Strategic Account Management Association

KAM Leader Series: Delivering for Customers

By Tania Lennon, Global Space Lead, Talent Assessment and Leadership at ZS and Denise Juliano, Vice President, Life Sciences Premier Inc.

SAMA is proud to offer this 2nd article in the 4-part series on the importance of SAM / KAM leadership. In this series we explore the key capabilities that drive the success of great KAMs and KAM Leaders. Using the experiences of four amazing KAM leaders underpinned by research into KAM leader capabilities for success from ZS, this series of four articles illuminates the foundations of high performance in KAM leadership roles. In addition, this panel of four leaders will be featured at our Annual Conference, May 23-25 in New Orleans. Register here to join us.

Customer expectations are rising. According to salesforce.com, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and 62% expect them to adapt based on this insight (1). For KAMs, this often means co-creating solutions with customers as an approach to radically refocus the business around customer value creation (2). Denise Juliano shares her approach to creating solutions that deliver mutual value for customers and clients.

“I’m an athlete by background – I’m really competitive. And that translates into business intensity. I give 120% to everything I do.” Throughout her career, Denise has successfully channeled this drive into delivering outstanding performance, whether as a sales leader, marketing leader or key account manager. Denise’s performance orientation has propelled her to take on new challenges and overcome obstacles by channeling a desire to continuously learn and adapt.
While leveraging her intensity was a core foundation for her success, Denise also had to learn to utilize it confidently. “Women sometimes struggle with intensity – they are often expected to be more passive and less assertive. That means the same behavior can be perceived differently.” Denise’s experience aligns with the research, which suggest that assertive behavior from women can be perceived negatively (3), even while it is key to driving successful outcomes. However, Denise describes a strong sense of mission in finding a way to deliver for customers. “I always try to find a way to yes – there always has to be a way to figure out a solution. I use my intensity as a way to push things forward.”

Harnessing the power of others
When it came to her role in strategic accounts, Denise learned to harness and modulate this drive. “In strategic accounts, the level of complexity and diversity increases. That requires balance: leveraging your own strengths while tapping into the strengths of others to create something that is more than the sum of all parts.” According to Harvard Business Review, the number of people involved in B2B solutions has increased from 5.4 two years ago to 6.8 today (4). “In today’s environment, the secret of being a great KAM is being patient and adaptable. You need to put yourself in others’ shoes and communicate using the client’s language, so they can really see the solution.”
From Denise’s perspective, getting the balance right also means giving others the space they need to step up. “I try to encourage everyone to lead, to see themselves as a leader. This means cultivating an environment where everyone can be themselves and where it is okay to take risks. That’s especially important for women, as they have a tendency to wait until everything is absolutely perfect, whereas men are more likely to step forward even when it is not 100%.” Creating the conditions that enables people to be themselves and take more risks is proven to be good for business. A climate that fosters inclusion generates improved well-being amongst the team, higher profitability, greater sales revenue and bigger market share (5).

Finding your superpower
Denise’s willingness to seek input and ideas also extends to her own development. “I’ve always sought out mentors and sponsors – I try to be open to coaching and feedback, both from those who know me and those who don’t.” This openness has enabled Denise to develop a strong sense of self-knowledge. “To be successful as a KAM leader, you need to know your strengths and weaknesses: you need to know your superpower and capitalize on it. And the things I don’t love to do or am not so great at are opportunities to bring others to the table. I try and surround myself with people who really complement you. Finding talent that is different to you can be a way to expand possibilities.”
There is accumulating evidence that playing to your strengths is an effective strategy for success. Strengths-based leadership has been linked to positive business outcomes such as profitability, customer satisfaction and leader confidence (6). The starting point for leveraging your strengths is identifying those outstanding capabilities and characteristics that define you, then owning them and investing in the additional knowledge and skills necessary to fully capitalize on them (7). This is especially important for women, as research tells us that female leaders tend to underestimate their strengths (8). Female leaders tend to show less confidence in their strengths and abilities, even when other raters see them as being as effective or even more effective than others (9).

Compassion enables risk-taking
In addition to self-knowledge, Denise also highlights the importance of being kind to yourself. “My intensity means I apply high standards to myself. I’ve had to learn to allow myself space to make mistakes in the same way as I extend that to others.” Kindness to yourself – known as self-compassion – can be a further tool in the armory of high performing KAMs. Self-compassion facilitates calculated risk-taking and innovation because it reduces fear of failure (8): it also increases levels of engagement and connectedness with others (9).
From Denise’s perspective, compassion and empathy for self and others has been even more important in the context of hybrid and remote working. “While we’ve always been remote, we’ve put a lot more focus on culture lately. We’ve worked hard to make sure people have a voice as it can easily be lost when everyone is behind a camera. It is easy for louder voices to drown out the others and we can lose vital insights that way. You need to actively seek out input from everyone to make sure that you’ve enabled everyone to contribute their ideas. You may be surprised to find out who has all the answers!”

Tania Lennon is Global Space Lead, Talent Assessment and Leadership at ZS. You can find her on LinkedIn.Denise Juliano Group is Vice President, Life Sciences Premier, Inc. You can find her on LinkedIn. You can hear from this panel of four leaders at our Annual Conference, May 23-25 in New Orleans.

