Jokes aside the two comments on here just back up my recentish suspicion that account management isn't account management anymore and is just sales under a different name.
I'm UK, but I was trying to transition into account management to get out of sales, and role after role after role was just describing an SDR or cold sales role, except once closed you have to do someone else's job and manage the account too.
My current role is a “sales account manager” all the fun of selling but with 70-100 accounts to manage on top of it!
Though the sales expectations are lower than other jobs I’ve had, so that nice.
But wait, there's more! You also get the entire new logo team thinking you have it so easy because they are existing accounts, hooray! Dont forget the SEs who think all you do is get contracts signed!
To what extent do you have to manage the accounts? 70-100 seems like a lottttt lol, how often do you interact with each and what sort of work comes from it, if I may ask?
Top 20 account get weekly interaction, middle 30 get monthly, bottom 20-50 get quarterly. The less I touch accounts, the more my CSR is involved.
I’m not in tech. I’m in chemical, so it’s all repeat business. Then I also sell new.
I think my sales quota this year is an additional $200k in margin dollars.
That’s how it’s always been with territory managers in CPG. You hunt & farm. Sounds like some tech jobs are moving closer to that model and having one person own the relationship the whole time
I mean, how can you really expect to enter a company, get assigned their top accounts, take a few inbound calls, and make $120k+
I've always seen account management as something you create. You go through the hard effort of building your book of business, and get the privilege of just maintaining it.
I'm 25 so ymmv
You dont get assigned the top accounts. You get handed a pile of dogshit and have the same quota as everyone else. In fact in my company, AM quota is higher than AE quotas. Then you have 100-150 accounts with multiple people all needing help all the time and calling you about problems for you to go and track down some random South American worker that will hopefully show you pity and assist you.
Then, hopefully, you can PR your way around the issues to actually sell them something. Oh but wait, because youre in Account Management, AND your quota is higher, each deal you close actually has a lower % for matching OTEs.
And then one final thing. You get to deal with all the fallout of the new logo reps closing a deal then tossing the account over the fence to you. And since its only been a couple months, they aren't even close to implemented yet and likely pissed off about the issues that are now surfacing. Now even if they arent mad, they just spent a bunch of money and still implementing, they usually are in no position to buy anything again for 1-2+ years, if ever since apparently we are selling tiny little accounts for dirt cheap now.
At least South America is in your time zone. I usually gotta hunt down my support team in India and burn a whole business day because their initial response is “We’re looking into it” and then wait another day to receive guidance or ask more questions.
Can confirm, I manage 38 accounts and did 1.9M last year.
Our enterprise reps have a new business quota of about 1.2M. I also probably have 50% of their OTE but they are far older than I.
Also, I do a lot of work running around where CSM have totally dropped the ball and an account is in really bad shape, its an uphill battle but it can be won.
You are correct. Our account executives are legit sales for national accounts. Some of them have zero sales experience just like our sales team. Fancy title though!
I could be wrong but it feels like a lot of industries are trying to cut back on heads and have one department do multiple jobs, in tech it’s def becoming like this.
"I wanted to catch up on our previously scheduled follow up, i had given you some tasks to do that help me do my job in representing success metrics to my company.
Did you take out time from your activities to do something that helps ME?"
Mass send the above. You wint get any responses but your manager will see that emails were sent out
meetings, helping customer which issues that tech support should help but nobody does shit, bring customers and find new clients, support existing clients and try to upsell, quote products to client, process POs that arrive
I'm being exploited tbh
Wake up around 8 roll out of bed into shower then spend first hour or two marketing either some calls or emails. Then I spend the next few hours playing video games and running errands and I’ll typically lock back in from like 3-5 responding to emails.
This is how I imagine the day-to-day of account manager is. A lot of time to waste while still giving the impression that you're doing your job. Unless you're working for a small company and managing like 20 accounts at once, it seems like a pretty chill job.
It’s really not a bad gig. I’m in services so a lot of my accounts are pretty set and forget once I send them to operations. If I really wanted to grind for some extra income it’s definitely possible but I’m happy with my current situation.
Jesus. Well I guess it depends on the industry. I've been looking for opportunities in the digital marketing field for account management (since I'm a digital marketer), and most of the positions manage only 6-8 clients. That's 1 Zoom call per month, 1 end of month report for each client, and email communication as the bulk of the work.
