Strategic Account Management Association

Healthcare, Learning & Development, Mental Health

How To Build A Resilient Sales Identity

By Jeff Riseley, Founder of Sales Health Alliance

There is a lot of bad advice going around these days like:

“You shouldn’t attach your identity to your work if you want to be happy.”

Often these types of comments strike the perfect chord with people who are experiencing burnout. It helps them feel heard, seen, and understood, while simultaneously pointing the finger back at work.

When you’ve been carrying the burden of unrelenting work deadlines, the relief you feel from someone telling you it’s okay to take a break and not care so much can be intoxicating.

“I’m stressed because of work. It’s work’s fault.”

While work is likely a major factor in fueling your burnout, work is something you’ll spend ~90,000 hours doing in your lifetime, which means trying to separate your identity from work may not always be the best approach.

Continue reading →

Learning & Development, SAMA training and certification, Strategic account manager skills and competencies

Strategic Account Manager Training: Begin with the End in Mind and Ask the Right Questions

By SAMA staff

One of the most frequent conversations SAMA has with members of our community is about strategic account manager training. Oftentimes they are unsure about how to begin the process and what to consider when making training decisions. We always suggest starting with the end in mind by asking them three questions:

What do you want to achieve?
How quickly do you want to start?
What are the KPIs for measuring their progress toward achieving their goals?

The answers to these questions will become the reference when moving forward with training development.

Continue reading →

Strategic account management process, Strategic account manager skills and competencies, Sustainability, Uncategorized, Value co-creation

Understanding the Hidden Needs of Key Accounts for Sustained Growth

By Dave Irwin, Founder & CEO of Polaris I/O

Given the pace of change during the pandemic — an accelerated digital economy, in addition to the current economic climate, supply chain issues, ESG initiatives, and world events — there are constantly new and shifting needs for any B2B company. Different groups of people across departments, regions, divisions, and elevation levels are having to adapt daily to new challenges. Fixed demand for products and services is being overrun with new demand for solutions to emerging problems. This shift in demand is both a threat and an opportunity for suppliers needing to protect, retain, and grow these valuable account relationships. And everyone knows it.

B2B Buyers Want Relevant Information Fast

When you combine constantly changing needs with a fundamental desire of B2B buyers to make most buying decisions without the involvement of salespeople, the threat to the traditional sales-and-marketing model becomes even more pronounced. According to a Harvard Business Review article, “Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing are Becoming Obsolete,” from last year, “Helping today’s B2B buyers buy isn’t a sales challenge, nearly so much as an information challenge (or, alternatively, an information opportunity). The companies that best provide customers the information they most urgently seek, specifically through the channels they most clearly prefer, are in a far better position to drive commercial success in today’s rapidly evolving digital commercial landscape.”

From a traditional go-to market perspective, the historical focus of sales and marketing, the information a buyer is seeking has been about your product and services. But that has changed. What about unknown demand and the unmet needs of today’s business executives who are bombarded with new challenges every day? This is a fundamentally different dynamic to understand, and critical for effective cross-selling in key accounts. In a buyer journey of unknown demand, it isn’t the channel you deliver the information to that is the issue, but rather the very information itself you are delivering.

Continue reading →