Why IT account management is failing

What’s The Problem?

The traditional IT account management role is not effective at supporting your business.

Why do I make this assertion?

1. IT account managers are commission and target-based. They are salespeople.
2. IT account managers are rarely technical. Therefore, they struggle to make suitable recommendations.
3. IT account managers do not have a structured approach to helping you achieve your business goals using technology.

I can’t speak for all account managers or all IT providers, but these challenges are very common.

What’s The Solution

For businesses to thrive today, they must maximise efficiency, productivity and security. Technology can help do this. Companies that successfully apply digital transformation concepts have seen 23% increase in net revenue, 30% reduction in costs and 62% increase in employee satisfaction.

• Statistics source 1: The Leaders Path to Digital Value by The Boston Consulting Group
• Statistics source 2: Automation at Scale by McKinsey
• Statistics source 3: Corporate digital transformation and rank and file employee satisfaction

Next Generation Account Management: The Digital Transformation Specialist

If your IT provider and/or account manager is not proactively driving your digital transformation efforts, you risk falling behind.

What do effective IT companies do to help their customers maximise technology:

1. Invest time to understand your business goals, not technical ones, using a structured discovery process with leaders and employees.
2. Build a technology roadmap focused on achieving your business goals.
3. Help proactively drive this roadmap, measure its impact and do it all over again the following year.

I feel that the title of account manager is insufficient, that’s why we adopted the term ‘Digital Transformation Specialist’ instead.

What Skills Should Your Account Manager Have?

It’s not enough to understand your licensing requirements. To help your business transform, your IT account manager needs to have a broader set of skills to be effective.

1. Understand business: To recommend the right solutions, they must understand business processes, organisation structures and politics.
2. Understand technical: They must be competent and experienced in a wide range of technologies so they can recommend the right options.
3. Connected: They must know experts in all fields so they can draft in relevant specialists as required. No one IT company or individual can know everything.

Processes

Digital Transformation takes time, so your account manager needs to be supported by their company with mature and structured processes.

1. A structured discovery process for understanding your business
2. A structured security program to deploy the appropriate amount of security aligned with Zero Trust principles.
3. A structured documentation and presentation format to clearly communicate complex information to stakeholders.

My Rant

It frustrates and saddens me that many IT providers have not modernised and are still providing basic licensing advice and service desk reports to their customers during monthly or quarterly reviews.

It’s not good enough. Technology is too pivotal today for your business to be left behind.

You should expect more from your provider and account manager. Or should I say Digital Transformation Specialist….