What is an inside sales account manager? As an inside sales account manager, you oversee and nurture relationships with clients after a sales representative has closed the first sale with them. The clients you work with are also called your accounts, and together they make up your portfolio. Your job is to generate additional revenue […]
What is an inside sales account manager?
As an inside sales account manager, you oversee and nurture relationships with clients after a sales representative has closed the first sale with them. The clients you work with are also called your accounts, and together they make up your portfolio. Your job is to generate additional revenue after the first sale by offering upgrades, service renewals, or contract extensions.
Your job will sometimes include customer support; for example, when a customer calls because they can’t log in to their account, it’s the account manager who takes the call, connects with the technical team, and waits for a response to deliver to the customer. But the account manager role changes depending on the industry. Below are a few examples of what your job may look like in different fields:
Technology: If you’re in tech, especially software, you’ll be the customer’s first point of contact. Since tech products always have bugs or need to be updated, you’ll try to catch any problems before they happen or work with support to fix them when they pop up. Since you work with a range of clients, you’re also in a great position to look out for recurring issues, which you’ll communicate back to the product manager and technical team.
Physical products: As an account manager selling goods, you’ll usually work heavily on the sales side since products have a lower price point and shorter sales cycle than services. This means your time is spent farming new business, cold calling and emailing your lists and keeping them updated about sales, discounts, and new product releases.
Creative services: Perhaps you can picture yourself like Don Draper, working at an advertising agency or marketing firm, in charge of a variety of accounts that need help with their campaigns. In these industries, you’re an intermediary between creatives (directors, copywriters, graphic designers, photographers) and your clients, ensuring projects go smoothly. Once each campaign is complete, you continue to keep track of the company’s upcoming campaigns and plan ahead to get more business with them.
To sum up, an account manager can do one or a hybrid of sales, customer service, or project management. Keep this in mind when you decide which industry you want to go for.
Account manager vs. sales representative
Account managers and sales reps meet customers at two different stages in the sales cycle. Sales reps focus on bringing in new business up until the close, while account managers take it from there and work on nurturing the client slowly over months or even years to get more business. Basically, sales reps are done once they get the sale, while account managers never stop selling.
What’s a typical day like for an inside sales account manager?
Let’s look at a typical day in the life of an account manager in the B2B software/technology industry.
In the morning, the first thing you want to do is check in with your accounts. Since your industry relies heavily on subscription services, your clients’ satisfaction is what will keep them around for years to come; even just one day of disruption on the platform could be enough to send them to one of your competitors. So your day starts with reviewing support tickets and prioritizing accounts that need help.
To prioritize accounts, you may rank them by how long they’ve been with you, the annual revenue they bring in, or how urgent their problem is. Providing support will require a lot of back and forth between you, your client, and your support team. Because you might not know everything about the technical side, you have to wait patiently for updates and reassure customers that their problems will be solved soon. Inside sales account managers can’t succeed alone; you’ll always find yourself working closely with other departments.
Once pressing issues are handled, it’s time to focus on other clients. You might call them or send off an email to update them about new features, explain product changes that will affect their business, or ask what business goal they want to achieve.
Now that clients are taken care of for the day, you may have a scheduled Zoom meeting with your general manager, client support specialists, engineers, or product managers to relay feedback to them. You’ll give insight into what customers are saying about your product, what they love and hate most about it, what features they wished it had, and which bugs engineers should tackle next.
What makes a great account manager?
The best account managers hold a wealth of knowledge, from the big picture to the little details, on their customers’ industry and needs.
To be a great account manager, keep track of your clients’ goals and stay up to date with projects—right down to the metrics . For example, if your company sells sales analytic software, don’t be afraid to ask your clients what their conversion rate was last month or how many sales qualified leads they got from using your product in quarter 1. This also lets you quantify the exact value you bring in for your accounts—how much time, money, and customers you save—and it keeps you on top of the important metrics for your clients’ industry so you’re better prepared to serve them.
We'll help you understand if Lusha can solve your business needs.
