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Category: Strategic account management program organization

Systems and processes that support and enable the SAM in the creation of long-term, mutual value with strategic customers.

Case study, Strategic account management program organization, Uncategorized

Lessons from a Winning Global Account Management (GAM) Program

By Danielle Matteson, Vice President, Strategic Accounts Program, AVI-SPL

AVI-SPL is a digital enablement solutions provider that serves 86 percent of the Fortune 100. It designs, integrates, manages ad supports on-site and cloud-based communications and collaboration technologies for organizations around the globe. AVI-SPL was the recipient of the 2021 SAMA Excellence Award for “Outstanding Mature SAM Program.”

Establishing a Customer-Centric GAM Program

The [GAM] program’s core mission is to form and maintain a trusted partnership with our clients that produces mutual innovation and value resulting in measurable outcomes.

Here at AVI-SPL we established our GAM program to drive long-term value through strategic alignment with our most valued global clients. Our program is oriented around three core, client-focused pillars:

  1. Culture: Create a customer-centric culture
  2. Trusted Advisor: Serve as a strategically aligned, trusted advisor
  3. Global Delivery: Optimize our client experience to consistently exceed expectations

Since the inception of our GAM program, we have seen more than 40 percent growth over projected revenue had we not created a strategic accounts program. We have exceeded industry benchmarks in revenue growth rates, wallet share expansion, customer satisfaction, and client engagement.

Continue reading “Lessons from a Winning Global Account Management (GAM) Program” →
June 14, 2021June 14, 2021client management, customer-centricity, global account management, kpis, revenue, savings, scaling, trusted advisorLeave a comment
Strategic account management program organization, Strategic account manager skills and competencies

“LIQUIDITY,” ORGANIZATIONAL RESILIENCE AND YOU

By Arun Sharma, Professor, Marketing, Miami Herbert Business School, University of Miami

Arun Sharma will deliver a keynote address at the 2021 SAMA Annual Conference (May 24-26). To learn more, or to register, visit the conference website.

Resilience is an organization’s ability to withstand a major disruption, recover quickly and adapt to the changing environment. During the COVID-19 pandemic, some firms have flourished while others in the same industry have floundered. To give a couple of examples: Among department stores, Nordstrom has demonstrated resilience by dramatically increasing online sales; as a result, they have excelled. Arch competitor Neiman Marcus, on the other hand, has declared bankruptcy. In telecommunications, while most firms have posted strong results, Digicel has declared bankruptcy. Researchers who have studied this topic have found that having flexible resources (monetary, assets-based and human), flexibility and adaptability increase organizational resilience. 

Classifying organizations

To better understand why some organizations exhibit resilience while others do not, we conducted interviews with senior executives, analyzed industry and firm performance, and examined extant academic research on organizational structure, resilience and liquidity. Liquid organizations develop and execute strategies faster than their competitors, they change direction and accelerate rapidly, and they are ambidextrous – by which we mean they can simultaneously leverage their existing competencies (“exploitation”) while at the same time they discover and harness new opportunities (“exploration”).

The first thing we did was to classify the organizations, at which point four distinct organizational categories emerged:

Hierarchical. In hierarchical organizations, every employee reports to one and only one supervisor (except for the CEO). This is the classic, pyramid-shaped organizational hierarchy. Most government entities, and many corporations, follow this organizational form. It is typified by slow and deliberate decision making, a decision-making process that is rigorously codified and decision making authority that is rigidly prescribed.

Matrixed. Matrix organizations are designed to increase teamwork between internal-facing (e.g., marketing, R&D, finance) and external-facing departments (geographic and product market). Most employees have dual responsibilities: to the function to which they belong (e.g., marketing) and the market in which they operate (e.g., Latin America). A matrix organization is typically visualized as a rectangle with internal functions (horizontal lines) and markets (vertical lines) forming the structure. Most modern organizations follow a matrix structure. Unfortunately, the amount of teamwork expected in matrix structures has not materialized, and rather than focusing on making the best possible decisions, negotiated decision making is the norm.

Entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial organizations are unstructured, where both functional roles and reporting structures are flexible and adaptable to the context. Employees typically perform multiple functional roles, and decision making is decentralized and team-based. Due to the lack of structure, these firms are typically small and have fewer employees. Decision making is quick, and the organization is adaptable. However, scale and growth require organized decision making, and most entrepreneurial organizations shift towards matrix or hierarchical organizations as they grow.

Liquid. Liquid organizations use team-based structures to increase the quality, speed and innovativeness of outcomes. They focus on skilling their employees in multiple functional areas and create organizational relationships to become more flexible and adaptable. Liquid organizations combine the speed and flexibility of entrepreneurial organizations with the scale of global organizations.

Resiliency of organizations

Our second project involved examining the context under which each organizational form would be most successful. In analyzing our data, we identified two dimensions that affected organizational success: the degree of disruption and resilience. Then we moved on to identify the context under which each type of organization would be most prone to success.

We found that hierarchical organizations are only successful when there is a limited need for resilience, and disruptions are limited and short term. That is because hierarchical firms are slow to recognize disruption and tend to be deliberate (i.e., slow) in making decisions.

By contrast, matrix organizations tend to be more resilient and able to make decisions more quickly – but only when disruption is limited. This is because the matrix organization’s complex structure makes rapid strategic and tactical decision making very difficult. For this reason, matrix organizations are best suited to times that require high degrees of resilience, but only if disruption is limited and short term. Extensive academic research shows that matrix organizations function favors stable environments but falter when conditions are prone to changing rapidly.

Entrepreneurial organizations are flexible, which equips them for addressing major and long-term disruption; but they struggle to exhibit resilience because they do not have the resources (monetary, assets-based and human) to sustain them during long-term disruptions.

Finally, our research found that liquid organizations are best suited to thrive when resilience and adaptability are most in demand. Liquid organizations are both resilient (thanks to their scale) and possess the ability to sustain and grow through major disruptions due to organizational speed, flexibility and adaptability. In our research on the impact of COVID-19, we find that the most successful and resilient firms have been those that are the most liquid.

Our Recommendations: Liquidity and you

To increase resilience, we recommend that leaders take steps to increase organizational liquidity.

Specifically, we recommend they take three steps:

  • Create and use teams to increase liquidity and quality of deliverables. We suggest that executives form teams by pairing people from different vertical markets or functional areas. (For more on creating teams within the strategic account management program, see “Addressing the New Normal: Creating Liquid Strategic Account Teams,” in the Fall 2020 issue of this magazine.)
  • Increase the multifunctional expertise of executives through training and assignment.
  • Reduce boundaries between the firm and suppliers by creating teams that include people from both firms.

In summary, our results suggest that leaders need to focus on increasing resilience by increasing liquidity. While the emergence of multiple highly effective vaccines portends an end to this global recession, it surely won’t be the last time organizations face conditions requiring high resilience levels.

Arun Sharma is a marketing professor at the University of Miami’s Herbert School of Business, has published extensively on strategic accounts, and is ranked in the top 1% of all marketing professors. Find him online at https://www.theliquidorganization.com/.

February 23, 2021March 2, 2021Agility, Liquid organizations, TeamsLeave a comment
Strategic account management program organization, Strategic account manager skills and competencies, Technology

Ten insights on the future of SAM

By Nicolas Zimmerman, Editor-in-chief, SAMA

Whether you’re struggling to survive the pandemic or thriving and experiencing unprecedented growth, one thing is clear: We are experiencing radical shifts in how we conduct business with our most strategic customers. As conveners of the largest community in the world dedicated to strategic and key account management, one of SAMA’s foundational purposes is to help our community both adapt to what’s happening right now and prepare for what may happen next.

At the 2020 SAMA Annual Conference (held virtually Nov. 9-11, 2020), we pulled together a group of the smartest, most sophisticated observers, students and practitioners of strategic account management for a conversation on “The Future of SAM.” Highlights are presented below, and the full panel is available on demand by registering for the virtual conference here. 

