Groove Best Practices for Customer Success and Account Managers
Account managers and CSMs are often asked to manage hundreds of accounts simultaneously, but recurring revenue will only improve if they have the right tools to manage those accounts effectively. Groove helps Account Managers and Customer Success Managers efficiently manage high volumes of accounts 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 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 understand your customers to create a successful onboarding and ongoing education experience across your accounts.
Proactively engage customers monthly with new product releases and company news and manage account health by building automated workflows based on NPS scores or other KPIs.
Could you collaborate with your manager and other teams on account expansion strategies after you have delivered actual value?
1. Automating Time-Consuming Tasks
Enable Email and Calendar sync for automatic activity capture.
A CSM must have visibility into all of their activities in SFDC (current and past conversations) so they know how to communicate best and engage their customers. Groove's Auto activity sync saves them the time to manually log activities to SFDC one by one or copy/paste activities into SFDC!
Auto-syncing your activities will also allow visibility of all your actions for your accounts so you can easily include them in reporting or share them 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 view the activity in SFDC immediately.
Utilize the Groove Omnibar
CSMs/AMs work out of many systems daily to do their jobs, including SFDC, Groove, Gmail, Linkedin, and many more. The Groove Omnibar provides a one-stop shop command center where you can use/access many different systems 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 Omnibar without leaving your inbox.
Review past activities in Groove Activities to help you stay on top of all your accounts.
You can use Groove Notes to share information within your team quickly. 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 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
Booking meetings can be challenging, from the back-and-forth emails when finding a time that works for everyone to creating and inputting all the necessary information in the calendar invite. The scheduler allows everyone on the email list to see commonly available times, maximizes the number of booked meetings, and auto-creates the meeting on everyone's calendar.
Set different meeting types to customize meetings depending on what's needed.
Adjust your availability settings under each meeting type to ensure customers don't book you so soon that you don't have time to prep for the meeting or are too far out in case the meeting is urgent.
Put your scheduler link or a specific meeting type in your email signature - i.e., "Click here to book a meeting with me" - to give customers an easy option to book time with you whenever they get an email.
Customize the interface with your branding.
Tip: set up before/after buffers in your Scheduler Settings to prevent back-to-back meetings.
2. Create a 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 in Omnibar to get a 360 view of your accounts to maximize engagement.
Easily search account history, contact engagement history, and hand-off notes stored in Salesforce from your Inbox. Contacts and Accounts have hundreds, if not thousands, of activities, and it can be complex to sift through the relevant ones in Salesforce.
You can quickly search and sort by type to view all necessary relevant records.
Tip: While browsing 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 Omnibar, which helps save you time by avoiding the back-and-forth between tabs. Ultimately, this integration also ensures that you have a more personal interaction/conversation with each customer as you can reference information directly from their LinkedIn page (i.e., mutual connections, past companies they worked for, etc.). You can also use this integration while using our flows.
Research customers' latest posts, work history, and shared connections to build a relationship with your customers.
Tip: You can easily add what you find from LinkedIn to Groove Notes to share that information with other team members.
Using Templates to communicate effectively
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 and 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 essential tasks.
Customer responses can sometimes take a lot of work to get. To be effective as a CSM/AM, it is essential to be polite and persistent and stay on your mind when you need something back from the customer to move things forward.
Could you set reminders 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 been triggered yet) to keep track or to execute a specific 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 over a certain period to do their jobs effectively. To execute all of the touches required across a period, it takes reps a lot of manual work to write up every touch and set/execute follow-up tasks.
Flows save 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 the 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 the user books a meeting, then update the salesforce field).
Execute your Flows with Actions
You can 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 to execute more efficiently.
You can personalize your emails using Templates in Actions.
You can access your actions directly in SFDC and Gmail.
Tip: Filter for all calls in later timezones to ensure you are making your calls while specific prospects are still in the office. Then, you can filter by the earlier time zones and call the rest!
Centralize your book of business with Workspaces.
Finding the proper 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 famous for their collaborative aspect, but because information on them can quickly become stale and require manual updates, that can lead to data consistency. Workspaces allow CSMs/AMs to manage their accounts all in one place with data straight from SFDC.
You can view your top accounts and take necessary 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 a specific scheduler so that you can insert a scheduler link or 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.
Share standardized Templates and Flows for Streamlined Communication
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You can create templates or save successful emails as templates to share with your team to streamline communication and maximize responses.
View the open, click, and reply rates of templates 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 flow by adding their contacts or leads and executing the actions.
Bonus Tip: Add labels to your templates and flows to help organize and categorize them so that you and your teammates can easily find the proper flow or template.
Collaborate with team members in Workspaces
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Workspaces are convenient for viewing all our accounts in one place and collaborating 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, Risk Accounts, Upcoming Renewals, etc).
We hope these best practices help get the most out of Groove as an AM/CSM. Stay Groovy!
Groove Best Practices for Customer Success and Account Managers
