During times of economic crisis, focusing on your existing customer and prospect relationships is one of the few keys to growth. Account health is sometimes seen only as a post-sale topic, but in this post I want to break down how it can apply across your full funnel and share some metrics you can track today to ensure you’re driving the right behaviours with your team.
There are two metrics we’ll look at specifically to help you measure account health:
And we’ll also cover how important it is to use them together in order to give you and your business an accurate reading on full funnel account health.
Account health should tell you how likely an account is to buy, expand, renew, or churn, based on how they’re engaging with your organization. Account health can be measured in a few ways, depending on the part of the funnel you’re evaluating.
Accounts are made of people, and people buy from people. Your relationship isn’t with an account, it’s with individual humans. While this is common sense, it means that you should consider the impacts those people may face due to this crisis. This means account health matters in times of economic crisis more than usual:
There are many great posts that dive into customer health – tracking things like daily active users (DAUs), NPS trends over time, willingness to provide referrals, etc. Here I want to focus on the breadth and depth of relationships, pre- and post-sales.
What is sales account coverage? Sales account coverage helps you understand the difference between the size of the account and how many people you know in the account.
You can make a simple ratio of this. We should know 50 people. We know of 10. We know 5.
Breaking this down by role within the org, purchasing process, and adoption is also very impactful. For example, if you know 50 people in an account, but 49 are end users and only 1 is on the purchasing team, you could be in trouble.
You have visibility into it now. Go make a game plan to find more friends.
What is account engagement? Account engagement helps you understand the difference between who you know and who you have an active relationship with. Think of it as the difference between a transaction, an acquaintance, and a friend.
There’s another layer of complexity here, because your organization is made up of people. So multiple people can be engaging. It’s important to classify them, because you could be lulled into a false sense of security with an account. For example, activity may come from:
The direction of engagement matters as well, is it a 1-way street, where you blast updates out but you never hear back? Or is it a 2-way street, with a high level of engagement from your buyers or customers?
The type of activity matters. Do you have an email-only relationship with the account, or do you have other types of activities – like phone calls, gifts, webinars, and once we’re allowed to leave the house again – in person visits.
Now that you have the basic metrics for coverage and engagement, you can bring them together to ask better questions, like:
If your ratios are very off, you need to find more friends.
There’s a lot of opportunity here.
For example, if you know 50 people in the account, but your Sales/CS team is only talking to 2, and Marketing is only communicating with 5 – right away you’ll see that you have a big opportunity to expand your relationships in the account with value-add programs.
Run them through Marketing, Sales, or CS – it doesn’t matter.
Build your relationships with people, as people, and it will help your team weather the storm.
To learn more about managing account health, check out my free book The Deal Health System.