In this video, Jermaine Edwards, a customer growth guide, outlines five essential weekly metrics that key account managers should monitor regardless of industry. He emphasizes that while specifics may vary, these metrics are universally applicable for anyone with direct contact with key customers and multiple stakeholders. The five metrics are: 1) Executive Contact – tracking engagement with senior decision‑makers to stay aligned with strategic direction; 2) Value Realization – confirming that promised benefits are being delivered and perceived by the customer; 3) New Contacts – monitoring personnel changes within the client organization to anticipate shifts in influence or competition; 4) Strategic Progress – reviewing ownership, status, and required actions for ongoing opportunities and projects; and 5) Customer Feedback – gathering satisfaction, NPS, support tickets, and informal cues to proactively adjust the relationship. Edwards explains why weekly tracking matters, provides concrete examples (e.g., missing CFO contact can relegate you to a cost center), and links the metrics to three outcomes: proactive advantage, immediate value creation, and sustained engagement that positions the manager as an indispensable advisor. He concludes with a call to action to adopt these metrics, subscribe, like, and share the video.
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Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. And in this video, we're talking about the 5 key metrics I believe every key account manager needs to track each week, regardless of industry or where you are in the world. So in this specific video, I mentioned 5 key metrics I believe everybody should be tracking if you're in the key account management space. Now, Let me offer a disclaimer here. There are obviously going to be differences in industry depending on the kind of products or services you have and the kind of regulations that might be attributed to your organization. What I'm about to share with you is what I believe is universal, and I'm assuming you must have some kind of direct contact with your key customers and have at least more than one stakeholder or main contact you need to speak with. So with that in mind, let's get started with the first metric. Metric number 1 is executive contact. So what do I mean by executive contact? Well, in your organization, you're at least going to have 1 or 2 senior people that you're speaking with. They might be sponsors, there might be people who had engaged you initially in the work that you're doing with them. What we recognize as we progress the relationship are the decisions that those executives make at a senior level will shape and will steer the way in which we engage with the entire organization. Why? Because they're setting the strategic view and the direction of that organization. So an example might be if you're not getting consistent engagement on a weekly basis with the CFO of a company that is in a highly regulated industry, maybe it's, you know, in insurance or in some sort of engineering company where costs and where they think about those costs are very stringent and very, very tightly put together, if that CFO decides to make a decision or is under pressure in some way and you've missed the contact with that person, it's very likely all of a sudden you'll become somebody who's just a cost to the business and not a value add if you're not engaging with that person on a regular basis. So tracking executive contact, how many times you're engaging with those executives, who's engaging with those executives on a weekly basis is really important. So metric number 2 is value realization. So again, what do I mean by value realization? Many people may have different ways in which they think about this, but for me, value realization is whatever you've promised to the customer, are they actually getting the realized results from that interaction with you? And we can track this sequentially, or at least concurrently with them on a weekly basis, meaning it's a simple question. Mr. Customer, are you getting the value? Are you feeling like you're making progress? Are we reducing costs for you? Are we making things more effective, more efficient for you? Are we helping you to increase revenue? How are we tracking the realized value with that organization on a weekly basis? Now, a weekly might seem really intense and perhaps they're overkill in some way, but actually I don't believe it's unreasonable at all. Why? Because oftentimes the way in which a company takes on the services and products that we have is different to our experiences of giving them the service. In our minds, we're already the experts. We know how to use these products and services well. However, it's going to be new to your customer. So we wanna make sure on a weekly basis they are not being restricted or finding that they can't solve any particular challenges on a weekly basis. If they are getting any kind of resistance to using your products or services and not getting or not feeling like they're making progress with your products and services, it's very likely they're not going to see you as a value add. Those users and those managers using or wanting to use your product and services are gonna get very frustrated and really start to see you as a poor choice in terms of purchase and future relationship. So we want to manage value realization on a weekly basis. So metric number 3 are new contacts. And new contacts are really important. Now for any organization, there's always going to be an in and outflow of employees that come in at different levels in the business, at manager level, senior manager level, and even at executive or C-level. And so for us, we need to be aware of what is happening with a flow of new contacts. Because oftentimes we have new contacts that will come into a business, and if we're unaware of when they've come in, what their roles are, and the impact to our relationship with the customer, we're often going to be sideswiped or taken by surprise when this person comes in and decides to do something completely different, or maybe even bring in an incumbent competitor to compete against you in a particular area. So tracking new contacts every single week. Hey, who's in this business? Who's been hired in this team? Where are the stakeholders? What's impacting them right now in terms of new contacts? Do they have a new manager? Is there a new CEO coming in? Are there new investors coming in that might impact the relationship with us? Tracking that weekly helps you to go ahead of the game and proactively engage with customers so that you don't get into a period of resistance and challenge with them in the process. Metric number 4 is strategic progress. The opportunities that you have that you're working through with a customer that needs real focus and attention. I imagine you're always working on some new opportunities or moving projects forward that have some kind of result attached to it, right? And so for you on a weekly basis, you're probably doing this already, but just to make this much more apparent and much more intentional, we need to be thinking about who owns what inside a project and opportunity and tracking that every single week. At a strategic level, you need to be thinking about what specific things might need to shift, might need to move in order to, you know, really move this progress forward, move this project forward, move this opportunity forward. If you're not aware of that on a weekly basis and tracking strategic progress, where are we moving, what needs to move, who needs to be moved, who needs to be influenced or communicated with, it's unlikely we'll cut those sales cycles in half and start to see our customers make progress with us in new opportunity areas. So the last metric is Metric Number 5, and it's customer feedback. Now, I don't need to tell you that customer feedback is critical. We need to understand what our customers are feeling, what they want to know, what they want to understand, what they want to experience from us on a week-to-week basis so we can proactively respond to those requests. Now you might have already internally things like satisfaction scores, net promoter scores, internal conversations you have with your customer success team or customer support team. You might have tickets, things that come through into your business, uh, either from an automated perspective or from a digital perspective or from word-to-mouth and meeting perspective that give you some insight into how the customer is experiencing you and your business. And how they perceive your relationship. If we aren't tracking that every single week, just like in any kind of relationship, if I never spoke to my wife on a weekly basis to say, to check in and see how she was doing, I'd probably be heading for divorce right now. But the fact is, with your customers, we need to operate in the exact same way every single week, checking in, understanding the feedback that's there, and understanding where we can proactively make changes or continue to do things or stop doing things that might be hindering or preventing the relationship from moving forward in a positive way. So those are the 5 metrics that I want you to consider this week and consider them seriously. And I know when you hear them, something's gonna happen. You're gonna feel what I call the resistance. The resistance to kind of really pull and track these things because you're overloaded. You can feel overloaded with other things. I'm not asking you to do anything that you wouldn't do already. I'm asking you to think about focusing on those 5 things because they truly drive 3 really important things for you. One, they give you proactive advantage so you don't get sideswiped or surprised with specific things that your customer might be going through that you need to respond to. Two, it gives you ways to add value immediately to customers so you don't have to think about what you need to say next. You come in with proactive things to tell them and to provide new engagement, new insight. The third is it keeps everybody engaged in a really proactive way, meaning internally you can go have really interesting conversations to feedback, what's happening with executives, what's happening with feedback, what's happening with value realization, all those things that really matter to building that relationship and making it really strong. Because I want you to become the advisor your customer never wants to leave. You cannot do that without tracking the right things. So make sure you subscribe to this particular video if you want more like this. Like it, share it, and I'll see you in the next video.
