The Ideal Dealer Manager

The role of an Account Manager within any business is a crucial one. A great Account Manager will deliver exponential business growth and become a champion of your products and services; a worthy face of your business who will position you as experts within your field and who will generate referrals and recommendations for you as a natural by-product of their daily activities. A poor Account Manager will have completely the opposite effect.

At O-bit Telecom our entire Account Management team is tasked with and rewarded on, their Client’s business growth. That is how we ensure professional, helpful, consultative and responsive service with all of our Clients. We don’t need to aggressively sell. We offer best advice to our Clients, nurturing business growth and take a genuinely strategic view. Having a strong team of Account Managers to deliver this is essential. If you have an exceptional Account Manager in your business, do whatever it takes to keep hold of them!

In today’s business environment, and specifically in this sector, being good at what you do is no longer good enough. Only the exceptional will experience business success and facilitate rapid and profitable growth.

Having accepted that great Account Management is such a key business driver, you’ll need to be able identify the attributes that make up such an individual. Get this right and your business will grow.

We think that some crucial attributes are;

1. Being likeable - you may have the best product, service or offering in the market, but if your Account Manager is awkward to deal with and doesn’t ‘click’ with the client then you’ll be hard-pushed to win the business.

2. Being commercially capable and astute - No-one will ask the advice of a ‘nice’ Account Manager who seems to struggle to offer sage advice due to a lack of commercial ability. If you’re a likeable individual and on the ball, then you’ll be half way there.

3. Being an expert communicator - Excellent communication skills are crucial. Every one of your Clients face a variety of challenges on a daily basis and have different ways of dealing with these challenges. A great Account Manager will have taken the time to get to know the people behind their client’s businesses as well as the Client business itself. They’ll know how the key contacts within their Client’s business work, what their primary motivators and business objectives are, what they’re looking for by way of support and guidance on a daily basis and will appreciate how it feels to be on the Client’s side of the fence. Only then will the Account Manager be able to show empathy with the client, and work with them to deliver successful and profitable outcomes.

4. Possess sound business and industry knowledge - If you are to position yourself as an industry expert capable of delivering solid advice and guidance, then you must know what’s happening within the industry as well as within your own business.

5. Being responsive - The quickest way to fail as an Account Manager at any level is to become unavailable or be unresponsive. The over-riding goal of a great Account Manager is to be on-hand to help their Clients win business. If messages are left unanswered and emails left unread then this can only have one outcome : the Client will get frustrated with the lack of response and will ask the question of one of your competitors. This is key.

The real focus every day should be on delivering exceptional service, and this exceptional service – both perceived and real – can only be delivered by a great Account Manager.

There will always be problems, and these problems will only increase as your business grows, but it’s how your Account Managers respond to and deal with these problems that will keep your Clients coming back for more.