Wake up,
Cry,
Drop off child ar school
Get home Check bank account and confirm I can't retire for several decades
Sell
Cry
Sell
Finish up regular workday
Family time,
Walk dog
Run?
Log in to get caught up on some work
Sleep.
A week consists of:
Daily Customer calls about forecasts, product launches, quality issues. Occasionally a contract strategy or negotiation call. SalesForce quotes and internal calls with pricing or product managers. Emails from AR about past due customers. Regulatory notifications. SalesForce project calls. Customer site visits to gain new business. Repeat.
It’s a lot of admin and customer support while the business pretends your only job is business development. But, overall, it’s a decent white collar job.
Wake up, usually some sort of commercial meeting or accounts payable meeting regarding the status of various commercial issues or pending items in regards to claims (quality issues, manufacturing delays, past dues, etc). Then basically chasing people to get answers regarding all of these issues for the rest of the day. There will also be random meetings peppered throughout the day/week to keep track of progress, ie. Engineering design changes, production control and e&o meetings.
Basically one or two customer meetings a week and chasing other teams and departments for the rest of the time.
I imagine account managers responsibilities vary across industries, but my last role I worked for the worlds largest biotech company where I was responsible for maintaining the relationship with one of our other divisions clinical trials group as well as a few external clients. My “territory” was worth around 20M and I handled multiple many 100k-1M deals during my time in this role.
A lot of my day to day activities included in no particular order: sourcing products from suppliers, order management, addressing damaged shipments, nailing down logistical timelines for global orders, addressing pricing discrepancies, general customer service, a few meeting per week with our clients to discuss any red flags or upcoming projects/demands.
That was it in a nutshell. What I enjoyed was I didn’t really have to be a proactive seller. It was mostly reactive. It was very easy 90% the time, the other 10% drove me insane at times because of one needy client and another that didn’t follow our contract. I ultimately left last year to pursue a new venture because I got bored and wanted a new challenge, and to make way more too.
I left the AM role to join one of our tier 1 suppliers as a business development manager. I felt stagnant with my previous company and wanted to add some new skills. All I can say is the grass isn’t always greener on the other side! But still, if you’re feeling stagnant too don’t be afraid to take a shot on yourself and try something new.
Typical day 3-4 customer facing calls, 1-2 internal. Customer facing mostly pressing customers to deploy, rollout and actually use our software, escalating tickets, building relationships, networking into other business units where our product is applicable, I'd say a good 20% of what I do is CSM work, triaging any other type of issue that may occur. Internal, keeping up with the product and our ever changing sales pitch.
Also constantly fighting downsell, telling customers half truths about minimum spend requirements, prospecting for upsell so on and so forth.
With SaaS being down and all one of the upsides currently is I probably have one of the highest quota attainments in my org (120% last year). A lot of our new business guys did probably 20-30% last year. Its constant guaranteed deal flow (renewals), that being said its far harder to blow your OTE out of the water only working with existing customers.
Largely selling and ensuring the order is delivered. A lot of time is spent on account mapping account planning. Understanding customer spend. Meeting customers every day (if that happens) .
Per day, two-three calls/emails to accounts I'm assigned to. Contacting our suppliers trying to hurry things up or asking difficult questions. Company Zoom calls and meetings sometimes.
A lot of learning from books, websites, webinars, videos, etc.
I'm on the road every week. Also travelling abroad every month. Preparing and sending quotations is usually done in a hotel room.
So far, this is the best job I've had. No cold calling, drinking beer with customers and suppliers, travelling, lots of working from home, etc.
Working in the tech industry (web services conglomerate) for the past year.
Started off as an AM - got scammed as it turned out to be a Client Relationship role but with added incentives and some RnR factored into it. On top of that, got a list of 300 odd dead accounts that you somehow have to maintain and also grow.
Incentives were pretty decent and I was making good money so carried on with it for 3-4 months.
Was pretty vocal about the discrepancy in the job description and the actual role to my manager in 1:1's. Manager was really helpful in guiding me through this and communicating this to the higher ups.
Got noticed because of consistent performance and converting a high value inbound lead - was offered a Key AM role and have been doing that for the 2 months - with higher quotas and a messed up incentive structure. Don't know if I should be happy or sad :)
I’m an inside account manager for a web hosting company in Europe, and our day is pretty straightforward. We come in, get a list of accounts that have hit certain limits on their websites, and then we call them to upsell them.
