Have you been considering the career path of an account manager? Account management can be a very rewarding and fulfilling job while providing good pay. Your main role as an account manager is to keep clients happy by developing and maintaining strong relationships while increases client retention.

Here are five of the top skills every successful account manager has:

1. Listening Skills

Part of keeping your clients happy is making sure they’re being heard. This is where strong listening skills come into play. Whether your meeting your client for a casual check in or conducting a formal business review, it’s important to hear and listen to the questions or concerns in great detail. Through comprehensive listening you will be able to better problem solve anything that gets thrown at you.

If you have strong listening skills already – that’s great! But remembering all the little details your client says is another thing. Tip: Always have a notebook and pen ready so you can quickly write down any important meeting notes that you listen and hear of.

2. Socializing Skills

Account managers spend a lot of their day communicating with clients. They need to take client information and feedback from clients and communicate that information properly to internal departments, such as your boss or supervisor, other account managers, sales, IT, accounting, and more. Practicing your communication skills is very imporant so you can come off looking and sounding as sharp as possible!

Tip: If you want to practice socializing skills even more, try giving yourself a speach or pep talk in the mirror every night before bed. There are also many courses that exist on speach that could be helpful as well.

3. Multi-Task Skills

Account managers perform a wide range of tasks and duties on the day to day. Account manager tasks are going to vary from company to company, especially depending on what industry you’re in.

Though tasks do vary in account management, you are not likely to be doing the same work items every single day. The role is a lot more dynamic, and may probably evolve over time as well.

Some of the day to day mutli tasking I complete on the job include meeting up with customers via zoom, signing renewals, conducting group trainings, reporting bugs on our software to our development team, and more.

Tip: To stay on top of all your duties, try using a daily planner to make sure you don’t forget a step in the shuffle.

4. Presenting Skills

Once again, account manager positions do vary from company to company. Regardless, having strong presentation skills is an asset in being a successful account manager.

Each meeting with an existing client can be looked at as a presentation. How did you get your message get across? Was it clear? Did you present the information confidently?

Presentations do not have to be formal demonstrations or extravagant sales pitches, but instead your day to day zoom meeting, or follow up call you make to a client. Good presentation will allow you to build a strong and appealing repuation that serves you beneficially on both external and internal levels.

Tip: Ask someone close to you whether you can do a mock phone call or presentation. The only way you’ll get better at presenting, is through practice. My company makes us do mock presentations to make sure our product knowledge is up to par, and see where there are areas that we can improve on. All feedback should be constructive.

5. Organizational Skills

Your day to day responsibilites add up fast, and without having processes for proper organization, it will make the role more difficult.

Try coming out with organizational processes that will help you succeed. This may be in having daily to-do lists prepared the day before, taking time to sort all documents in the correct folders on your computer, creating email draft templates to save you time, and so forth.

Tip: Ontop of using a daily planner, make sure to use daily and weekly to-do lists as well. You can set up automated tasks and alerts through your outlook calendar or company’s CRM software to stay ontop of all the most important items.