Customer Success | 8 MIN READ
How to Choose the Best Account Management Software?
Looking for a CRM tool for your Company to help optimize the sales efforts? Here’s how you can choose the best Account Management Software for your Company.
Customer Success | 8 MIN READ
Looking for a CRM tool for your Company to help optimize the sales efforts? Here’s how you can choose the best Account Management Software for your Company.
An account management software is basically a customer relationship management (CRM) that’s fast gaining popularity as the tool that helps big and small businesses organize their sales by dividing them sector-wise. According to Gartner and Grand View Research, CRM software revenue has increased every year worldwide and is expected to touch $80 billion by 2025. They also help map customer success, classification of customer hierarchies, etc.
In the olden times, small businesses and sometimes even big ones, kept a ‘contact list’ or a black book of important client names and numbers. Client management, at that time, was a more one-to-one thing and sales reps worked more on personal rapport. And customer care was more about assuaging egos.
Not anymore, though. The way you do business has turned on its head, with subscription-based SaaS models disrupting the pre-existing notions of marketing and client management.
The current market focus on customer experience has finally made an ammunition of Bill Gates’s “Customer is the king” statement. Customer retention, loyalty, renewal are the keys to doing business with the smartphone-savvy, data-hungry, speed-loving millennial customer, who’s often labelled as ‘premium account’, ‘silver account’, ‘loyal account’, etc, by businesses.
All this makes it essential for companies to have a zero error approach towards the ‘science’ of customer management. Which is where account management software tools come into play.
What these tools do is facilitate and evaluate a company’s overall sales processes. So, does your company need a CRM tool? How to choose one that helps you optimise your sales efforts?
Here are a few tips to figure these things out:
Understand that CRM is not one-glove-fits all solution. It’s not a ‘tool’ in that sense (though often referred to as one), but a set of tools customised to manage the way you approach your relationships with clients and potential customer portfolios.
So, before you set out on that route to market, know that aligning your business to a certain set of CRM tools will take time, money, and the involvement of multiple departments. Be clear about what you are looking for: Is it the classification of customers? Or do you follow a democratization model? Map what are the resources and returns you expect from each of them.
Depending on what your need is, you can choose the right CSM tool for your company – look for one that supports your sales team’s workflows as well as your company’s strategic goals.
The thumb rule of a good account management software or CRM: Enhanced UX and CX. Super UX means the software streamlines workflows by making the sales staff’s jobs easier by reducing manual tasks. Often, standalone tools, when forced upon existing sales platforms, tend to increase the number of steps in a workflow.
This forces employers to double check the same boxes twice. So consider your purchase strategically, look at the larger picture. Improved CX leads to a better understanding of customer expectations and needs, and makes interactions easier via customer portals and intelligent call routing. Simply put, by enhancing UX, you can improve CX because when the employee selects the right tools that lead him to easier workflows, he can concentrate on customer needs.
Many common features of CSM overlap with those of CRM. Identify the gap in your current set up, and work on a set of sales enablers from the following to help you set up intelligent workflows that ease your staff’s pain points as well as help customer acquisition and retention
What industry are you in? What is the operational scale of your business? Would you classify it as a small business or a large one (is your annual turnover several millions, or a few thousands)? Based on this, look at the following SaaS CRM:
So, if you’re still wondering whether your business needs a CRM tool, or if it’s just to own one (just because the dashboard makes the website look smart), here’s the last word: A software that executes a series of complicated tasks, easing manual workload is a definite plus towards streamlining workflow and working at cyclical revenue generation. Having said that, it’s not a magic wand.
Customer success will still largely remain in the domain of personal touch, empathy, and the account manager’s capacity to build trust and long term relations. The software is only a tool that supports his endeavors.
Originally Published June 11th, 2020, Updated October 28th, 2020
Rakhin has over 10 years of experience driving business development and client services. In his prior roles, he stayed close to customers to understand their requirements and help them achieve their business goals. He is passionate about customer success.
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