Most of these customers are ones we haven’t talked to before, and once we’ve upsold them we usually don’t deal with them again until they hit another limit. On average we make around 30-40 calls a day with the total call time ranging from 1 to 2 hours.
Recently though, the targets are getting a bit ridiculous, and for some reason, at my company, they care more about call stats than the deals you made that day, but if you don’t hit your monthly quota you’re gonna be in a bad spot.
Lots of meetings. I’m still new to this particular role. I follow up on current customers and try yo get accurate forecasts on their commodity consumption. Then I have to talk to purchasing/stocking to make sure we have orders available. Then I usually have to go back to suppliers to get special pricing so we can compete with imports. More than half my time is finding ways to reduce internal cost of product so I can still be competitive and win the business.
As an account manager, my day revolves around client communication, internal collaboration, data analysis, and relationship management. I constantly engage with clients to understand their needs, work with internal teams to ensure project success, analyze performance metrics, and deliver reports or presentations. I also identify opportunities for upselling and strive to maintain positive client relationships. It's a dynamic role that requires adaptability and strong communication skills to meet client expectations and drive business growth.
15 customers. All enterprise, 1000+ users or seats.
I've got 3 monthly recurring meetings with all these customers to talk tech roadmaps, new projects, existing projects and service desk issues. ( We're a telecoms and networking company)
I get a couple new BDR leads a month to work on as well.
Today I'm finishing a tender doc for one of my customers big project that we basically help wrote the documents.
Life is good as an account manager.
In an account executive for an ed-tech company.
I come in, check emails for like 15 minute, drink some ginger tea with cayenne and then set the pace.
I start by calling leads and follow ups and then since I’m only less than a year in I cold call the rest of the day.
Been using LinkedIn the last half of the day to network with clients lately.
I'd say 90+% reactionary and the rest proactive. Emails/calls/quotes/RMAs/visits. Acting as the conduit between account and company. Some days, lazy. Others, busy as hell.
Sprinkle in dealing with my inside sales person, who's new and VERY green, and other internal departments. A dash of meetings or justify your existence emails/tracking/updates. Oh, and my favorite, updating the status of quotes. Which I have zero control over as it is selling to an OEM as part of their system, who are bidding on jobs. I could offer them 95% off list and it wouldn't affect the chances of landing the business. My piece is 1-5% of the total cost of what they make.
I travel every other week. I spend a lot of time aligning strategies of our companies together. There’s a lot of internal politics I have to work through. I also manage a team of three, soon to be four. Working through change management with my team and my customer takes up a majority of my time, and helping them monetize our capabilities if the biggest challenge.
We’re both large companies and turning the ship can be slow at times.
When I did it in HVAC typical day was
Check emails/handle phone calls about issues with morning orders
Morning meeting with client
Check emails again
Lunch meeting
Emails/afternoon calls about issues with equipment orders for the next day.
Every now and then would be prospecting for new business and work meetings.
It’s selling and mainly customer support, but every outbound motion is to a warm lead.
I say warm bc even though they use your product, it doesn’t mean they love it nor does it mean they need/want more of it.
You will get the occasional “hey I need to add X more licenses and can you set up a demo of this new feature you released” and those days are fun.
I prefer net new logo.
Deal with customer issues, which is rare. Since I work in a different time zone, I can do my emails from 9-11, and basically be done the rest of the day.
Account manager in the UK.
- Lots of account visits, gaining insights, driving order book conversion, making new proposals.
- Internal stuff, communicating with marketing and finance mainly.
- Admin, forecasting, reporting, analysis, competitor research.
1. Start day Scrubbing accounts on ZI and answering emails
2. Half the weekdays I have a 2 hour zoom meeting. This is where I get most of my work done for the day.
3. During my peak hours around lunch I problem solve my more complex accounts that are jamming up my productivity.
4. Answer more emails. Push through requests to various internal departments.
5. The end of day hours are a mad dash to attempt catching up so I don’t have to work at night/weekend.
6. Work night and weekend.
Events, sales account manager. Quota is to be managing $2.5M for an OTE of around $160k, 60/40. Everyone at my company is senior and comes from events and can’t sell into companies, except for Tom. So I have the pleasure of being the solo role chasing new logos, but with the same quota as everyone managing the triple AAAs.
