Account managers and CSMs are often asked to manage hundreds of accounts simultaneously, but unless they have the right tools to manage those accounts effectively, recurring revenue will suffer. Groove helps Account Managers and Customer Success Managers manage high volumes of accounts with ease through the smart application of automated workflows, advanced activity capture, and scheduling features. Groove helps ensure that account hand-offs are seamless and that every customer feels like they’re getting a highly-responsive, VIP treatment from day one.

Learn the best practices recommended by our team so you can focus on delighting customers, retaining revenue, and driving expansion opportunities for your book of business.

Key Takeaways:

Automate time consuming tasks related to managing your book of business so you can spend more time building and nurturing relationships
Leverage easy-to-use tools to help you truly understand your customers to create a successful onboarding and ongoing education experience across your accounts.
Proactively engage customers on a monthly basis with new product releases and company news and manage account health by building automated workflows based on NPS score or other KPIs.
Collaborate with your manager and other teams on account expansion strategies after you have delivered true value.

1. Automating Time Consuming Tasks

Enable Email and Calendar sync for automatic activity capture

It’s critical for a CSM to have visibility into all of their activities in SFDC (current and past conversations) so they know how to best communicate and engage their customers. Groove's Auto activity sync saves them the time from having to manually log activities to SFDC one-by-one, or having to copy/paste activities into SFDC!

Auto syncing your activities will also allow for visibility of all the actions you have taken for your accounts so you can easily include them in reporting or share with your colleagues/managers.
With Auto syncing, you still have the flexibility to customize logging using search and select
Tip: Click on the Groove alert at the top of the screen after sending an email or saving a calendar event to immediately view the activity in SFDC.

Utilize the Groove Omnibar

CSMs/AMs work out of many systems each day to do their jobs, including SFDC, Groove, Gmail, Linkedin, and many more. The Groove Omnibar provides you with a one stop shop command center where you can use/access many different systems all in one place so you can spend less time switching between systems/tabs.

Create/Update standard and custom Salesforce objects including Contacts, Activities and Opportunities directly from the Omnibar without having to leave your inbox.
Review past activities in Groove Activities to help stay on top of all your accounts.
Utilize Groove Notes to easily share information within your team. Different teams often work together across the sales and customer lifecycle, and each team learns new information about the customer which would be beneficial for the other teams to know, in order to make each interaction as personal and productive as possible.
Tip: Take notes for your meetings directly from Google calendar to capture meeting notes.

Book Meetings easier with Scheduler

From the back and forth emails when trying to find a time that works for everyone to then creating and inputting all the necessary information in the calendar invite, booking meetings can be a challenge. Scheduler allows everyone on the email to see times that are commonly available which maximizes the number of meetings that get booked, and auto-creates the meeting on everyone’s calendar.

Set different meeting types to customize meeting depending on what's needed.
Adjust your availability settings under each meeting type to make sure customers don’t book you so soon that you don’t have time to prep for the meeting, or too far out in case the meeting is urgent.
Put your scheduler link or a specific meeting type in your email signature - ie “Click here to book a meeting with me” - to give customers an easy option to book time with you whenever they get an email from you.
Customize the interface with your branding.
Tip: set up before/after buffers in your Scheduler Settings to prevent back to back meetings.

2. Create successful onboarding program that scales across your accounts

Leveraging Salesforce activity search

With Groove auto-sync, you can view all your past/current activities for each account right in Omnibar so you can get a 360 view of your accounts to maximize engagement.

Easily search account history, contact engagement history, and hand-off notes that are stored in Salesforce from your Inbox. Contacts and Accounts have hundreds, if not thousands of activities, and it's can be hard to sift through the relevant ones in Salesforce.
Use the search and sort by type to quickly view all the relevant records you need.
Tip: While browsing through Activity History for a contact, lead, or account, you’ll see the rate at which they’ve opened, clicked, and replied to your emails. The summary stats at the top show you their overall engagement with your emails, or scroll down to see how many times each email has been opened or clicked.

Stay Connected with LinkedIn Integration

You can access your LinkedIn Sales Navigator directly from the Omnibar which helps save you time by avoiding the back and forth between tabs. Ultimately this integration also ensure that you have a more personal interaction/conversation with each customer as you can reference information directly off of their LinkedIn page (ie. mutual connections, past companies they worked for, etc.). You can also use this integration while using our flows.

Research a customers’ latest posts, work history and common connections to build a relationship with your customers.
Tip: You can add what you find from LinkedIn to Groove Notes so you can easily share that information with other team members.

