesses in India provides financial analytics and business solutions that help businesses stand out among their competitors.
Automate Account Management with Groflex.io
The growth of sales for small businesses in India begins with analyzing and understanding purchase and preference patterns. Most buyers these days are sophisticated in making purchase decisions, bids, and negotiations. It is where Groflex cloud-based accounting software comes to play. The integrated software runs all the accounting errands for small businesses. It not only helps retain current customers but enables poaching new clients through customizable quote creators. Groflex automation tools reduce the workload for account managers and other employees, eventually streamlining the organizational workflow.
Strategies to Scale Account Management to Drive Business Growth
Traditional Account Management strategies can hurt the growing business. Here are five strategic methods that can transform a small business into a successful organization.
Method – 1: Increase Renewals
Increasing your renewal rates doubles your income base and gross revenue growth. Adding points to the renewal rates and improvising them over time can be a twisted process. Lower renewals hamper revenue growth and scalability. A renewal rate of 85% will consume at least 15% of the growth in new business bookings to maintain revenue growth. Most companies struggle to overcome renewal rates, while the best companies never drop lower than 95% renewal rates. Groflex cloud-based software counters the problems and provides tools to improve renewal rates. Taking a “land and expand” approach to sales could positively affect renewal rates. For instance, you can aim to capture half of the target growth rate of expansions by demonstrating value in one area of your client’s business and then expanding to others. As your platform or solution becomes more stable and long-term, the customer (renewal) will likely stay with you.
Method – 2: Hire Creative Minds That Understand Your Goals
Most SaaS and Tech companies fail to employ product strategists or marketers. Commonly, not many CEOs have experience working with them. It is one of the main reasons why businesses are not able to scale their growth. Here’s how hiring creative minds can bring about a change in an entity.
- Passionate employees understand the organizational goals and thus work by customer centralization.
- They are well experienced in aligning products as per market needs and demands. It substantially helps product development and sales.
- They are determined to generate significant sales.
- They focus on the effectiveness and efficiency of delivery that ensures customer satisfaction.
- They work with a holistic perspective toward defining, developing, operating and launching a product.
- They ensure end-to-end cross-functions, which helps launch a product successfully and scale product development.
Hiring ideal employees is a strategic function laid out to generate market reports that guide CEOs to make business decisions. They help prioritize and group technical requirements for business sales and customer retention.
Method – 3: Offering Value-Added Services
Whether you seek each project to be a professional service (as if it were unique) based on business hours, sell one-size-fits-all services, or, worse yet, provide free service hours, these practices are not scalable. Provide packages on the services or products that you render. You can offer a project-based, annual or timely subscription for your customers. Here are a few examples.
1. Implementation
Examine what it takes to implement your solution in one customer profile versus another. Inspect in terms of roles or types of service required, such as discovery, integration, QA, architect, and project management. Look into the hours of each kind of service you offer. Incorporate this into production deployment packages at a total flat rate compared to the software’s annual cost. It allows your sales representatives to sell your price list rather than looking for resources to define each deal’s scope. The implementation strategy also leads to the aligned organization of services in terms of lifetime expectations (revenue recognition).
2. Creating & Managing Reports
Do your account managers provide regular reports? Are they responding to custom report requests from clients? How many hours a month do you dedicate to this? Can these interactive service requests be turned into a value-added proactive reporting or analytics service for a fee?
3. Optimization
Set and Forget. Offer an upgrade package for a fixed annual fee. Ensure that your solution is actively launched and used so that it is consistently aligned with your customer’s business needs and that they get the most out of their deployments.
Method – 4: Integrate Product Management Ownership with Delivery of Services
Integrating product management and product delivery keeps the money roadmap in place. Keep the customer experience at the center of the roadmap and focus on revenue generation. It lends not only a scalable service offering but also a more scalable end product. Especially for startups and small businesses, product managers need to see how products are implemented, merged, improved, etc. If done so, they will be better positioned to produce capabilities that would otherwise require customization work and service hours to activate.
Method – 5: Launch Sales & Marketing Engines Across Multiple Cylinders
Multifaceted market models tend to present the best opportunities for growth and scalability when implemented effectively. Here’s what launching sales and marketing engines across multiple cylinders mean.
- Sell to multiple industries at the same time, such as retail, financial services, and travel.
- Sell to multiple market segments, such as large enterprises, medium-sized businesses, and small businesses.
- Sell through more than one channel—for instance, direct, online, or VAR.
Successful businesses seize the opportunity to shoot multiple cylinders in the early stage of their journey. It helps in the optimum utilization of resources. In case you plan to expand to mid-markets, you can extend the base of target buyers. In this way, you can leverage existing tactics of lead generation and resources.
Conclusion
Of course, there are many ways to scale a growing business. What are your strategies and methods for expanding growth? Embrace failures and learn from your mistakes. Focus on bringing the right system in place. Implement a strategic account management plan. Allow your account managers to shape the future of your growing business. Better yet, go for cloud accounting software that can automate it all for you. Rid of the challenges of implementing your account management plans. Groflex.io, the best accounting software enables businesses to gain internal support and advocacy. Utilize the analytical solutions to measure the success of your account plans.
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