Account Management Archives

Many organizations struggle with internal strife due to siloed teams or positions. Marketing and sales are frequent combatants, a situation that is particularly unfortunate as sales enablement works best when it’s the responsibility and purview of both teams. Although sales enablement is often perceived as marketing-led, the fact is that while the sales team needs the resources marketing provides, the marketing team also needs feedback and context from sales in order to source the most effective and useful leads. The two roles certainly do depend on one another, but if the communication is lacking, this interdependence can breed frustration for both divisions. Without proper synergy, the sales team will be uninformed about the company’s marketing campaigns, and the marketing team won’t know what actually helps […]

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When did customer success become a department, a division, a role, at vendors of business software for the enterprise? It was when their leaders first feared that customers’ dissatisfaction with, or ambivalence over, the product would begin to affect the bottom line in uncomfortable ways. When and where was this? According to The Customer Success Association, it was in 1996 at Vantive, a company that produced software for customer relationship management. This surprised me. My guess was a cloud company as the first. But the rationale at that CRM company, Vantive, was similar. And, once it becomes relatively easy for customers to discard with one vendor’s product in favor of another product to address the same need, vendors are more apt to sense the urgency […]

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