Are You Letting Your Clients Slip Away? 12 Tips to Keep in Touch.

Keeping in touch with your clients is vital to maintain an active and mutually beneficial relationship. So it's really important to develop an effective strategy for keeping in touch. Otherwise, it's just so easy for things to fall through the cracks and create a contact gap that could lead to your client drifting away and negatively impacting your business. So if you are struggling to stay in touch with your clients, keep on listening because I'm about to share some ideas on how to build an effective contact plan. Sit tight. I will be right back. Hello heroes, and welcome to the Camp Club Podcast, a show that is on a mission to help busy key account managers get results. I'm your host, Warwick Brown, and together we'll explore tips, tricks and trends to help you grow client revenue, crush customer retention, and build a successful career in key account management. Now you know the drill. You can find links to everything linkable, including the show notes, @tkcpodcast.com 0244 all right, onto the topic at hand. Keeping in touch with your clients before they drift away. You know, absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart look for competitors and go somewhere else. So it really is vital that you do stay in touch with your customers. But here's the rub. When you're a key account manager, you're going to have maybe 10, 12, maybe a few more accounts. If you are a regular account manager, you might have 20, 30, 40, 50 accounts. If you think about it, within each each of those customers, there's going to be probably a dozen or more contacts. You'll have your procurement contacts, you'll have your category manager, you'll have executives, you'll have end users and everything in between. When you multiply them, you can easily, easily reach a couple of hundred people. And those are sort of the inner circle. You know, the influential people, the decision makers, the people that you need to stay in touch with. That is a lot of people to stay in touch with. On top of your day job, doing whatever comes into your inbox and getting the work done. So how do you maintain those critical customer relationships, especially when you think that your business might be growing, you might be getting more accounts. As an account manager, people come and go, you launch more services, you're solving more issues. There is a way. So let me run through some tips on how to wrestle control of these contacts and how to have a sort of a methodology, a method to the way that you approach your contact management. So first things first, create a relationship map and a contact plan. Absolutely essential. This is the first Place I would start because you need to know who you're supposed to be contacting. Now a CRM is only going to do some of the work for you. A lot of them are just places where contact information is held, but it doesn't help you actually stay in touch with people. Now you can use a tool like getdex, which I use myself, it's a personal CRM to, to help you stay in touch. Or you can build a contact plan, a customized contact plan inside a tool like airtable. Now I've created one of these templates for cam club members. So if you check out the cam kit, you'll see this relationship map and contact plan template. But essentially I've created this database where I have the type of customer they are. Are they a champion, a key player, a problem owner? What kind of influence do they have? What kind of relationship quality do we have? Is it good, bad, neutral? What kind of role are they? Executive, influencer, technical, et cetera? How often should I see them or do I see them often or rarely? Are they opposed to change or are they embracing change? Are we a good solution fit? Do they prefer us? Don't they prefer us? And then I've got a contact frequency. So I have weekly, bi, weekly, monthly, quarterly, every six months and yearly. What you can do in Airtable, which is what I've done is I have created a formula where the next contact date is dynamic and it changes based on the contact frequency that you created, you know, weekly, monthly, whatever, and the last contact date you updated. And then it will automatically send you a reminder to stay in touch with that person. So that's a great simple way to be able to a keep track of who's who, how important they are in terms of influence and getting things done and their attitude towards you and then building in, you know, a regular cadence to be able to stay in touch with them and keeping notes on, on what you've sent them and what you've said. So that's a really simple, easy way to get started with relationship mapping, contact planning and help you stay on top of who you make contact with and when. I absolutely love this type of setup. So check out airtable if you want to set something up. Very similar, super easy. You can do something similar in Excel or you could simply download your contact records from your salesforce or from your CRM every so often to see kind of a high level overview of when you got in touch with somebody. But whatever kind of method that you use, just make sure that you have a contact plan. And a relationship map established. So that becomes your blueprint about who to reach out to, how your network is evolving over time and