Using Templates to effectively communicate

With templates, save time while writing new emails so you don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel, or copy/paste from old emails.

Use templates to save high performing emails from the past to use them again.
Use templates to create successful handoffs between teams.
Leverage merge fields to enrich your emails with personal details straight from Salesforce.
Tip: One-click create a template from an existing draft in your inbox by clicking the templates icon and then the “+” button.

Use Reminders to prioritize important tasks

Customer responses can sometimes be hard to get. To be effective as a CSM/AM, it is important to be politely persistent and continue to stay top of mind when you need something back from the customer to move things forward.

Set reminders as needed to keep track of email conversations where you or a teammate needs to continue following up to get a response.
Tip: You can check “open” reminders (ones that haven’t triggered yet) to keep track or to execute a certain reminder earlier than anticipated. You can go here to view/modify/delete any queued reminders.

3. Proactively engage customers and manage account health with Flows

Get into the Groove with Flows

CSMs/AMs typically need to be in constant communication with customers across a certain time period in order to do their jobs effectively. In order to execute all of the touches required across a period of time, it takes reps a lot of manual work to write up every touch and set/execute follow up tasks.

Flows saves the time and manual work required to write/execute the touches so you can focus on other high value activities in their workday.
Use Flows to proactively engage accounts based on Inferred Status stage, products needed or account engagement levels.
Auto-import users into NPS flows based on their latest score.
Execute Flow actions directly from within Gmail, Microsoft 365 or SFDC.
Tip: Add Automated Actions to your Flows to automate tasks based on conditions triggered by the Flow (ex: If user books meeting, then update salesforce field).

Execute your Flows with Actions

Track all your tasks and priorities across all our Flows in Actions and personalize communication in one place.
Use filters in Actions to focus on similar tasks so you can execute more efficiently.
Personalize your emails using Templates in Actions.
Access your actions directly in SFDC and Gmail.
Tip: Filter for all calls in later timezones so you can ensure you are making your calls while certain prospects are still in the office. Then you can filter by the earlier timezones and call the rest!

Centralize your book of business with Workspaces

Finding the right accounts to prioritize is essential to maximize growth and engagement. Salesforce reports are helpful but don't allow for any collaboration and flexibility with different types of notes. Spreadsheets are popular for the collaborative aspect but because information on them can quickly become stale and they require manual updates that can lead to data inconsistencies. Workspaces allow CSMs/AMs to manage their accounts all in one place with data straight from SFDC.

View your top accounts and take needed actions immediately from Workspaces like adding users to flows for engagement or adding tasks.
Combine SFDC data with custom data with custom columns to create a 360 view.
Tip: Customize which fields you can include in your Workspaces from Salesforce here.

4. Collaborate with team members on Renewals, Expansions, and Upsells

Within Groove, you can collaborate with your team to book meetings, manage communication, and strategize on accounts.

Schedule Calls with team members

Each Groove user has their own specific scheduler, so you can insert a scheduler link or insert free times for a teammate into an email.
Add specific times using Groove's Scheduler, and also include any teammate in the list to Schedule for.
Tip: Use our Round Robin feature to distribute meetings across your team.

Create templates or save successful emails as template to share with your team to streamline communication and maximize responses.
View the open, click, and reply rates of templates that have been shared with you, so that you and your team can continually refine them and increase their performance.
Share flows across teams to send consistent messaging and view analytics on who's getting the best results .
Tip: Master flows are the perfect way for teams to send consistent messaging while still being able to add individual customization from each person utilizing the flow. It will allow multiple people to use the same exact flow by adding their own contacts or leads to it and executing the actions.
Bonus Tip: Add labels to your templates and flows as well to help organize and categorize them so that you and your team mates can easily find the right flow or template to use.

Collaborate with team members in Workspaces

Workspaces is not only convenient to view all our accounts in one place but to collaborate with teammates and managers.

Create tasks in Workspaces for accounts and assign them to yourself or teammates.
Create custom columns to capture additional notes.
Tip: Create different Workspaces to segment and strategize on your accounts with similar goals and share with team members (ex: Top ARR Accounts, At Risk Accounts, Upcoming Renewals, etc).

We hope you find these best practices helpful in getting the most out of Groove as an AM/CSM. You can also check out our Master Class Series on the Account and Customer Success Managers to see these tips and tricks in action presented by a Groove CSM. Stay Groovy!