Strategic account management program organization Archives - Strategic Account Management Association

Strategic Account Management Organizational Design, Strategic account management program organization, Strategic account manager skills and competencies, Uncategorized, Value co-creation

The Essential Seven Factors for Unlocking Strategic Account Growth

By Abhijit Gangoli, Cofounder and CEO, DemandFarm

The top three decision criteria for B2B buyers today are account managers’ knowledge and understanding of the industry, the business itself, and service provider trustworthiness. Top performing SAMs leverage customer insights and constantly recalibrate how they create value for customers in the face of industry disruptions.

The Essential Seven

Based on our experience working with successful leaders, speaking to hundreds of high-performing CSOs, and studying user experiences over 2,500 consistently growing strategic accounts, we identified seven key drivers of strategic account management. These drivers are most impactful only when they are activated within an effective operating model and applicable to the sales methodology or framework adopted by the organization.

1. PROPOSITION DISTINCTION

Knowledge of the customer’s business and industry, an under-standing of their organization, and how your solutions benefit them in purposeful and innovative ways, is vital to succeed in strategic account management. Thus, proposals must change from being feature-led to being customized, as each customer is truly unique.

If you involve customers in co-creating solutions by encouraging collaboration and dialogue, you have already won a big part of the customer’s mindshare. In our experience, we have seen that by involving customers in co-creation they gain ownership of the solution and are more likely to accept it. Customers feel empowered and believe that the solution is their creation. Not only does this lead to greater acceptance, but the solution better meets the customer’s needs as it was designed by the customer.

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Strategic account management process, Strategic account management program organization

How to Sell Innovative Ideas (When Everyone’s Terrified to Take Risks)

By Brian Doyle, President, Holden Advisors

Business decisions are usually made by decision makers at two ends of a spectrum. At one end are the innovators, who want to try new things and aren’t afraid of failing. At the other end are those who fear making a bad decision and getting called out for it. In my experience, the clear majority of business decision makers sit on the “afraid to fail” end of the spectrum.

And who can blame them? Historically, when times are tough, innovators who go out on a limb for an idea get sidelined or, worse, fired. During the Great Recession of 2007-2009, unemployment reached 10 percent, and many businesses cut down on innovation – even when that innovation may have ultimately increased their profit. Business leaders solved budget issues by cutting expenses and employees, rather than by adopting new ideas. If you were an innovator in those days, you were tagged as someone who “didn’t get it” and may have found your job on the chopping block.

A significant outcome of this kind of recession-driven mindset is that fear of failure drives approval-by-committee. Any important, or even small, purchase or decision could mean a personal loss for each person involved in the decision-making process. According to Brent Adamson, co-author of “The Challenger Sale,” an average of 6.8 decision makers are involved in every B2B purchasing decision. This means that if you are a strategic account manager selling an innovative product or service, the sale will need to be approved by six of your main contact’s coworkers before the deal is done.

So, how can strategic account managers support their innovative customers in getting approval from their committees of seven and up? I’ve broken it down into a six-step process with action steps that SAMs can share with their customers as the two work together to close bigger, more ambitious deals

1. Create a shared need. To get buy-in for a new idea, it’s important for decision makers to believe it’s in the best interest of everyone.

Action Step: Create a threat/opportunity matrix before going to the buying team. Figure out what the risk is if the organization doesn’t adopt the idea. Is it layoffs, stock price dropping? Likewise, articulate the upside of adopting your idea. Is it increased profits that position the company for growth?

2. Share the vision. Stephen Covey, in “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People,” had it right when he recommended that we “start with the end in mind.” If people can imagine the new state and how their daily behavior will change, they can more easily support the vision.

Action Step: Paint a picture of how the customer’s day-to-day will change if adopted. For instance, if you’re planning to raise your prices, how do you want your sales team supporting that price increase?

3. Find a visible champion. Once the vision and shared need have been articulated, find someone to champion your idea – a leader who will promote the idea in meetings and from stages the innovator doesn’t have access to.

Action Step: To help champions explain the idea correctly, write out talking points and make them memorable and easy to understand. I’ve had senior leaders read my remarks verbatim on global all-employee calls.

4. Gain commitment from other key stakeholders. As steps one through three are completed, find ways to get other stakeholders, beyond your champion, onboard.

Action Step: Figure out which things each stakeholder cares about most. I’m willing to bet it’s one or more of the “3 Ds”: demand (leadership mandate), data, or demonstration (competitor or other industry best practice examples). In other words, the CFO will likely want to see the impact of a price increase on his or her margins while the sales leader may want an example of how competitors have successfully implemented price increases.

5. Measure and communicate success. This starts with taking a baseline measurement of whatever you’re trying to improve and then sharing across the organization how it’s tracking, even if it’s a small pilot in one part of the organization.

Action Step: Suggest adding a Finance representative to the team. Very few improvements can be completely isolated from other parts of the business, so when the idea becomes successful, other functions will lay claim to the results. You’ll hear, “It wasn’t your initiative that drove the increase in profitability. It was sales/operations/marketing/fill-in-the-blank.” A Finance rep will serve as an independent third party who can add credibility to the innovator’s claim.

6. Change systems and processes. You want change to last, but it won’t unless the innovator changes the functional processes that support it.

Action Step: Think through how sales are measured and incentivized. If the goal is to increase profit margin but pay salespeople solely on revenue, then there will be a misalignment that is hard to overcome.

The proven process above has helped innovators quickly build momentum for ideas while also establishing themselves as thought leaders with their customers. To sell successful and lasting change, we must be thoughtful about how we build consensus for our ideas. ■

Brian Doyle is President of Holden Advisors. You can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianadoyle/.

Strategic account management program organization

From executive sponsorship to executive engagement

By Dominique Côté, Founder and CEO, Cosawi Consulting

In our organization’s work, we see much confusion and lack of clarity on executive sponsorship, even when it is in place. Clarifying the executive sponsor role, behaviors (internally and externally) and expectations is critical if we wish to leverage the role as an accelerator and create executive accountability within the account team.

In the first post of this series, we discussed the importance of establishing a SAM Center of Excellence (COE) to enable the SAM journey’s evolution, sustainability and agility. As a sequel, we would like to address the critical role of executive sponsorship, how it can impact the success of your strategic partnership when done well and, most importantly, best practices for doing so.

I remember being an executive sponsor myself in the corporate environment. During those years of leading SAM journeys, I was often frustrated by the lack of engagement among some of my fellow executive sponsor colleagues. For many of them, it was their belief that being an executive sponsor amounted to being a name on a slide and a lifeline when a critical issue or problem arose. We too often confuse strategic account sponsorship with corporate project sponsorship, where sponsorship is a way to escalate issues or decision-making when in need.

When done right, strategic account sponsorship begs to have a very different definition. I find it valuable to rebrand the concept from executive sponsorship to executive engagement. This name implies buy-in from the executive and the “be-in” mindset. The idea of executive engagement implies an accountable and engaged member of the account team, rather than a distant back-room player.

Strategic account management is a team sport and requires cross-functional, multi-tiered vertical level engagement and strong accountability. Executive sponsorship is undoubtedly critical to the team and is a key internal and customer account role. It must be part of the SAM structure that is put in place to enable, support and execute the SAM vision and strategy by enabling customer partnership, account revenue generation and achievement of objectives.

These are the four key components that we see the best companies placing at the forefront of their efforts to accelerate executive sponsorship, which I will detail below. They are:

Leading the organizational customer-centric culture
Clearly defining the executive sponsor role
Adapting corporate behaviors when working in the account
Matching the right sponsor to each account

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