their attitudes towards you. So you can focus on the people that are champions and you can focus on the people that are detractors and then there'll be that bunch in the middle that are neutral that you can probably afford to stay in less frequent contact with. Next tip to stay in touch with your clients is to automate. I touched on that briefly when I mentioned airtable. But they have automations where you can set certain triggers which will then notify you when those triggers are triggered. So automation is a great way to help you be more efficient in your contact. Now that could also mean creating templates. My CRM allows me to create email templates. My CRM allows me to have sequences so I can create. I can drop clients into certain nurture campaigns and it will automatically remind me when to send an email, when to pick up the phone, when to reach out to them on LinkedIn based on the different nurture sequences and journeys that I've created inside the CRM. That CRM is salesmake by the way, in case you want to check it out. It's very reasonable. I've been using it since a couple of years now and I absolutely love it. So take a look at the tools that you use and see if there are any automations that allow you to communicate at scale, that allow you to use templates, that allow you to use auto reminders and rules, and certain things that will just help you communicate with clients and let you know when they're going cold so that you can re engage with them. Now another great way to stay in touch is to share the load. Connect executives and subject matter experts. You're one person. As a key account manager, you can't possibly build robust, strong relationships with 200 people across your various clients organizations. But what you can do is rely on some of your internal teams more heavily to build relationships in the functional areas where they are the experts. So for example, your senior executives could be building relationships with your clients senior executives. You don't necessarily have to be super close to that and shadow that relationship, but you can guide it and provide some insights and some direction. Similarly, with your customer service and customer facing teams, you can encourage them to take a step up and be more proactive with the relationships. Key to this is to create a knowledge base for those teams so it makes it easy for them to pick up conversations, it makes it easy for them to make decisions, and it makes it Easy for them to do outreach because they have all of the resources, all of the tools, all of the guidelines, all collected in one knowledge hub. Now, you may have tools for this purpose already, depending on the platforms you use. Or you could use the tools that I use, which are Microsoft Teams and Notion, which are exceptional, to build customer knowledge hubs and also have some great interaction, collaboration and communication features built in. So removing yourself as that single point of contact and moving towards more of an institutional relationship where you have your subject matter experts and frontline teams. Be more proactive about building relationships with their counterparts within your client and supporting them with a customer knowledge base in teams or Notion or something like that. Massive, massive, scalable way to build customer relationships. Stay in touch and make sure you don't let them slip away. Another effective way to keep in touch with clients is to think in terms of campaigns rather than communication. Think like a marketer. So Instead of sending one email to one person, you essentially send one email to 10 people. You start to group your clients by their interests, by their business drivers, by their objections, by their goals, whatever it might be. But you start to build these little clusters of people based on sort of psychographic information, I guess. And then when you come across something interesting that appeals to that group of people, you send that same bit of information to, to everybody. Now, you might tweak it a little bit depending on the person or the context or the conversations that you've had previously, but essentially it's still one email that you're just repurposing and resending to all your clients in different ways. Use the mail merge feature with Outlook and Word. That is absolutely brilliant. You can send out dozens of emails in literally seconds and you can customize them as you go. So that is a very straightforward way to add value. Drive conversations in a more strategic way and use that single piece of information, but apply it to multiple customers in one couple of clicks. Another way to improve your contact and communication with clients is to make sure that you have a scheduling appointment tool. Encourage them, if they want to talk to you, to just go online and book an appointment with you. Don't wait to go backwards and forwards. Tell them not to be shy. Let them know that your door is always open. Here is the link. Don't hesitate and remind them regularly, they can reach out anytime. Now, obviously you'd like to be more proactive and, you know, make appointments rather than, you know, let your client do it, but. And I'll get onto that in a minute, but at least you've got that channel and there is an opportunity for them to very easily get time with you