Account Manager SOS: Your Action Plan for Handling 100+ Accounts

Ever feel like you're drowning in a sea of clients with no way out? Well, today I'll be revealing some surprising strategies to turn that chaos into control and even find time to be proactive. Stay tuned because you are not going to want to miss these game changing tips. Hello heroes and welcome to the Game Club podcast. I am Warwick Brown, your go to camp coach. And if you are looking to level up your gaming key account management, you are in the right place. We're here to chat about all the best ways to grow your client revenue, keep those customers happy and, and build a thriving career. So with introductions out of the way, let's talk about a common problem. I see all the time account managers who have, when I say too many accounts, I'm talking hundreds. Some of my coaching clients have 300 accounts. Now me personally, I think that's way too many. However, this episode is not about challenging your boss on the number of accounts in your portfolio. This is about managing what's within your control and figuring out ways that you can actively find more time that you can leverage, that you can scale, that you can work with the portfolio you've been given, no matter how big it is, and find some peace, find some balance, and even find some ways to be proactive. So number one, you cannot treat. Well, not in, not number one, in no particular order, the first one I'm going to be talking about is prioritization. Now, you cannot treat all of those customers equally. It's just impossible. There is simply no way that you can give equal attention to 300 accounts, 200 accounts, 100 accounts, or even 50 accounts, right? So it's up to you to figure out where the best use of your time is spent. Who should you be spending it with? It's going to drive revenue, that's going to drive opportunity, that's going to minimize risk of churn, that type of thing. Now, regardless of how your business has categorized your accounts, whether it's key, small, telephone, whatever the label is internally, you can create your own segmentation. You don't have to abide by whatever those rules are because we're talking about you actively managing your portfolio in a way that makes sense to you. Now, you can use very traditional ways of prioritizing your accounts. Things like revenue potential, strategic importance, relationship stage. But why not have some fun with it? Use labels to categorize your clients in ways that make sense to you. I've got a list of 20 that I've come up which is a bit playful, but it's just a fun way for you to remember which accounts you should be focusing on and which of those you can just wait for the phone to ring. So you could have a bucket like the squeaky wheels, you know, those are the clients who always have issues and need constant attention. You could have the ghosts, you know, those are the clients who rarely, if ever, get in touch. And, you know, to be honest, with the amount they spend, you're quite happy for it to stay that way. Then you've got the overachievers. You know, they're the ones that are always pushing for more. They're constantly setting new goals. They're super engaged and, you know, ready to change the world. Lovely clients to have put them all in a single bucket so that, you know, those are the ones I want to be spending time with, assuming that, you know, what they're wanting to do is actually going to return some investment for you. You could have the night owls. They're the clients that tend to typically work late hours where you think, all right, well, those are the clients I know I can reach late in the evening or maybe the early birds, where, you know, they're the clients I know start at 8am so they're my little group of clients. If I find myself getting to work a bit early, I can spend some time with them. So have a think about how you can start to prioritize your portfolio in a way that makes sense for you. It's a great tactic and a very simple and easy one for you to quickly figure out where your time is best spent. Continuing on with prioritization. Same with the things that you need to do. The emails that come into your inbox, the projects that you're working on, you cannot treat them all with equal attention. So you have to get good at prioritizing. You want to filter out which are the most important and which are the most urgent, and those are the ones that you should be starting with first. There's various methods that you can use. There is the Eidenhower matrix. It's a simple way to put things into buckets, basically around what's urgent and important, which you would do the things you need to do first. What's important but not urgent, meaning you need to do it, but at some point in the future so you can schedule some time when you've got more room to do them. There is unimportant but urgent, meaning there's a deadline, but you know, the work is menial. Maybe you could potentially delegate that. Do you have an intern? Do you have a team assistant? Maybe there's other people that you could find to do that work for you. And then you have the not important and the not urgent. Delete it. Don't even waste your time on it. So that's a very simple framework. A book that I love on the subject is Stephen Covey's First Things First. Check that one out. I'll put a link to the Show Notes as well. But it's a really great book as well if you want to think about how to actually get into that mindset of doing important work, not just the urgent stuff that lands in your inbox. So action steps. Create a priority matrix for your accounts using whatever labels and descriptions you want to use and implement some sort of priority based time allocation system where you are figuring out what you need to work on first and be ruthless. The other area that you need to look at when you're