Account Managers play a key role in managing customer relationships generally post sales. The primary objectives for Account Managers are to retain existing customer business and to grow opportunities within current customers. Similar to Account Executives, Account Managers need to understand customer needs, identify opportunities and recommend products and services to customers that will provide value.

The big difference between Account Executives and Account Managers is that Account Managers need to focus on building a long term relationship with their customer while the traditional Account Executives are focused on the short term goal of landing the customer.

Account Managers have quotas similar to Account Executives but as discussed above they also need to be long term focussed on customer relationship as it is less expensive to make money from existing customers than new customers.

Considering the above important responsibilities of Account Managers, an agile goal setting methodology such as the OKR framework will immensely help Account Managers to set clear goals that not only focus on the short term numbers but also on the long term customer relationship building.

OKRs which are generally not linked to compensation would be an ideal tool to set goals that will help in the long term business success alongside the short term goals focused on numbers. OKR is flexible and agile for Account Managers to set goals that are aligned with company and team goals and at the same time provides flexibility to build long term plans.

OKRify, an OKR software that is simple, intuitive , user friendly and built natively in Salesforce will provide even more benefits to Sales roles such as Account Managers. Account Managers who mostly manage their Account relationship and opportunity information in Salesforce CRM can now also set their goals and track it within Salesforce CRM using OKRify – a Goal Setting and Strategy Execution Application built for Salesforce customers.

OKRify is tightly integrated with Salesforce and it will reduce the time to manage and track Goals and also will provide the best opportunity for Account Managers to effectively adopt the OKR framework.