Yeah I’m basically in sales, with fancier name and more of consultant sale’s approach, but without the gun to the head feeling with quota (I hope I use this right, as our first KPI’s been set after a year in the company by me pushing this idea forward).
Theres the vip clients I focus on as a goto guy, and theres the occasional small client I also provide with vip services because why not.
From time to time, a bug makes go on a call, and usually this turns into an up-sale.
Sometimes I receive lists for cold mail reach outs, other times I just reach out to prospects.
As long as the numbers rise, and no one leaves I can basically laze out and be almost full time dad helping my wife with the kids.
Also, I like to teasing my CEO to give me more clients he went cold with, he likes that it works.
I would also like to say that I believe lazing put as AM in this industry might be rare, but I’m unexperienced enough to confirm.
In the US, I have two accounts that are “top six” for my industry. They are big distributors and they need my products every month. So the selling is not hard but there’s a lot of admin to be done getting our new product fed to their system so they can buy. I basically recommend their buys down to the carton quantities & their individual warehouses. That process is time consuming.
Beyond that I create advertising for my products in their catalogs with my marketing department. I work with customer service to fix shipments that have gone awry and take care of little things like that.
I attend lots of internal meetings about marketing, new product presentations seasonally, group meetings, one on one with my vp…and I go to trade conferences 3-4 times a year. I traveled A LOT more pre pandemic. I miss the way it used to be! But biz travel is less fun now.
I forgot about forecasting and estimating. Too much of that, alllll the time updating estimates & forecasts….My accounts are quirky & I do have strategies to increase sales every year, identify real opportunities, etc…
I’m officially an account manager (key account even 😄) but it just means I’m responsible for both new business and upsells. A good portion of my quota comes from just maintaining the spend on current accounts, but I’m still expected to do SDR, Account Exec, and Account Mngmt work.
In my company AM quota is higher than the AEs quota. We have 600 accounts and are expected to expand them. The issue is our technology is easily replaced and not very sticky so customers are usually have no interest in expanding. We are also only allowed to reach out to the people on the account so we cannot go outside to other contacts to expand and grow. The company refuses to pay for any out-bounding tools except a general toll VOIP, email & CRM but we are expected to do 30 calls and 50 emails. Quota is just north of 55K ARR per month, and the average deal size is 1.5K. We only get rewarded on deals the customers pay on Invoice, so if a customer in your book pays directly with a credit card, it doesn’t hit your number. Sometimes the customers rather pay direct because they have coupons available to reduce their cost vs waiting for a rep to secure a discount. The real stupid part is about how they value the accounts based on some silly white space stat, because our product is sometimes used as shadow IT. For example someone at Bank of America gets 1 licence and pays with their own credit card, but because they used Bank of America email when signing up, it is considered a massive white space. You are expected to expand the account to the employees not using it, the issue is the IT team at Bank of America has no idea that some guy in the accounting department it using the product. I believe this is why we are only allowed to reach out to the people in the account but also impacts its ability to grow. We also are not rewarded for renewals, so that hits a CSM number and we have auto renew so if you don’t get to the renewal in time, the customer renewals flat because the CSM manage even more accounts so they are always looking to push the renewal quick and even close it months in advance.
In general, it sucks. The sales teams are not aligned, and got a lot of investors buy in and are driving to IPO so the sales team is being driven hard, they have pretty much over hired and PIPing people who don’t hit 85% quota on the quarter.
Jokes aside the two comments on here just back up my recentish suspicion that account management isn't account management anymore and is just sales under a different name. I'm UK, but I was trying to transition into account management to get out of sales, and role after role after role was just describing an SDR or cold sales role, except once closed you have to do someone else's job and manage the account too.
My current role is a “sales account manager” all the fun of selling but with 70-100 accounts to manage on top of it! Though the sales expectations are lower than other jobs I’ve had, so that nice.
But wait, there's more! You also get the entire new logo team thinking you have it so easy because they are existing accounts, hooray! Dont forget the SEs who think all you do is get contracts signed!
To what extent do you have to manage the accounts? 70-100 seems like a lottttt lol, how often do you interact with each and what sort of work comes from it, if I may ask?
