Strategic account manager skills and competencies Archives - Page 4 of 12

Strategic account manager skills and competencies, Technology

The Future of SAM – Revisited

This blog post is based on a keynote presentation from the 2021 SAMA Annual Conference. The session was moderated by Jim Ford, Chief Commercial Officer, Solecta and SAMA Chairman of the Board. Panelists’ remarks have been paraphrased for this blog post.

The future is now.

After 14 months of chaos, now is the time for SAMs to learn from the past and prepare for the future. Regardless of the organization we work at, we could be outspent, out resourced or out marketed but we do have the opportunity to outthink our competition. The challenge is to visualize what that future will look like.

Over the past 12 months, SAMA has established a knowledgeable point of view based on hundreds of webinars, the SAMA Experts Council and countless interviews with members. From all this, we stress tested long-held views about strategic account management. We acquired real-time, relevant insight from the world’s best practitioners and thought leaders in the SAMA community.

Panelists: the three experts of SAM

Karen Passmore is Partner at the management consulting firm McKinsey and Company where she works on organizational design and go-to-market strategies with a focus on breaking down organizational silos. She also works on sales effectiveness and has recently done some innovative work around omni-channel excellence.
Frédérick Kahn is Global Vice President of Sales at Wavelength Pharmaceuticals. He is a savant in bringing SAM programs to life, revitalizing SAM programs and helping get the most out of a SAM program from a structure and talent perspective. On a global scale, he’s worked for Hovione, Lonza and other private equity and venture capital organizations.
Kaj Storbacka is a professor at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki and Founder of Market Shaping Lab. He has served on the board of directors at SAMA. He’s a global thought leader around business-model innovation, market design and disruption. He’s authored more than a dozen books and is a frequent guest speaker around the globe for corporations, executive education and various industry communities.

Continue reading →

Strategic account manager skills and competencies

The Challenge of Selling Expertise (Not Product)

An interview with Michael Thomas by Harvey Dunham, Managing Director of Business Development at SAMA

Michael Thomas is the founder of Magnetic Services. He also spent years as a managing consultant for Microsoft’s global consulting organization. This interview is based on a recent SAMA podcast.

Join us for a Next Practice Symposium on September 15 when Michael Thomas will be speaking more on this topic. Register here.

Becoming a Trusted Advisor

Harvey Dunham: We are asking the smartest customer-facing people in B2B how to become trusted advisors to customers they cannot afford to lose. How do you think SAMs can learn to sell expertise and not products and transform themselves into trusted advisors?

Michael Thomas: There are two ways to look at this. First, there is how SAMs communicate, articulate and exchange their expertise based on their sales and professional experience. Second, you can view a SAM as a broker or bridge to the expertise that lives within their organization. While the first topic is interesting, the second is more germane.

There are exceptions but generally SAMs are used to thinking of themselves as a bridge to products and solutions for their customers. This is historically the role they have played. SAMs however have a much more important role to play. When we talk about expertise, you could label it as knowledge-intensive business services or expertise-based services that don’t show up in a product catalog. These services are not documented like products, technologies or platforms that have solution sets customers can find online and have at their disposal. So, the SAM is critical to connecting the customer with the expertise inside the seller’s organization.

Service teams generally have that expertise but can’t scale as broadly as your SAM community. So, from the customer’s and service team’s perspective the SAM represents the expertise and can make things happen for those customers.

Continue reading →

Strategic account manager skills and competencies, Uncategorized

Character Matters: Learn How to Become a Better SAM

By Rowena Abrahams, Contributing Editor, SAMA

“Who you are matters as much as what you do.”

Dr. Fred Kiel, co-founder of KRW International, a global leadership consulting firm and Kelly Garramone, CEO of KRW and Executive Director of the KRW Research Institute, prove that character “isn’t kumbaya.” Kiel is often referred to as a sage in the field of character science. He and his team have a large practice working with C-suite leaders across the nation. In 1993, Fortune magazine did a feature story on Kiel using for the first time the “coach” metaphor that is frequently used in business literature today.

Character may sound like a soft topic but Kiel and Garramone’s research shows that character is a critical component of leadership that delivers bottom line results. We can also argue that character is essential for SAMs whose reputations define their brand and whose brands determine their career.

Tough Leadership ≠ Good Leadership

The dominant view held through the 20th century was that tough leadership generates results. Leaders believed that the “soft stuff” was nice but unimportant as it does not bring value to the bottom line. Only the hard driving person who tells the truth and is brutal delivers results.

This same belief rang true in the world of sales training. In the past, sales has done a disservice by being in the business of creating human doings not human beings. The philosophy existed that if you “do this and do that” you will create results.

Today, we see that who you are matters as much or more than what you do. We have seen too many examples of Harvard MBAs who are sitting in jail because of their misbehavior.

Continue reading →