Is your account management bringing in new business?

If you work in B2B sales or business development, you already know account management is integral for maintaining key relationships with clients to ensure you are aligned to your clients’ key business needs. It’s essential for the day-to-day running of accounts.

Increasingly though, relationship management is merely an account management baseline. At Pure Business Development, we believe that, at its most skilful and strategic, account management plays an integral role in your company’s ongoing business development – and if it’s not doing that, then it’s just not working hard enough.

We all know that winning new business is time consuming and expensive. We also know that the best source of business development is leaning into existing business: like referrals for example, warm leads already know the value you offer, and are often the most effective route to finding new business in different departments or sister companies in new territories – maybe your client in Barcelona also has an office in Berlin, for example, or your IT client might work in engineering as well as manufacturing.

But we’ve also found that many of our clients, particularly in enterprise businesses, are coming to the realisation that they just don’t have the time or resources to effectively dig into their existing clients. And that inevitably limits their ability to uncover the myriad of other possible opportunities for revenue.

So, the question is: are you sure your account management is working hard enough to develop your business in the best possible way?

Strategic account management that wins you business

We believe that account management, done well, is a perfect gateway to generating optimal leads, whether that’s expanding on warm initial connections or uncovering entirely new ones. That each interaction should have an eye to either cross-selling or up-selling – as well as identifying the strength of individual leads that will be worth your while following up.

We believe it’s about creating strategic plans that will help your client work to identify potential areas for growth, as well as identifying market trends, benchmarking against competitors, setting new business goals, or expanding existing market share.

It’s also about making sure that you are doing everything in your power to maximise the resources you have – whether that’s reviewing your CRM list to tap into existing or old clients, revisiting leads who might have said no before (but might be in a different situation now) or identifying previously untapped markets to generate entirely new lead generation.

Collectively, it turns account management into an effective strategic approach that will drive sales growth and expand your business.

How to check if your account management is supporting new business development

If you’re looking to expand your business within an account, there are key questions you need to ask:

Look for growth: how big is your client’s organisation?

How much scope is there for your business to grow your reach within the organisation, or different departments or territories within it?

Widen your influence: is your contact the only contact in your organisation?

How can you build more relationships, in this, or other departments and territories?

Know who you’re dealing with: is that person your client, or is the entire enterprise your client?

How is your current relationship management set up – and is it reaching as far as it could be?

Always be closing: are you cross-selling or up-selling?

Do you really know enough about your clients to add additional business?

Cross borders: have you considered working with clients internationally?

If your client is in multiple territories and markets, how might you work to expand your business to service them, too?

Pure Business Development: masters of account management

We understand that not everybody has the time, culture, linguistic or category knowledge to dig into the additional new revenue opportunities that could be on offer from your existing clients.

And that’s where we come in. As an international business development consultancy specialising in outsourced business development and B2B outsourced sales, we have rich experience across multiple industries and territories. Account management – or internal account development, as we also call it – is at the heart of what we do.

Should you be looking to build on your existing account management – get in touch with Pure. You can use us as either an external partner, or as an extension of your team – or maybe you’re starting entirely from scratch, then our structured approach to networking, nurturing and developing contact profiles across and within an account makes for a proven, effective and powerful way to identify new opportunities.

Or, as one of our clients put it: “the team are masters in their art; building relationships with key targets to highly qualify their need before passing across to our internal teams.”

See our strategy and solutions here.

Want to find out more about how we can help your business? Book an introductory call today.