
In this lecture you sort the people behind one of your accounts into three kinds, pick the move each kind needs, and see why an account that runs through one friendly contact is a single point of failure.
This course is built from five disciplines: building the commercial team, customer service leadership, churn as a method, survey design and conflict resolution.
The map of the course
A dictionary for reading lectures from other fields as key account work
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Account Contact Map and fill in one line after each lecture.
How modern selling differs from everything before it
How the most successful companies sell
The characteristics of someone who is genuinely good at it
Why written channels replaced the phone
Which characteristics separate an outstanding salesperson from an adequate one
Building the selection tools step by step
Creating a candidate scorecard
Preparing the interview questions
Searching professional platforms
Making first contact
Searching through your own team
Active search, and the basics of sourcing
Who to start with
Conducting the interview
Identifying real motivation
Selling the role, and the onboarding programme that follows
Developing the training programme
The core elements of the sales process
How customers actually buy
Training on lead qualification with BANT
Teaching a salesperson what their customers actually do for a living
Helping them build a personal brand
Why customers do not trust every salesperson, and what changes that
Coaching based on performance data rather than impressions
Introducing a coaching culture
Building a plan together with the person
Assessing whether the coaching worked
The plan for acquiring new customers
The plan for retaining existing ones
The plan built on customer engagement
Evaluating bonus schemes, levels and internal competitions
Defining what a leader is here
Developing the programme for them
The requirements to set
The problems a first-time sales manager always hits
The idea of the sales flywheel
Getting customers to look for you
Search visibility, and how it actually works
Creating content, and using social platforms
What marketing owns in this
How to score leads, and how not to
The buyer journey matrix and the buyer persona
The script, prioritisation, and shifting from outbound to inbound
The cooperation agreement between the two functions
Developing a service level agreement in both directions
What each side commits to, in numbers
Speeding up lead work with technology
Speeding up search and engagement
Automated reporting
Where the tooling stops helping
Generating ideas for increasing revenue
Best practice for implementing them
How to tell whether an experiment worked
A partner programme
An updated lead qualification matrix
What made each of them work
What is changing structurally
The current research in the field
What that means for account relationships specifically
What owning this involves as a function
The effect on experience and on revenue
The key indicators: net promoter, satisfaction, effort, first-contact resolution
Working with marketing, sales and product, and leading change
What an audit is for and what it must cover
Journey mapping as the core instrument
Collecting data: surveys, interviews, feedback
Finding the bottleneck rather than the symptom
Vision and mission for the service itself
Long-term and short-term goals
Developing policy and standards
Choosing the model: omnichannel, self-service and the rest
Hiring and onboarding into a service team
Training and coaching as a routine
Financial and non-financial motivation
Building a culture of support, and career tracks that keep people
Working out what actually needs optimising
Using customer systems properly
Chatbots, AI and self-service, and where each stops helping
Service levels and standard procedures, with cases
Experience metrics: net promoter, satisfaction, effort
Operational metrics: handling time, first-contact resolution, service level
Analysing feedback rather than counting it
Reporting, visualisation, and using it to decide
The types of difficult client and the approach to each
Conflict management and active listening
Escalation: how and when to involve someone senior
Communication standards in a crisis, and preventing public negativity
The technology worth paying attention to
Global trends and practices
The role of AI and large data sets
Staying competitive, and planning service development long-term
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Revenue from an existing customer costs a fraction of revenue from a new one. Almost every company knows this and almost none runs retention as a system the way it runs acquisition.
How an account is actually lost
Never at the renewal conversation. It is lost over months, in small signals nobody was tracking: response times slipping, the internal champion changing role, satisfaction scores drifting a point at a time, a complaint handled politely and never fed back to anyone. Then the renewal arrives and the answer is already decided. I have sat in that meeting having genuinely believed the relationship was fine, and every warning sign had been visible in data we collected and did not read.
What this course actually covers
Five blocks. First, the team that holds the relationships: sixteen lessons on hiring, onboarding, training, coaching and paying commercial people, including the retention plan and the engagement-based plan alongside the new business plan, plus demand generation, conversion and the agreement with marketing. Second, the service side of the relationship — auditing how you are experienced, building the standards, the team behind them, and the metrics that predict a renewal. Third, churn as a method: causes, measurement, calculating what a loss costs, designing the retention programme, implementing it against resistance, and reporting on it. Fourth, measuring relationship health — survey types, question design, scales, the report and the action plan. Fifth, open conflict: escalation, prevention and mediation.
A note on the churn block
Those six lessons were recorded about employee attrition rather than customer churn. They are here for the method, which is structurally identical: find the causes, measure it properly, calculate the cost of a loss, build a programme, implement it, check whether the number moved. The cost-of-loss calculation in particular transfers directly. I would rather say that than let you discover it in lesson twenty-five.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 42 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the candidate scorecard, coaching plans, the retention and engagement plans, service standards and the metric set, the cost-of-loss calculation, survey design and reporting, the conflict resolution algorithm
Practical work on your own accounts rather than on a case study
Where to start
Take the last account you lost and write down the earliest signal you can now identify. Then check whether that signal existed in data you already had. It almost always does. Enrol now and start today.