experience hiring an account manager?

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May 17, 2023

by a professional from Colby College in Boston, MA, USA

Hi all, has anyone been involved with hiring account managers for your company? We're hiring now and trying to decide which direction to go (experience vs junior/home grown).

If so, what skills did you look for? Did you go for someone with experience or someone junior and train? Avg deal size?

Thanks!

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Reply by a searcher
from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in South Orange, NJ 07079, USA
Hey Tyler, just a few thoughts if they are helpful. A lot of it depends on what their primary goal is and who your customers are. If it's your first hire I'd go experienced - someone with a few years under their belt that wants to move into management of a team of AMs. You want the first customer experiences with your AM team to be really good or engagement/retention will be low. And you want someone that has the experience to build out a model that will work for you that can be replicated with other AMs as you grow.

Some other considerations:
- Is this a commercial account manager or an "advisor" - If part of their responsibility is renewing or upselling, then they won't be seen as a trusted advisor to the customer. If you want them to be an advisor, then they shouldn't process contracts (trust factor goes down hill once you start asking for signatures as an AM). Think about that when you think about your profile.
- Book of business - this is a SaaS mid-market/enterprise number but an AM should carry at least $1MM as a book of business or up to 40 customers, depending on how high touch they are. I'm sure others will have their own benchmarks as well.

Happy to chat on this if you like, have interviewed thousands and hired hundreds of salespeople and account managers. Good luck!
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Reply by a searcher
from University of Denver in Boston, MA, USA
If this is a sales role, here's a blog post I wrote. Account Manager is a broad term. Happy to chat if you send a DM. https://patrickdichter.com/how-to-hire-a-profitable-salesperson/
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