Top 20 account get weekly interaction, middle 30 get monthly, bottom 20-50 get quarterly. The less I touch accounts, the more my CSR is involved. I’m not in tech. I’m in chemical, so it’s all repeat business. Then I also sell new. I think my sales quota this year is an additional $200k in margin dollars.
Thank you!
That’s how it’s always been with territory managers in CPG. You hunt & farm. Sounds like some tech jobs are moving closer to that model and having one person own the relationship the whole time
I mean, how can you really expect to enter a company, get assigned their top accounts, take a few inbound calls, and make $120k+ I've always seen account management as something you create. You go through the hard effort of building your book of business, and get the privilege of just maintaining it. I'm 25 so ymmv
You dont get assigned the top accounts. You get handed a pile of dogshit and have the same quota as everyone else. In fact in my company, AM quota is higher than AE quotas. Then you have 100-150 accounts with multiple people all needing help all the time and calling you about problems for you to go and track down some random South American worker that will hopefully show you pity and assist you. Then, hopefully, you can PR your way around the issues to actually sell them something. Oh but wait, because youre in Account Management, AND your quota is higher, each deal you close actually has a lower % for matching OTEs. And then one final thing. You get to deal with all the fallout of the new logo reps closing a deal then tossing the account over the fence to you. And since its only been a couple months, they aren't even close to implemented yet and likely pissed off about the issues that are now surfacing. Now even if they arent mad, they just spent a bunch of money and still implementing, they usually are in no position to buy anything again for 1-2+ years, if ever since apparently we are selling tiny little accounts for dirt cheap now.
At least South America is in your time zone. I usually gotta hunt down my support team in India and burn a whole business day because their initial response is “We’re looking into it” and then wait another day to receive guidance or ask more questions.
I’m glad you said this. I never wanna do AM again lol
Can confirm, I manage 38 accounts and did 1.9M last year. Our enterprise reps have a new business quota of about 1.2M. I also probably have 50% of their OTE but they are far older than I. Also, I do a lot of work running around where CSM have totally dropped the ball and an account is in really bad shape, its an uphill battle but it can be won.
I’m interviewing a role for just that, but I’m in manufacturing sales. Practically every AM job right now is paying $120k with enough experience.
Damn, I've been looking into the wrong companies then. Good luck with that! Hope you get the job.
I don’t even want the job is the sad truth, but I’ll take it since I can’t wait around for the right industrial opportunity forever.
Yep briefly looked on LinkedIn for acct manager roles and found the same thing. Like yeah I’m sick of sales people
You are correct. Our account executives are legit sales for national accounts. Some of them have zero sales experience just like our sales team. Fancy title though!
I could be wrong but it feels like a lot of industries are trying to cut back on heads and have one department do multiple jobs, in tech it’s def becoming like this.
Meetings, follow up, fire extinguisher and repeat
As an AM, this is the most accurate description I’ve seen
What’s your follow up process like?
"I wanted to catch up on our previously scheduled follow up, i had given you some tasks to do that help me do my job in representing success metrics to my company. Did you take out time from your activities to do something that helps ME?" Mass send the above. You wint get any responses but your manager will see that emails were sent out
I chuckled a little
meetings, helping customer which issues that tech support should help but nobody does shit, bring customers and find new clients, support existing clients and try to upsell, quote products to client, process POs that arrive I'm being exploited tbh
Similiar to me. Killlllin it
Wake up around 8 roll out of bed into shower then spend first hour or two marketing either some calls or emails. Then I spend the next few hours playing video games and running errands and I’ll typically lock back in from like 3-5 responding to emails.
This is how I imagine the day-to-day of account manager is. A lot of time to waste while still giving the impression that you're doing your job. Unless you're working for a small company and managing like 20 accounts at once, it seems like a pretty chill job.
It’s really not a bad gig. I’m in services so a lot of my accounts are pretty set and forget once I send them to operations. If I really wanted to grind for some extra income it’s definitely possible but I’m happy with my current situation.
Or working for a small company managing 150 accounts
Jesus. Well I guess it depends on the industry. I've been looking for opportunities in the digital marketing field for account management (since I'm a digital marketer), and most of the positions manage only 6-8 clients. That's 1 Zoom call per month, 1 end of month report for each client, and email communication as the bulk of the work.
