Understanding Your Account Portfolio

May 2, 2020

The first step of account management is to understand your portfolio. We cannot define a perfect methodology to understand your account portfolio as the KPI’s are different for each company. But we can discuss about the generic indicators that every account Managers or CSM can make use of.

To key to understanding any portfolio is to segment them

Revenue Segmentation

Segmenting the customers based on their subscription value helps us identify our key customers. We need to establish a good relationship with our high paying customer so that we find expansion opportunities and get an earlier notice if they are churning, this will help you plan your targets accordingly.

Product Adoption

Categorization based on the product health score can predict upgrades and downgrades. A customer with higher health score is more likely to upgrade and advocate your product. While an account with low health score is a red flag for churn, you can get in touch with the customer and make them adopt our product more so that they see value for what they pay

Plan Segmentation

List out your customers plans. This will help in revenue expansion by pitching higher plans to customers. We can also use this to understand any downgrades happening and use the feedback to show right value to customer and regain lost revenue.

Subscription Frequency

Customers can be on a monthly, quarterly, annual or multi-year contracts. The longer the contract, better is the customers trust in your product and lesser chance of churn. So, try and upgrade your customers to annual contracts.

We can also use other pointers as mentioned below to understand your portfolio

  • Account growth percentage

  • Average Lifetime Value

  • Age bracket compared  

  • Employee size and annual revenue

  • Geography

Source

The growth percentage per quarter form your portfolio will give you an idea of how much revenue you can expect in the next quarter.

Comparing the LTV, which is the total revenue gained from a customer and comparing it to the company and your portfolio average will help you estimate the payback period of the customer acquisition cost.

Segmenting the accounts based on the age and comparing them to the average churn age will help in anticipating churn.

The employee size and annual revenue of a customer lets you segment them as SMB, mid-market or enterprise. Now you can plan your approach accordingly, and if they are big enough find opportunities by pitching your product to other teams inside the organization.

Geographical segmentation comes in handy as it helps understand their culture and how it impacts business in addition to keeping a track of their holidays.

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Written By - Chameli Kuduva, Founder - SaaS Insider