1. Salesforce.com (2020). What are customer expectations and how have they changed? https://www.salesforce.com/resources/articles/customer-expectations/

2. Lusch, R. F., & Vargo, S. L. (2006). Service-dominant logic: reactions, reflections and refinements. Marketing theory, 6(3), 281-288.
3. Mensi-Klarbach, H. (2014). Gender in top management research: Towards a comprehensive research framework. Management Research Review.
4. Zoltners, A. A., Sinha, P. K., Lorimer, S. E., Lennon, T., & Alexander, E. (2020). Why women are the future of B2B sales. Harvard Business Review.
5. Herring, C. (2009) Does Diversity Pay? Race, gender and the business case for diversity. American Development Review, 74(2), 208-224.
6. Harter, J.K., Schmidt, F.L., & Hayes, T.L. (2002). Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 268-279.
7. Clifton, D.O., & Harter, J.K. (2003). Strengths investment. In K.S. Cameron, J.E. Dutton, & R.E. Quinn (Eds.), Positive organizational scholarship (pp. 111-121). San Francisco: BerrettKoehler.
8. Kay, K., & Shipman, C. (2014). The confidence code: The science and art of self-assurance – what women should do. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers.
9. Herbst, T.H.H. (2020). Gender differences in self-perception accuracy: The confidence gap and women leaders’ underrepresentation in academia. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 46(0), a1704
10. Neff, K. D., Hsieh, Y. P., & Dejitterat, K. (2005). Self-compassion, achievement goals, and coping with academic failure. Self and identity, 4(3), 263-287.
11. Neff, K. D., Kirkpatrick, K. L., & Rude, S. S. (2007). Self-compassion and adaptive psychological functioning. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 139-154.

Uncategorized

KAM Leader Series: Insight into Customer Needs

By Tania Lennon, Global Space Lead, Talent Assessment and Leadership at ZS and Renae Leary, Chief Commercial Officer Americas, Ansell

In this series we explore the key capabilities that drive the success of great KAMs and KAM Leaders. Using the experiences of four amazing KAM leaders underpinned by research into KAM leader capabilities for success from ZS, this series of four articles illuminates the foundations of high performance in KAM leadership roles. In addition, this panel of four leaders will be featured at our Annual Conference, May 23-25 in New Orleans. Register here to join us.

The foundation for success for Key Account Managers (KAMs) is insight into the needs of customers. Understanding the needs and priorities of others emerges as one of the most important drivers of success for leaders: leaders who succeed in achieving their potential demonstrate around three times more empathy than those whose do not show high levels of interpersonal insight or organizational insight. Renae Leary describes how this capability is at the heart of KAM success.

According to Renae, developing empathy and strategic insight is not easy. “While technical KAM skills can be learned, the key to creating a strong value proposition for customers is understanding their unique needs. The better your insight, the more likely it is that you will be able to see opportunities that others cannot.”

Renae’s marketing background was a key lens to generating deep customer insight. “Marketing is all about leveraging data and information to create insights from a range of different perspectives. These enable you to understand the market, the organization, the customer and their competitive environment.” Fundamentally, Renae suggests that customer insight is about tuning in to customers. “Whether you use Voice of Customer, Voice of Market, formal research or just glean insights from your ongoing conversations and through your networks, the heart of understanding customer needs is really good listening.”

Insight forms the foundation for value propositions
This process yields deep insight as the foundation for co-creating value propositions to address unique customer needs and build strong relationships. It requires a level of long-term investment to generate these insights and use them to forge robust partnerships. Based on Renae’s experience, this level of investment can generate up to twice the growth of other customers. However, choosing the right accounts is vital. “The default position is often to choose the largest accounts. However, you need to look beyond size to factors such as growth potential and willingness to partner. A partnership is composed of at least two parties. Without partnership, it is a service relationship that does not offer the chance to expand value through co-creation.”

While building trust-based partnerships is primarily a person-oriented activity, KAM research suggests that we can leverage multiple channels to create broader trust in the organization. The multi-channel environment creates the opportunity to shape the customer’s overall experience with your organization. The notion of ‘social client relationship management’ is about engaging the customer in a ‘collaborative conversation’ across multiple channels, with the KAM as the main custodian and orchestrator of the customer experience.

Insights are strengthened with a team approach
While KAMs and KAM leaders are at the forefront of customer insight, Renae describes how adopting a team-based approach enhances the ability to deliver to customer needs. “To really generate deep customer insight, you need to look at the account and the market through different perspectives. That’s where the leadership element becomes vital. KAM leaders are able to pull a team around the customer to create a shared sense of ownership and accountability. That way everyone is concerned with both understanding and meeting the needs of customers.” And what is the secret of creating this sense of alignment and ownership across the account team? “Communication, communication, communication,” says Renae. “I get so much benefit from connecting with people. It gives me a chance to learn from them and enables me to share insights and priorities with them – people stop reading emails.” Renae likes to take the opportunity to bring people together and ‘work the problem’ on the whiteboard.