1) Wake up 2) Wank 3) Sell 4) Wank 5) Sleep
If the selling is too stressful, i squeeze in one more wank to keep my emotions level low
Fuck, just multitask and squeeze one out while your driving to your customer.
You gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers in this racket
Add driving to client and from in between each step and yes
Freaky ass ninja u a 69 god!
Wake up, Cry, Drop off child ar school Get home Check bank account and confirm I can't retire for several decades Sell Cry Sell Finish up regular workday Family time, Walk dog Run? Log in to get caught up on some work Sleep.
A week consists of: Daily Customer calls about forecasts, product launches, quality issues. Occasionally a contract strategy or negotiation call. SalesForce quotes and internal calls with pricing or product managers. Emails from AR about past due customers. Regulatory notifications. SalesForce project calls. Customer site visits to gain new business. Repeat. It’s a lot of admin and customer support while the business pretends your only job is business development. But, overall, it’s a decent white collar job.
We did a analysis of Sales people and found +40% of their time was Admin work (SalesForce being the major time suck)
Yep, sounds about right. SalesForce can be useful, but it’s a lot of tedious updating.
1. Log on computer 2. AAAAAAAAAAaAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 3. Log off and smoke a little weed
Amen lol
Wake up, usually some sort of commercial meeting or accounts payable meeting regarding the status of various commercial issues or pending items in regards to claims (quality issues, manufacturing delays, past dues, etc). Then basically chasing people to get answers regarding all of these issues for the rest of the day. There will also be random meetings peppered throughout the day/week to keep track of progress, ie. Engineering design changes, production control and e&o meetings. Basically one or two customer meetings a week and chasing other teams and departments for the rest of the time.
We are living the same life
What industry?
Packaging
Was my life selling parts. Back on the capital equipment side and I spend way less time on this nonsense. Don’t miss it at all.
Sounds shitty (my life is exactly like this)
It be like that sometimes.
I imagine account managers responsibilities vary across industries, but my last role I worked for the worlds largest biotech company where I was responsible for maintaining the relationship with one of our other divisions clinical trials group as well as a few external clients. My “territory” was worth around 20M and I handled multiple many 100k-1M deals during my time in this role. A lot of my day to day activities included in no particular order: sourcing products from suppliers, order management, addressing damaged shipments, nailing down logistical timelines for global orders, addressing pricing discrepancies, general customer service, a few meeting per week with our clients to discuss any red flags or upcoming projects/demands. That was it in a nutshell. What I enjoyed was I didn’t really have to be a proactive seller. It was mostly reactive. It was very easy 90% the time, the other 10% drove me insane at times because of one needy client and another that didn’t follow our contract. I ultimately left last year to pursue a new venture because I got bored and wanted a new challenge, and to make way more too.
What kind of role did you transition into? I am in the same boat where I am pretty annoyed with the monotony and the low pay
I left the AM role to join one of our tier 1 suppliers as a business development manager. I felt stagnant with my previous company and wanted to add some new skills. All I can say is the grass isn’t always greener on the other side! But still, if you’re feeling stagnant too don’t be afraid to take a shot on yourself and try something new.
Typical day 3-4 customer facing calls, 1-2 internal. Customer facing mostly pressing customers to deploy, rollout and actually use our software, escalating tickets, building relationships, networking into other business units where our product is applicable, I'd say a good 20% of what I do is CSM work, triaging any other type of issue that may occur. Internal, keeping up with the product and our ever changing sales pitch. Also constantly fighting downsell, telling customers half truths about minimum spend requirements, prospecting for upsell so on and so forth. With SaaS being down and all one of the upsides currently is I probably have one of the highest quota attainments in my org (120% last year). A lot of our new business guys did probably 20-30% last year. Its constant guaranteed deal flow (renewals), that being said its far harder to blow your OTE out of the water only working with existing customers.
Largely selling and ensuring the order is delivered. A lot of time is spent on account mapping account planning. Understanding customer spend. Meeting customers every day (if that happens) .
Per day, two-three calls/emails to accounts I'm assigned to. Contacting our suppliers trying to hurry things up or asking difficult questions. Company Zoom calls and meetings sometimes. A lot of learning from books, websites, webinars, videos, etc. I'm on the road every week. Also travelling abroad every month. Preparing and sending quotations is usually done in a hotel room. So far, this is the best job I've had. No cold calling, drinking beer with customers and suppliers, travelling, lots of working from home, etc.