Moderator: Jim Ford, Chief Commercial Officer, Solecta, and Chairman, SAMA Board of Directors

Panelists: Jennifer Stanley, Partner, McKinsey & Co.; Dino Bertani, Executive Director, International Strategic Account Management,  Allergan Aesthetics; Harvey Dunham, Managing Director, Strategy and Marketing, SAMA; Tom Hablitzel, Senior VP, Enterprise Clients, Sherwin-Williams Company; Jim O’Leary, Global Practice Chair, Corporate Affairs, Edelman

#1. Shifting from focus on shareholder value only to stakeholder value as well – and a broadening understanding of what stakeholder value means.

O’Leary shared takeaways from Edelman’s most recent Business Roundtable, which highlighted the growing emphasis placed on a company’s role in society – from environmental impact to social justice and diversity/inclusion. Non-traditional sources of value will play a growing role in how stakeholders evaluate the impact of companies and their strategic accounts efforts.

#2. Sales and account management – no longer an expense but an investment.

While firms once viewed sales as an expense, in this environment it’s clearly an investment. O’Leary’s advice: Projects with the best “story” will be funded and resourced first. His other advice:

  • Expand whom you interact with at your customers
  • Focus more than ever on active listening. Only by making astute observations will you uncover potential new sources of value.
  • Make sure your internal stakeholders understand the value your program brings to customers and, through them, to the firm. If they don’t grasp it, you may become the target of cost cutting and/or restructuring.

#3. Centralized beats diffused.

When companies shift their programs into the regions or business units, Bertani says, you risk adding inefficiencies, redundancies and opportunities for misalignment. You also risk sacrificing a common strategy, methodology and customer experience.

#4. SAM will become (if it isn’t already) the standard bearer for all sales.

From Stanley’s perspective, SAM already serves as a beacon for what it means to be a sales professional–particularly when it comes to the rigor SAMs bring to account planning, solutions co-creation with customers and articulation of unique value propositions.

#5. Centers of Excellence (CoE).

Bertani says these centralized groups of SAM experts can and should be leveraged as the catalyst for instilling the mindset, skill set and processes for distinctive go-to-market and customer-centric engagement models.

#6. Agility is the new stability.

In disruptive times, leaders need to increase their organizations’ agility by focusing on what really matters and making much faster decisions. Bertani recommends trading perfection for simplicity. “I’d rather be approximately right,” he says, “than exactly wrong.”

#7. Those who have the data, and use it wisely, will control the playing field.

If you’re accumulating data on your customers and even your customers’ customers, how are you using it to develop insights that lead to innovative value propositions? How are you linking it to your core business strategy?

#8. In just a few months, COVID accelerated digital adoption as much as 10 years.

What this means is a vast proliferation of data on customer behavior. Those companies that both control the data and utilize it most effectively to glean customer insights will be the ones who will control the playing field. Stanley predicts that digital adoption will spare SAMs from much of the day-to-day “firefighting” of the job, freeing them to look into all this new data and distill it back into insights about their customers.

#9. The profile of strategic account teams will shift dramatically.

New and different skills will be needed to analyze all this new data and make use of it, leading to teams that include not only data scientists but also behavioral scientists and others with non-traditional sales skills. Teams will also need to become flatter, less hierarchical, in order to move quickly and with agility.

#10. Customers will reward suppliers who successfully blend a great digital experience with the human touch.

When McKinsey surveyed B2B buyers to see whether they prefer to buy digitally or from people, the answer, overwhelmingly, was “it depends.” Turns out customers are much more likely to reward suppliers with sole-source contracts when they excel in both areas and know which channel is right for which kinds of interactions.

Want more? A recording of the discussion, more than two-dozen breakout sessions and keynote presentations is available for unlimited, on-demand purchase. See what you missed here.

December 3, 2020February 1, 2021Digitalization, Future of SAM, Strategic account teamsLeave a comment

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