How to manage account assignments in Handle CRM.
Account assignments can be handled in a variety of ways. But the objective is simple, to ensure key accounts are being reached frequently enough to maintain and ideally grow your business with them.
Here are some best practices for doing that, plus tips for getting it done in Handle:
- Define – Determine what contact is and how to automate
- Prioritize – Classifying accounts
- Frequency – Determining how often to contact
- Strategy – Surpluses and Deficits
A Simple Way to Approach Account Assignments
Your sales staff can only make so many contacts throughout the year. It’s important to empower them to connect with customers as efficiently as possible. It’s also important that these connections are meaningful — that your team has objectives and goals for their meetings/calls and aren’t just dropping off a business card.
The key to making this happen is to define what a quality connection looks like and determine the best frequency for them to occur for each customer.
Keep in mind, some customers don’t justify the same frequency of touches. Others need a lot of touches to keep the deal moving forward. While there can be rough guidelines around the size of the account and how often they should be contacted, it is important to consider each customers’ preference.
Best Practices for Account Assignments
Let’s look at the best practices or guidelines we share with our users.
Expanding your definition of “contact”
With standard CRM account management, you have to manually record calls in the system. You can then indicate whether or not someone’s been reached based on whether they received a manual call.
But there’s a different way to think about account management and the automation of it, and that’s to expand your definition of a “contact.”
One of the more efficient ways to get interaction from salespeople is to measure the results that you actually want to achieve. So rather than just looking at it from the perspective of whether someone has been communicated with or whether a call was recorded, look at other transactions or events that naturally happen to indicate a customer has been reached and ideally automate it.
For example, your phone system can automatically log incoming calls. Contacts may include a quote, invoice, aftermarket purchase, trade assessment, etc.. All of these transactions can be used to connect with an account, and Handle can be set up to record them automatically.
The key is to think about how you classify calls and contacts, and the different types of contacts you want to record. Keep in mind, anything can be considered a contact: an email, an incoming/outgoing call, a parts or service purchase, a quote, a trade assessment, etc.
And with Handle capturing them through integrations and or manually recording items , it’s easy to combine them to see if someone is overdue for a contact.
Setting priorities
Ideally, you need a good distribution of accounts. To do that, you need a standard way to classify them, for instance, as A, B, C, or D accounts.
The 80/20 Rule comes into play: 20% of your accounts will be A and B customers who make up about 80% of your business.
Of course, that distribution is different for different companies. If you sell a high volume of smaller items, it might be 60/40 or 70/30. But 80/20 is a good ratio to work with as you think about account assignments.
As a best practice, you need to protect your A and B accounts and connect with them on a more frequent basis. (More on that in a minute.)
Timing
The best time to talk to customers is outside the buying cycle, when they’re not price sensitive or focused on costs. This is one of the key reasons to set a frequency that reminds sales to teams to make contact when they are not buying. When you do meet, focus on their current needs and future planning.
Frequency
A and B customers typically need more touches than C and D customers. C and D accounts may have potential, but they don’t require (or justify) the same level of frequency. That said, you still need to stay in touch with them.
The key is to make sure you’re reaching out proactively. To do that, you can set up your schedule in Handle to automatically remind team members based on the last time they were “contacted.”
Strategy
Time is the issue here, because you can only make so many contacts. To work efficiently, every contact should be high quality and should accomplish a specific goal.
Don’t assign your team members too many accounts, or you’ll burn them out. And don’t expect them to follow up too frequently with an account, or you’ll burn out the customer relationship.
A “contact” may be defined as any combination of an email sent, a quote completed, and or a a call recorded. Handle can use the record of this outreach to calculate the next call date and type of connection.
It also provides you maps and color coding on each type of contact, territory, or element to tell you whether customers are being reached frequently enough.
There are two things to look at with regard to call frequencies:
- Which customers are overdue to be reached
- Which accounts are in a deficit or a surplus
As a best practice, this is the most powerful way to evaluate account assignments because it tells you which accounts are being contacted too frequently and which aren’t being contacted enough.
To reach more people, you need to be more efficient with the accounts you contact too often. And you need to redistribute those calls to other accounts or prospects that aren’t getting enough attention.
We like to take a tiered approach. Simply assign accounts and track whether contacts are being completed on the assigned call frequency.
Then take it one step further, expanding your definition of “contact” to include other types of communications, such as emails and text messages. Measure how often these contacts occur and track the distribution of contacts.
Are you contacting people too often or not often enough? Our indicators let you see that at a glance.
Finally, add color coding and the icons. Create maps, lists, dashboards, and other visualizations that make account assignments easy to track and optimize.
How to Make Account Assignments in Handle
In every account within Handle, you can assign as many manager types as you want. Think of them as departments: Sales, Whole Goods, Marketing, and Services. We even have some organizations that assign sales managers to key accounts for an annual call.
When you set this up in Handle, you can assign the user and call frequency for an account.
Handle has a variety of automation rules that calculate when the next call should be made based on when the previous one was completed.
And we support tracking multiple methods of contact. So rather than only tracking customer calls, you can also track emails, quotes, parts or service transactions, etc. All of these are transactions in our system.
Note: We have a robust tool called AOR Intelligence that allows you to configure the activities that are considered a “contact.” If interested, let us know.
Bulk-assign or mass-reassign anyone
Handle makes it easy to bulk-assign accounts. Start with a search to look up the person who’s currently assigned to the accounts. Let’s say the person has 40 assigned accounts and you want to assign them all to someone else.
Check the checkbox in the upper left corner to select all. The options for action are available in the dropdown above. Choose “Mass Edit.”
There are two settings to reassign the accounts:
- Append – Add the person you want to be assigned to the accounts.
- Remove – Remove the person they were previously assigned to.
Then all you have to do is Save. Handle will run and mass-reassign the accounts for you.
Need to upgrade your account assignments in Handle? Let us know what you need.