An Account Manager role is some kind of weird hybrid between sales and customer support. Depending on what company you’re in and how they structure this role, You may be dealing with a lot of current customers but also working to close new deals as well.
That’s the way my role is set up. I deal most closely with current customers and have formed relationships with many of them. However, part of my job also involves the discovery, demo, and closing stage for bringing new customers in.
What I’ve found out is that getting yelled at by a current customer feels much worse than getting pounded by people you’re trying to sell to. There are several reasons for this. One of them being that when you’re in sales there’s not much harm you can do for the company. Just not getting the calls and quotas met. When this is a customer who you know and have worked on, you feel the pain much more deeply because you’re invested and you’re literally losing the company money if you lose them.
I guess the moral of the story is this: If you want to be hurt more by people who don’t matter, pick sales. If you want the yelling to be important and critical every time, pick customer success.
Pick your poison.