Joanna Hagelberger and the Five-Year Question
Written by Alex Raymond, founder of AMplify and author of The Growth Department.
Joanna Hagelberger built Account Management from scratch at two insurance technology companies. At Vertafore, she grew one customer from $50,000 a year to $10 million in annual revenue, a 200x increase. The turning point was a single question she put to the customer's leadership: where do you want to be in five years?
The question
Hagelberger told the story on episode 37 of Account Management Secrets. She had been asking the questions every Account Manager is taught to ask, such as how the customer would know, a year from now, that the work had been a success. Then she tried a longer horizon.
"I think this is going to sound so counterintuitive, but the most impactful question I ever asked a customer was, where do you want to be in five years?" she said. "They fell out of their chairs."
The customer had no answer. "They took that question and they went back and said, we truly have no idea. We've never asked that question before." So they went to a giant whiteboard and worked out what the business, and the relationship, would look like in five years if they really invested in it. Then they came back with a list of asks. "Which was very scary," she said. The customer became her employer's single largest account.
The numbers follow the question. The customer paid about $50,000 a year when she started working with them and about half a million at the time of the conversation. By the time she left, they were worth about $10 million a year. On air, I called it a 20x increase. She corrected me: 200x.
Why it worked
The question worked because of how she asked it. Hagelberger asked "with open hands," as she put it: to learn the answer, with no product in mind. "They can tell if you're coming in with an ulterior motive," she said. "They can tell if you're trying to manipulate the answer."
She also accepted whatever came back. "If they come back to me and say five years from now, we expect to have been acquired and not exist. Good to know." An answer like that does not grow the account, but it protects the forecast, which is the No Surprises half of Keep, Grow, No Surprises.
And she asked the right people. The question needs someone with strategic vision in the room. "If you're talking to someone that is heads down, working on their computer every day, completely tactical, they can't answer that question."
Many Account Managers never ask, because they feel the question is above their station. Hagelberger rejects that. The customer signed a contract and pays real money, so "not only do you have a right to ask these questions about their business and make sure that you're supporting them well, you have a responsibility to."
She did it again
At her next company, Hagelberger grew a $200,000 account to $5 million. The repetition is what makes this a discipline, with a different customer, a different company, and the same result.
Both accounts started small, which is why she argues against sorting customers by revenue alone. "Because you drew a chalk line and said they're not important because they're not paying us a lot today, you're missing the potential opportunity," she said in an AMplify Building the Growth Department session. The segmentation guide covers how to score accounts on potential instead.
Solve Bigger Problems
The five-year question is the labeled move for Solve Bigger Problems, the first arrow of the Growth Department Mindset. Customers put you in a box defined by what they already bought, and most Account Managers stay in it by talking only about that. A question about the customer's future widens the box, because the answer is about their business, and your product becomes one of the ways to get there.
How to use the five-year question
Ask it of leadership, in a strategic review or an executive meeting, and send it ahead of time. The more strategic the question, the more notice the customer needs to answer it well. Ask it with open hands and take the answer you get, including the one you did not want. Then bring the answer into your account plan, because the asks that come back are the plan.
Listen to the full conversation with Joanna Hagelberger on Account Management Secrets.
The Growth Department is the post-sale revenue operating standard for B2B companies. Take the ten-minute Post-Sale Stress Test to see where your function stands across Clarity, Commitment, and Cadence. Or download the free audiobook of The Growth Department and read the manifesto.
About the author Alex Raymond is the founder of AMplify and the author of The Growth Department, the operating standard for the function that delivers most of a company's revenue. He spent a decade building Account Management and Customer Success systems with B2B companies before founding AMplify, where he works with Post-Sale leaders on installing the Growth Department Method. He hosts the Account Management Secrets podcast.