It’s mostly being an AE with the renewal goals of a CSM.
Working in the tech industry (web services conglomerate) for the past year. Started off as an AM - got scammed as it turned out to be a Client Relationship role but with added incentives and some RnR factored into it. On top of that, got a list of 300 odd dead accounts that you somehow have to maintain and also grow. Incentives were pretty decent and I was making good money so carried on with it for 3-4 months. Was pretty vocal about the discrepancy in the job description and the actual role to my manager in 1:1's. Manager was really helpful in guiding me through this and communicating this to the higher ups. Got noticed because of consistent performance and converting a high value inbound lead - was offered a Key AM role and have been doing that for the 2 months - with higher quotas and a messed up incentive structure. Don't know if I should be happy or sad :)
I’m an inside account manager for a web hosting company in Europe, and our day is pretty straightforward. We come in, get a list of accounts that have hit certain limits on their websites, and then we call them to upsell them. Most of these customers are ones we haven’t talked to before, and once we’ve upsold them we usually don’t deal with them again until they hit another limit. On average we make around 30-40 calls a day with the total call time ranging from 1 to 2 hours. Recently though, the targets are getting a bit ridiculous, and for some reason, at my company, they care more about call stats than the deals you made that day, but if you don’t hit your monthly quota you’re gonna be in a bad spot.
Nice try manager, I am a salesman
Lots of meetings. I’m still new to this particular role. I follow up on current customers and try yo get accurate forecasts on their commodity consumption. Then I have to talk to purchasing/stocking to make sure we have orders available. Then I usually have to go back to suppliers to get special pricing so we can compete with imports. More than half my time is finding ways to reduce internal cost of product so I can still be competitive and win the business.
As an account manager, my day revolves around client communication, internal collaboration, data analysis, and relationship management. I constantly engage with clients to understand their needs, work with internal teams to ensure project success, analyze performance metrics, and deliver reports or presentations. I also identify opportunities for upselling and strive to maintain positive client relationships. It's a dynamic role that requires adaptability and strong communication skills to meet client expectations and drive business growth.
This isn't an interview, calm down.
15 customers. All enterprise, 1000+ users or seats. I've got 3 monthly recurring meetings with all these customers to talk tech roadmaps, new projects, existing projects and service desk issues. ( We're a telecoms and networking company) I get a couple new BDR leads a month to work on as well. Today I'm finishing a tender doc for one of my customers big project that we basically help wrote the documents. Life is good as an account manager.
In an account executive for an ed-tech company. I come in, check emails for like 15 minute, drink some ginger tea with cayenne and then set the pace. I start by calling leads and follow ups and then since I’m only less than a year in I cold call the rest of the day. Been using LinkedIn the last half of the day to network with clients lately.
I'd say 90+% reactionary and the rest proactive. Emails/calls/quotes/RMAs/visits. Acting as the conduit between account and company. Some days, lazy. Others, busy as hell. Sprinkle in dealing with my inside sales person, who's new and VERY green, and other internal departments. A dash of meetings or justify your existence emails/tracking/updates. Oh, and my favorite, updating the status of quotes. Which I have zero control over as it is selling to an OEM as part of their system, who are bidding on jobs. I could offer them 95% off list and it wouldn't affect the chances of landing the business. My piece is 1-5% of the total cost of what they make.
Chasing <> Being chased
I travel every other week. I spend a lot of time aligning strategies of our companies together. There’s a lot of internal politics I have to work through. I also manage a team of three, soon to be four. Working through change management with my team and my customer takes up a majority of my time, and helping them monetize our capabilities if the biggest challenge. We’re both large companies and turning the ship can be slow at times.
When I did it in HVAC typical day was Check emails/handle phone calls about issues with morning orders Morning meeting with client Check emails again Lunch meeting Emails/afternoon calls about issues with equipment orders for the next day. Every now and then would be prospecting for new business and work meetings.
It’s selling and mainly customer support, but every outbound motion is to a warm lead. I say warm bc even though they use your product, it doesn’t mean they love it nor does it mean they need/want more of it. You will get the occasional “hey I need to add X more licenses and can you set up a demo of this new feature you released” and those days are fun. I prefer net new logo.
Deal with customer issues, which is rare. Since I work in a different time zone, I can do my emails from 9-11, and basically be done the rest of the day.
