Strategic account manager skills and competencies Archives - Strategic Account Management Association

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.

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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.

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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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