Managing time in a book of business

One of the key disciplines of good account management is the need to allocate time in more important areas. Think of yourself as an investment manager managing a set of investments. An excellent planning tool is putting together a spreadsheet listing your accounts ordered by revenue. As a rough rule of thumb the proportion of time should be equal the proportion of revenue the account contributes to the total.

Of course one might need to balance this with the potential of the account.

Thinking this through clearly with an analytical perspective is very important. Because otherwise it is easy to fall into the following mistakes:

• Spending time talking to customers that we like to talk to - the ones which are fun to hang with.

• Spending time talking to customers which are squeaky which take up more than their fair share of attention. See technology arguments which are really about politics and positioning.

• Chasing start ups which don’t have a mature business.

Instead it often means sticking at and persistently following up with accounts which are difficult to talk to yet are very high value in terms of the revenue that they bring to us.