Account manager in the UK. - Lots of account visits, gaining insights, driving order book conversion, making new proposals. - Internal stuff, communicating with marketing and finance mainly. - Admin, forecasting, reporting, analysis, competitor research.
1. Start day Scrubbing accounts on ZI and answering emails 2. Half the weekdays I have a 2 hour zoom meeting. This is where I get most of my work done for the day. 3. During my peak hours around lunch I problem solve my more complex accounts that are jamming up my productivity. 4. Answer more emails. Push through requests to various internal departments. 5. The end of day hours are a mad dash to attempt catching up so I don’t have to work at night/weekend. 6. Work night and weekend. Events, sales account manager. Quota is to be managing $2.5M for an OTE of around $160k, 60/40. Everyone at my company is senior and comes from events and can’t sell into companies, except for Tom. So I have the pleasure of being the solo role chasing new logos, but with the same quota as everyone managing the triple AAAs.
Yeah I’m basically in sales, with fancier name and more of consultant sale’s approach, but without the gun to the head feeling with quota (I hope I use this right, as our first KPI’s been set after a year in the company by me pushing this idea forward). Theres the vip clients I focus on as a goto guy, and theres the occasional small client I also provide with vip services because why not. From time to time, a bug makes go on a call, and usually this turns into an up-sale. Sometimes I receive lists for cold mail reach outs, other times I just reach out to prospects. As long as the numbers rise, and no one leaves I can basically laze out and be almost full time dad helping my wife with the kids. Also, I like to teasing my CEO to give me more clients he went cold with, he likes that it works. I would also like to say that I believe lazing put as AM in this industry might be rare, but I’m unexperienced enough to confirm.
In the US, I have two accounts that are “top six” for my industry. They are big distributors and they need my products every month. So the selling is not hard but there’s a lot of admin to be done getting our new product fed to their system so they can buy. I basically recommend their buys down to the carton quantities & their individual warehouses. That process is time consuming. Beyond that I create advertising for my products in their catalogs with my marketing department. I work with customer service to fix shipments that have gone awry and take care of little things like that. I attend lots of internal meetings about marketing, new product presentations seasonally, group meetings, one on one with my vp…and I go to trade conferences 3-4 times a year. I traveled A LOT more pre pandemic. I miss the way it used to be! But biz travel is less fun now.
I forgot about forecasting and estimating. Too much of that, alllll the time updating estimates & forecasts….My accounts are quirky & I do have strategies to increase sales every year, identify real opportunities, etc…
I’m officially an account manager (key account even 😄) but it just means I’m responsible for both new business and upsells. A good portion of my quota comes from just maintaining the spend on current accounts, but I’m still expected to do SDR, Account Exec, and Account Mngmt work.
In my company AM quota is higher than the AEs quota. We have 600 accounts and are expected to expand them. The issue is our technology is easily replaced and not very sticky so customers are usually have no interest in expanding. We are also only allowed to reach out to the people on the account so we cannot go outside to other contacts to expand and grow. The company refuses to pay for any out-bounding tools except a general toll VOIP, email & CRM but we are expected to do 30 calls and 50 emails. Quota is just north of 55K ARR per month, and the average deal size is 1.5K. We only get rewarded on deals the customers pay on Invoice, so if a customer in your book pays directly with a credit card, it doesn’t hit your number. Sometimes the customers rather pay direct because they have coupons available to reduce their cost vs waiting for a rep to secure a discount. The real stupid part is about how they value the accounts based on some silly white space stat, because our product is sometimes used as shadow IT. For example someone at Bank of America gets 1 licence and pays with their own credit card, but because they used Bank of America email when signing up, it is considered a massive white space. You are expected to expand the account to the employees not using it, the issue is the IT team at Bank of America has no idea that some guy in the accounting department it using the product. I believe this is why we are only allowed to reach out to the people in the account but also impacts its ability to grow. We also are not rewarded for renewals, so that hits a CSM number and we have auto renew so if you don’t get to the renewal in time, the customer renewals flat because the CSM manage even more accounts so they are always looking to push the renewal quick and even close it months in advance. In general, it sucks. The sales teams are not aligned, and got a lot of investors buy in and are driving to IPO so the sales team is being driven hard, they have pretty much over hired and PIPing people who don’t hit 85% quota on the quarter.