Account management is often considered a branch of sales, but in reality great account management involves your entire organization. From the person answering your phones to the CEO and of course, the engineers, managers and executives...anyone who touches the client is functionally and tactically part of the account management team.
89 percent of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. - Oracle Study
Think about the best hotel you’ve ever stayed in. What made it great? Was it the location? The luxury amenities? The superlative food?...Maybe, but likely what separates the greatest hotel from every other good hotel was the level of service you experienced. The attention to detail, the warmth...the hospitality. Great account management should be a similar experience, you should be warmly and graciously taken care of.
Here at Metal Toad I have a story I often lead with when discussing what service means to me, I say, “great work is the floor”. What does that mean? It means doing excellent work is what our clients are paying for. From the deliverables in the initial SOW to building architectural solutions in code our teams understand what we’re aiming for and how to hit the target. The work will be performed and delivered on time and on budget.
And that is the bare minimum we’ll accept.
I go on to say, “six months into a relationship if we deliver fantastic work and our clients look up and think, ‘I don’t like working with this team’ that is a FAIL’. It means we delivered a poor experience to a key relationship! I tell this story to anyone in our organization that will listen to me because I believe it and so do the managers at Metal Toad.
The relationships created at every touch point in the organization, will ultimately determine the health of a business partnership. We want to be a trusted advisor. If an executive stakeholder with budgetary responsibility discusses Metal Toad with an engineer and discovers a layer of frustration with us, how long will we be around? Not long! We endeavor to ensure that our entire company understands we're not just generating great code, we're creating fantastic outcomes.
I’m proud of the work my colleagues do every single day to ensure our clients are having a great experience. Software development is not an easy process. There will be misses and the closer Metal Toad teams are to the client teams they are supporting in those moments, the better the outcome.
Gartner Group statistics tell us that 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers.
We work hard to ensure that the floor remains the work and that we deliver and experience to our clients that includes great food and drink, smart conversation, maybe some adventures! Our work takes us to far-flung corners of the globe and just around the corner and to all of us at Metal Toad our clients represent more than revenue, they are the people we spend our days working with!
And you don't have to hear it from me:
“Metal Toad has the ability to go from 0 to 100 which delighted and surprised our stakeholders. They are comfortable working within some amount of uncertainty which has been relieving. We know what we want to build, but there will always be hurdles to overcome. The Metal Toad team shows professionalism, enthusiasm, and an accuracy to detail that allowed the planning, architecture, development, and personalization of our product to be stellar. I cannot be happier with our working relationship and I couldn’t recommend a better company to work with.”
- Audrey C. Younkin, Intel Sports Group, Intel Corporation
The next time you’re considering your relationship with a vendor, dig a little deeper and ask the folks doing the work if they are enjoying the experience. If they aren’t, you might want to place more emphasis on a company like Metal Toad, whose commitment to forging more than code makes us unique in the developer community.