How can Inside Sales support Account Management teams? (Part 2)

Continuing from my last post, I feel that Inside Sales can assist Account Management teams in the following ways

1. Inside Sales can help Account Managers in preparing account maps of their key accounts with regards to organization structures, decision making dynamics within these accounts, current technology environment and vendor landscape present within the accounts.

2. Inside Sales can act as a coordinator between Account Manager and Marketing, so as to drive the relevant campaigns within the key account with a perspective of creating maximum visibility, awareness amongst all the relevant stake holders and establishing warm touch points with these people even before the Account Manager has met them in person.

3. Once the Inside Sales team has aligned well with the Account Manager, they can definitely help the Account Manager in penetrating deeper within these organizations by engaging in preliminary discussions with relevant stake holders, setting up meetings for the Account Manager & managing the Account Managers calendar better.

4. Inside Sales can play an important role in maintaining a high quality of hygiene in the account management CRM and take that load away from the Account Manager, so he spends his time more productively.

5. Keeping track of sponsor movements within the organization, profiling every relevant stake holder- critical information which the Account Manager can leverage well, are again areas where inside sales can most definitely play a big role in.

The key element here of course is winning the trust of the Account Manager. The Account Manager needs to see inside sales as a support engine which he can leverage to his advantage. Once he has established a level of faith in the inside sales engine, he can gradually involve them deeper and deeper in his account management plan.

Apart from making Account Managers focus on their core competency, this also ensures that organizations retain the relationships that are built by Account Management teams.

Milind Katti

COO, QEDbaton

How can Inside Sales support Account Management teams?

Traditionally Inside Sales has been focused on identifying opportunities for New Business and not surprisingly over the past five years, all our clients have used our services from a new business acquisition perspective. Every time that we spoke to them about using inside sales for account management, the general perception was;

a. Account management is purely a relationship driven function, and therefore the best person to drive traction from within an account is the Account Manager himself.
b. Account managers are very sensitive about their individual accounts, and they are very protective about a third person reaching into their account.
c. Account management is an extremely high touch, high involvement function, and cannot possibly be influenced by a remote support engine.

While each of these points are true, there are still a number of companies that I know of, which have made excellent use of their Inside sales engines to further their account management practices. In fact, in many ways, I feel inside sales deliverables can be a lot better defined in an account management scenario. Account managers can improve their productivity drastically through an efficient inside sales function.

What are those areas where inside sales can support the account management team to deliver faster and better results?

Milind Katti
COO, QEDbaton