if they need it. Now on the topic of scheduling calendars and solutions, let's hear from our sponsor, cal. Now this is a fantastic tool that I've been using for about a year now. It eliminates the back and forth scheduling. It has a seamless and beautiful booking page experience. You can create personalized templates based on meeting types that then connect your calendar. And also it integrates directly with Zoom and teams so you end up, you know, creating a secure private room as the booking is made. I love the out of the box templates. They've got this really fun, whimsical template and they've also got more corporate and professional templates. There's also lots of control over the design elements, the colors and also custom fields. You can set your availability. You can even make people pay like require payments for certain types of appointments. I have tried so many of these scheduling platforms, I don't think there's one that I haven't given a go. I've tried Arranger, I've tried Calendly, I've tried Bookify, I've tried the ones that come with my CRM and I always come up short. I always seem to have issues. Sometimes the invitations didn't sync up with different time zones. That's what led me to Doc Cal in the first place because the tool I was using was booking, you know, say 4:00am when it should have been 4:00pm and it was driving me nuts. Sometimes the calendar invitation was incomplete so there was no link for people to reschedule or even join the meeting or the formatting was just ugly. It looked so basic and just didn't represent me as a brand. So I am obsessed with Cal. I have finally found a simple, elegant, robust calendar scheduling tool that works beautifully and looks great. Now, I was on the free plan for ages and it is more than enough for most people. But I've also just upgraded to the pro plan because I wanted some of the extra bells and whistles and that's only $96 a year, something like that. So it's a bargain. So I'll leave a link to the dotcal Features page. You can check it out if you're interested. I'll pop that in the show notes, but highly recommend it. Not only because it looks good, but that feature is a great way for clients to be a bit more proactive about staying in touch with. All right, onto the rest of the tips on how to stop your clients from drifting away and be Better at staying in touch, go where they are, use multiple channels, use LinkedIn, use email, leave voicemail messages, go on Twitter. You know, if that's where they are and you're spending time there anyway, this can be a really simple and easy way to at least let them know that you're around, you're thinking of them, contribute to the conversations that they're having on these platforms or mix it up. Maybe a voicemail is super quick, you can leave that in 30 seconds. Obviously not the most strategic in depth conversation, but again, it's a touch point. It's an opportunity to start a conversation, to showcase a success, to highlight an opportunity, to encourage them to call you, whatever it might be. So I highly recommend you mix up the modalities and think about not just relying on email constantly as a way, as a channel for staying in touch. All right, next up is to use project tools which allow you to collaborate asynchronously. This has been a game changer for me. All of my account plans are collaborative documents. I share them, I use ClickUp and I'm also exploring a new tool called taskade, but essentially you can do this on any platform. There's loads of them, Asana, ClickUp, todoist taskade, plenty of them around. I'll pop a link to ClickUp in case you want to check it out, but that's my go to. But using these tools is such a simple way to reduce email communication but to actually still improve collaboration, to be able to give visibility to all the things that you're working on. You can assign tasks, you can create tasks, your customers can create tasks. You can both comment on specific tasks and actions and use the project management tool as the workspace where you stay in touch without having to spend time on phone calls and meetings and face to face and all that kind of stuff, which can be massive time sucks. And use your time more efficiently but more effectively by making the project tools the central point for all of your communication collaboration. Absolute game changer for me. Next is to use the external connectivity available in Microsoft Teams or Slack Slack Connect. It's free in Microsoft Teams and in Slack Connect. I think it's like $7 a month per person. Very reasonable. Now, you might have some challenges depending on your IT and your kind of firewalls and your kind of rules of engagement with some of these external communications versus internal. But both of these tools have been game changers for me again because I can do direct message and I can communicate in real time on the platforms where they are. So if you use Teams and Slack, and if your clients use them, then why not try using the external communication features of Slack and Teams to see if that improves the way that you're able to connect with your customers, the frequency and the quality of the communications to again nurture those relationships more effectively. Okay, a few more tips for you. Next is to create recurring milestone meetings. Those are things like