In our previous blog post, we reviewed how we typically see our vCIO community members from 2019, so now let’s look at another report regarding our other active community of more than 700 account managers that are working with us today.
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Like in the case of our vCIO community, the language composition shows a clear majority of English-speaking countries. 62% are from the United States, 10% for both Australia and Canada, and 5% for the United Kingdom and New Zealand respectively.
The most active movement of account managers is concentrated in the United States, Eastern Coast. However, the most numerous account manager nucleus is scattered in California, North Carolina, and Texas. The largest city groups are in New York and San Francisco; furthermore, we should mention Toronto, Canada and London, UK as well.
Considering that the most active account manager groups are scattered throughout the United States, its no wonder as to why their educational experiences aren't centralized in any American university. However, at the beginning of the list, classic technical education centers can be seen: Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and Harvard.
The account manager function is related with technical account management topics like sales, information technology, engineering, support and only partially related with business management topics such as IT consulting, business development, finance and project management.
Between the groups and forums, hot topics are more technology-related than any other; virtualization, Microsoft Office 365 and recently cloud computing, NIST cyber security. It should be noted that smaller MSPs usually deliver these services through outsourcing or assistance from an MSSP or CCSP partners. In order to develop these transformations internally for MSPs, we have launched our “Build a Better MSP” expert guide program with a wide range of building business solutions for the SMB space.
Unfortunately, only a small minority of account managers feel the importance in developing their business management skills, like consulting, communication, decisiveness, problem-solving and leadership. The technology dominance usually happens when owners of MSPs with less than 15 employees perform the account management role themselves, among many others. And most of these MSPs are challenged with the commodization trap of their service offering. So they look for new cloud or security services that can differentiate themselves from other MSP competitors.
Regarding their experiences, we can say that qualified and veteran account manager experts are a majority in managed services providers with more than 15 employees: 70% have more than 10 years of experience in the technology market and the other 21% have between 6 and 10 years of experience. That’s why they have a high percentage of account managers at seniority level positions. The other reason that account managers find themselves in senior level positions, as mentioned further above, is that CEOs are usually the executives of small MSPs with less than 10-15 employees, but are also often the Account Managers as well.
Often small MSPs do not have dedicated Account Managers, while the mid-size MSPs with more than 15 employees are challenged with MSP Account Manager turnover problems, because more than 50% of them have less than 2 years experience with the organization. That's why MSP owners try to give their account managers a clear playbook of activities that they can manage and fulfill with clients. Likewise, they would visibility gain access into their account manager activities.
So what are typical and successful MSPs like with account management services?
- Small MSPs usually have resource problems because the owners or executives try to provide account management services themselves, among many other roles, which is the reason why they can not be full-blooded professionals who don’t always have time resource problems.
- Account managers are dedicated professionals from a mid-sized MSP with more than 15 employees but owners of these businesses are challenged with employees for which the solution should be developed into a scalable business consultative service with processes, predefined segments and tools that support their executive and monitoring demand.
- Account managers have strong technological backgrounds and interests, but only a small minority are interested in developing their consultative and business-related skills. However, like vCIOs, should feel comfortable talking with small to mid-sized business executives, and last but not least, they should understand how to put technological solutions into a business solutions context.
Be sure to download our growth guide below, and for more information on how to build, strengthen or create a more efficient Account Management offering, check out our account management Growth Solutions here on our homepage.
- vCIOs in United States
- vCIOs in New Zealand
- vCIOs in Australia
- vCIOs in Canada
- Managed Services Platform vCIO report