trying to manage and stay on top of these large portfolios is streamlining communication. You need to implement a communication cadence so that you are in control of your contact plan, that you're in control of your outbound outreach to your customers. If you're just going day to day, week to week, waiting for things to land in your inbox, if you're waiting for the phone to ring, if you're just, you know, calling clients, when you remember that's not going to get you anywhere and you will always be chasing your tail. If you go through. Once you've created that prioritization matrix, then you can think about. All right, well, these are the. The clients in this group literally never going to call, never going to reach out. I'll send them one email a year with their annual review. This particular group of clients I'm going to call weekly. This particular group of clients I'm going to email biweekly, whatever it might be. But just think about what are the regular intervals that you can commit to that also make sense based on how you have categorized your clients. And don't be afraid of some of those, meaning no outreach. You've got 300 accounts, right? You cannot, you simply cannot interact with all of them all the time. So be reasonable and sensible about your time, but also match that to the client's needs and expectations and the opportunities. More importantly, where are the growth opportunities or where are the risks? Are there some important clients? I mean, you're not going to salvage every client. By the way, if we're talking about risk, if it's a small little client that says I'm out of here or suddenly they're down trading, it's really not worth your time, in my opinion, to do everything you can, drop everything you can to try and save a client that spends $10,000 a year. You know, if your average client spends 100,000, there's very little value. You're a commodity to clients that spend that little money. All right, so you set up your regular intervals. Great. Next, you want to standardize your email templates. If there are communications that you send regularly, like product updates, bug releases, just news and trends, or white papers or anything else that you communicate to your clients on a regular basis, create templates. I use a tool called Text Expander, and I have all my templates set up there, and I can recall them with a short key. So if I want to say, book a meeting with me, I literally just do K call, and it inserts a whole sentence with the link to my, you know, booking page. And all I did was write K dot call. So I've got a ton of them set up. And it has saved me. I get a report from Text Expander every week on how much time it saved me. Some weeks, it saved me hours just because I'm doing a lot of outbound and I just have to, you know, use these shortcuts. So think about standardizing email templates. You can use them and you can set up templates in Gmail. There's lots of ways you can set up templates, but make it a priority. That way you're not having to rewrite stuff every single time and, and store those templates where you can easily find them. The other tool that's going to really help you be efficient when it comes to communication is, well, ChatGPT basically, but any kind of large language model. ChatGPT, Claude Gemini, copilot, whatever it might be. But the tool that I use is Harper AI. It's a Chrome extension. It is incredible. If you want to set up, you know, API connections to various different tools, it's great. You can easily toggle between the different available platforms, and it has a bunch of embedded shortcut keys and codes, so you can quickly just ship stuff to the Chrome extension and it will do whatever you need it to do. So, for example, I was writing an email I'd written about two paragraphs just today, actually, and I was like, I'm struggling with the words today. I just can't, can't get it out. So I just brought up Harper with the shortcut control. A sent it over to the little interface and hit the button saying rephrase, and then it pasted it back into the email, no problems. I would have sweated for like 10, 20 minutes trying to rework the words to make it a bit more clear. That's a waste of my time and it's a waste of your time, especially when you have that many accounts. And if you have a really, really genuinely out of control inbox, you might want to think about investing in an AI email assistant to really kind of use those. Tap into those AI smart email filters and keep your inbox clean and organized. Could be a great tool to invest in if you're on certain platforms like, I think, Copilot. I know Gemini because I use Gmail and it's just recently started this week. Come up with a panel that helps me find my emails, it searches back to previous responses and it's giving me some intelligence as I, as I go through my inbox. I haven't really explored it in detail, but certainly looks promising. And if you do find yourself with a chaotic inbox, then have a think about, you know, looking at some of those AI powered inbox assistants or email assistants, whatever they call them. It could be some help. All right, my last point on streamlining communication is to set boundaries when it comes to response times. Make sure that you have very clear, defined working hours and response windows. Because I can tell you a little story, right? I used to be a. Obsessed, I guess, is the only word I could use to describe it when it came to my inbox, right? The moment a client would send a request, if I was in my inbox, I'd reply instantly. If they asked me to do anything, if they wanted something, I would turn it around instantly. So a client would email me saying, hey, Warwick, I need a report for Q1. And this was like. And I'd be in Q4, right? So it was a long time ago. I'd say, sure, no problem. And I would literally run