your account planning sessions or your business reviews. There is no reason you cannot set up a year's worth of account planning sessions or business reviews today. Just set it for the last Friday after the quarter end, every three months, something like that, and then it's in the diary, it's done. And if nothing else, you know that you have at least four times a year when you've already got something in the diary or you're going to get in front of your customer. So that has again been a game changer. Instead of just literally every time the review rolls around, I'm madly trying to find time in my client's diary and suddenly my Q1 review isn't being delivered until June because nobody can fit us in. I get them done at the beginning of the year. I'm like, right, annual review, let's book the rest of the year in the diary. Done. Can you see how easy this would make it for yourself? If you have 10 clients and you have four business reviews, that's 40 meetings that you can schedule on autopilot in January for the rest of the year and it is done. You will save yourself hours and hours of time trying to fit these into people's calendars. If you try to do it at the last minute. And again, as I said, you know you're going to have those placeholders as milestones, as markers where at least, if nothing else, you've got them in the diary to connect. Another tip is to keep track of special occasions. Again, this is a great tip, especially for clients that you're not talking to all the time or who aren't particularly strategic. If you know when their work anniversary is, you know when their wedding anniversary is, you know when their birthday is, you know when they're going on vacation, you know when they're coming back from vacation, you know when their son or daughter is going to university, you know if they're about to run a marathon or anything like that, those little things can be great relationship building and they're easy, simple triggers where you can even set something up in advance. You could literally schedule an email today to go out in a month saying, hey, welcome back from holidays. How Was the trip so simple and a great way to stay in touch and build that little bit more of that personal relationship with your clients. And lucky last, the thing that I use the most, or that I recommend the most rather, is video messages. These are so simple to create, they are so effective at delivering messages, and they are fast. I can create a video message and say exactly what I want to say in 30 seconds. I can show information, I can share my screen, I can explain in a clearer way, I can add context. And it saves me so much time writing long, boring emails. Better to say it, you know, picture paints a thousand words, as they say. So again, if you start to incorporate video messaging into your communication strategy, gonna make it a lot easier. There are things that you will be able to, you know, set up as templates, things that you FAQs, things you get asked all the time that you can literally just copy paste into new emails. For example, when you take on a new client, you know, you can just say, hi, I'm Warwick Brown. I'm your account manager. Looking forward to working with you. My background is in sales, but I'm really focused on account management and making sure that you get the very best from our solutions. And that's my number one goal to optimize our partnership. Here's my calendar. Call me if you need anything. Now, I could have that video done in a library and I just have to copy paste when a new client comes on board to introduce myself. How simple and easy is that? So these are very simple tactics, little things that you can do to improve how you engage with your clients and, you know, your frequency of contact and the quality of your contacts. Let me just run through them real quick before we wrap up. Got to create a relationship map and a contact plan. Automate where possible, share the load. Connect executives and subject matter experts and support them with a knowledge base for your frontline teams. Repurpose. Think like a marketer. Think in terms of campaigns, not individual communications. So you can send one email, but to essentially 10 people. Allow clients to schedule appointments online. I use Cal for that. Use multiple channels, go where they are. Try phone, try LinkedIn, try email, try Twitter, wherever it is. Use project tools to collaborate asynchronously. That's such an easy way to improve communication and stay in touch because everything becomes ground zero within the project management tool and that's where you start to communicate. You can use external communication features that are available in Teams and Slack and then create those recurring milestone meetings, keep track of special occasions, use video messages. I mean, I've given you a dozen or more tips there. Promise me you'll implement one or two of these to help you improve your communication so that client does not slip away from under your nose and move onto a competitor or becomes increasingly dissatisfied because you haven't been in touch. All right, well, listen, that is a wrap. Heroes, a reminder that links to everything are in the show notes@tkcpodcast.com 024 I've been your host, Warwick Brown, and I'm going to see you in another episode real soon. Bye for now.