the report, get it back to them in 90 seconds. Practically superhuman. But this was a big problem because I was creating the monster, I was feeding the beast. The client didn't respect my time. The client didn't think anything I was doing was difficult or interrupting other things that were more important. They got used to me turning things around instantly and replying instantly. And I suddenly created this enormous pressure for myself and I just thought, I can't keep doing this. So now, even today, years later, I may read an email, I may listen to a voicemail, but I'm not going to action it any earlier than I think is appropriate. I will acknowledge it saying, I have received it and I'll get back to you within this timeframe. But I'm not going to jump through hoops for simple requests and I'm not going to even acknowledge some of those requests straight away. If I'm doing deep work. What I want to focus on is the important stuff, right? The low level stuff, whether it comes from a client or a colleague, that can wait. And I want my clients to be clear that what they can expect from me in terms of timeframes and what they can expect from me in terms of when I'm going to jump through hoops and when I'm going to, you know, give it a lower priority because that's what it deserves in terms of what they're asking for. Now, that can take a bit of time to figure out where those boundaries are and those lines are and to train your clients. But don't be afraid, even if they send you something to reply saying, hey, listen, by the way, normal turnaround time for something like this would be the end of the week. And half the time I get the response, oh, don't worry, I'll run it myself, or oh, well, don't worry about it at all. No big deal. I just had an idea in my head, but not important. And here I was jumping through hoots for every single last minute thing that they sent to me and turning around instantly. So think about how you want your clients to treat you and make sure that they are clear on you. Jump in when it's urgent, but when it's not, you're not going to jump in. Okay? Very, very important. Because otherwise you're going to run yourself ragged and you're always going to be distracted. You're always going to be starting something and then being interrupted and trying to fix that and then coming back to the work you wanted to do and never getting it done. Make sure also that your clients know when you're available. Let them know, listen, I'm typically available between 10 and 3. There's nothing wrong with that. Clients are not expecting you to be at their beck and call and on call. If you say to them, the best chance of reaching me is between these hours because that's typically the time that I dedicate to being in the office and at my desk. Outside of those times, you know, it may take longer to reach me or, you know, I may not get back to you until the following day. You don't have to put that in and out of office, but you can communicate that to some of your clients, especially the ones that are always chasing you or the ones that are always sending you stuff. Put some guardrails up around the communication rules of engagement. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, in my opinion. And if you're uncertain about it, do a little test. You know, test that kind of approach with one or two clients and see how they react. I am confident you'll find that most of them might even bat an eyelid and that will then give you some breathing room. So you know, if a client drops your message at 11am, you already told them you're not going to be working until three in the afternoon, so you don't even have to look at it. And they will be expecting that and they know they can call you if there is something that needs urgent attention before then. All right. The next thing you really need to get a grip on when it comes to managing high volume accounts or portfolios is, is to leverage technology you need to find. We talked about ChatGPT and Harper, AI and text expander. There are so many tools out there now to help you become more efficient, become more effective to get you information you need as you need it, rather than having to go search for it. So if you are using a CRM, make sure it's integrated with all of the tools that you use. Make sure that you know how to use your CRM and get the most from it. A lot of my clients have a CRM, but they've never bothered to do any training on it. They don't know what it's capable of and they don't really know how to even set up, you know, their account so that they're getting the most from it. You know, track your interactions and activities, make sure that when you are talking to a client automatically it pops up with your previous interactions, your previous conversations. That's how I've set my CRM up so that automatically I don't have to go trying to remember what I last spoke to him about. Because when you have 300 clients, you're probably not going to remember when you last spoke to them or what they asked for. So make sure that you take advantage of those things. The one that I have found lately, that has been my biggest change, gamer, I was going to say game changer is fathom, which is AI driven. Meeting notes. It has been fantastic because it records the meeting, it takes automated note taking and summaries. There are different templates based on the kind of meeting notes that you want to send. Whether it's project based or action plan based or just summaries, it tracks all of the items it sets follow up reminders and it has the hyperlinks to those sections in the recording so you can quickly replay them. So it takes way better notes than I ever have. And what's great is you can set it up so it automatically sends it to the client. So every time you have a call with a client, you know you're doing it via Zoom or via Google Hangouts or teams, whatever. If you have Fathom activated, when you hang up the call, there's nothing to do. It lands in your inbox within literally 30 seconds. It has been a game changer. It saved me so much time. And it also means I can focus on the call. What's also great is it gives you a little panel that tells you if you are talking too much and has these little bookmarks or little tags so that when you're talking to a client, if they mention something in particular, you can click on one of the tags saying, oh, that's a problem. Or I want to. That's a highlight. Let me go back and look at it. You can change the labels on these tags too, so they make sense for you. So an absolutely brilliant tool. Check it out. Link is in the show notes. Now, my final piece of advice is to be proactive. Now, I know being proactive sounds impossible when you have, you know, a couple of hundred clients, but there are still ways that you can do that, right? So one of my first bits of advice, schedule your reviews for the whole year for the clients that are going to get them right in, you know, on a call or in person even. So you can say, all right, let's work out a cadence. And you just say, all right, the first Friday of the month after the quarter ends, and you just set a recurring quarterly meeting to schedule your business review. Think about what are your personalized touch points, but how you can do them at scale. So if you think, all right, this group of clients is interested in technology trends, well, you just know you have to set yourself a reminder saying, once a month, send an email with a few little updates on what's going on in the technology space to these clients. And you could, you could do a mail merge and do that very, very quickly inside of Gmail or Outlook. And you could send a personalized email to, you know, 300 people with a couple of clicks. So very easy way to scale some of your communications. But what you have to do is plan them in advance. So plan out a little contact touchpoint, plan for your bigger accounts with the bigger opportunities, and also schedule your reviews upfront for the whole year. Also think about when you do that prioritization we talked about earlier, what are the kind of things that they're interested in? Because then you can set up alerts, you can follow the right companies on Twitter, you can follow my business trends list on or X. Now I've got a list that follows PwC, KPMG, Deloitte's, McKinsey's, all of the consulting firms that follow all of the different industries and professions. So that there are, there might be some news that you think, oh, they might be interested in that let me send it to them. There's a tool that I use called IKNOReader, which is a sort of content aggregator, but you can essentially subscribe to blog posts and resources and company pages and social media pages and group them by topic and then it'll send me an email saying, oh, here's what you missed this week. And I get a little summary of stuff that's come in and if I see anything interesting I'll send it to my clients. So this is again a great way to really be proactive, but in a simple, simple way, right? Just, just dropping them an email once in a while on topics that interest them because they're probably not going to have enough time to find these trends themselves. So if you can send them something that shows that you're thinking about them, that you are an expert, that you're strategic, that you are keeping an eye towards the future and emerging trends and hoping to find ways that they can capitalize on those to de risk or to grow opportunities. And then easy way send agendas and make sure you send those post meeting summaries like we talked about with Fathom. So we're not talking about hard, difficult stuff here, we're talking about the day to day proactive touch points. Schedule your reviews, figure out a few topics that you know, some of those clusters you categorized would be interested in. Set up your feeds either on X or using a tool like inoreader. Share some relevant industry news and updates once in a blue moon. But do it to everybody that's in that group. You know, not one by one, but think, all right, I'm gonna send this to like a hundred people because you know, that's what I think they would be interested in. And yeah, meeting agendas and meeting summaries, case closed. You know, outside of that, obviously there'll be a lot of day to day activity that's going on. We're talking about the proactive strategic stuff that's going to remind your clients that hey, I'm an expert. I'm not just a firefighter here. I actually can help you get better results. I can help you make a greater impact. So yeah, don't forget. Now if you'd like to learn more about high volume Account management, then check out the CAM Club. The CAM Club is my membership community where all of the best key account managers hang out. It is your number one path to key account mastery. There are courses, training templates, guides, tutorials and even one to one coaching with yours truly. I have open office hours every Tuesday and Wednesday, but the complete course on high volume Account management has a lot more information, a lot more exercises, a lot more action plans and ideas and reflection topics and all that kind of stuff. So it will really help you get a handle on your portfolio and go a lot deeper than we have been able to in this episode. So that's a wrap. Heroes. On this episode of the Game Club Podcast, I've been your host, Warwick Brown. Don't forget to check out Harper AI. Don't forget to check out Fathom, don't forget to check out textexpander and of course, don't forget to check out the Camp Club. Now listen, don't forget to show. Notes are available at tkcpodcast.com 041 I'm going to see on the next episode real soon. Bye for now.