Customer Insight forms the core of account strategy
Customer insights are shaped together to identify underlying themes and anticipate likely market developments. “Seeing the bigger picture is vital. KAM leaders look for the underlying trends and focus on longer-term profitability. That’s one of the ways in which key account management differs from sales. Sales cycles are shorter: you win the sale and move on. Key account management is about creating a sustained relationship that generates mutual value over many years.”

The ability to see the bigger picture consistently emerges as one of the drivers of high performance in leadership roles and KAM roles. Outstanding leaders draw on seven characteristics to support them in shaping strategy: conceptual thinking ability, visionary thinking, creativity, analytical thinking ability, learning ability, synthesizing ability, and objectivity. This diverse array of characteristics supports one of the factors that Renae feels is most important to connect with a wide range of customers in a dynamic environment – make it simple. “As a KAM, you have to understand different customers at different levels of maturity. The more you can communicate clearly and simply to them, the better – lots of pictures and diagrams.” That sort of simplicity requires high levels of strategic thinking to synthesize complex multi-faceted data and boil it down to its core elements.

Key capabilities for identifying customer needs
Renae’s insights highlight two of the key capabilities for success as a KAM leader: IQ and EQ. The IQ element is the strategic thinking capability that is important for gaining insights about customer needs from a broad range of analytical sources to identify key trends and underlying needs. The EQ element is the empathy needed to elicit information about the personal and business needs of customers using open questions and deep listening. These are sophisticated capabilities that are difficult to develop, which is one of the reasons why KAM is often described as an ‘apprenticed skill.’ Women often demonstrate build customer relationships using approaches grounded in EQ, especially deep listening, while men are more likely to build relationships founded on common interests. For both men and women, it is important to ensure the right balance between the IQ and EQ components. Interpersonal insights are a powerful source of information: they are most valuable when they are balanced and validated with additional data. In the next article in this series, we’ll explore how KAM leaders can fully capitalize on diverse perspectives.

Tania Lennon is Global Space Lead, Talent Assessment and Leadership at ZS. You can find her on LinkedIn. Renae Leary is Chief Commercial Officer Americas, Ansell. You can find her on LinkedIn. You can hear from this panel of four leaders at our Annual Conference, May 23-25 in New Orleans.

Strategic account manager skills and competencies

Mastering competing demands in strategic account management by embracing paradoxical thinking

By Javier Marcos, PhD, Director, Key Account Management Forum

Strategic account managers face increasing pressure from their strategic customers in the form of enhanced quality of service expectations, growing product requirements and further customization of their offers, amongst others. To respond to these pressures effectively and to grow business with their strategic accounts, SAMs need to address a number of competing demands such as internal and external orientation, short- and long-term goals and top- and bottom-line financial outcomes.

In this article, I will explore some of the paradoxes strategic account managers face and provide an approach to managing them constructively in the pursuit of sustainable value creation with strategic accounts.

Imagine, if you will, a day in the life of Sam Richards, a strategic account manager working for TechCo, a digital technology company. She starts her workday at 8:30 AM in a meeting with her team to conduct the final review of next year’s operational and delivery plan for her strategic customer, a large oil and gas company we will call OilCo. From there, she goes on to the performance and development review of one of the team members before participating in a virtual meeting with OilCo to present next year’s operational plan. It’s an important meeting to which TechCo is committing significant resources. The hope, for Sam and her team, is that the success of the operational plan will open opportunities for developing a new generation of services – not just for OilCo but potentially for other customers as well.

Following a short break for lunch, Sam meets colleagues to discuss future systems architecture and then attends another technical meeting to familiarize herself with the latest cybersecurity solutions TechCo is developing.

Afterwards, she attends a budget and forecast meeting with Chris, a senior colleague from Finance before being invited to participate in the compensation committee to discuss next year’s incentive plans. After that, she has a short catch-up with a colleague from Legal to discuss some clauses of a new contract.

Before leaving for the airport for a work trip, Sam attends one last virtual meeting with a marketing director from OilCo to discuss some issues they are facing with data integration and consolidation.

Looking at Sam’s daybook, you can see that her time is split between internally and externally oriented tasks. How she chooses to invest her time will determine the extent to which she is able to achieve the ambitious outcomes she needs for her organization and OilCo. But she also faces other competing demands: between activities that drive short-term gains versus those meant to build capability for long-term revenue growth. Like most account managers, she needs to find a way to handle both top-line and bottom-line growth with her strategic accounts.

All sales professionals face strategic dilemmas when it comes to managing their pipeline. Should they prioritize growth within existing customers or focus on acquiring new ones? When looking at opportunities and bids, should they focus on smaller but more secure deals or larger, riskier ones?

Managing a team also requires Sam to balance competing priorities. Does she increase decision-making quality by involving more people or speed up decision making by involving fewer people? Is she better off motivating her team through financial rewards or intrinsic motivation? Promoting individual performance or stressing overall team performance?

Paradoxes exist in everyday life. How leaders choose to address them has become a crucial dimension of leading a modern organization. Paradoxes are contradictory, yet interrelated. They exist simultaneously, and one cannot be disentangled from the other. Paradoxes persist over time. Leaders ignore them at their peril.

The situations that strategic account managers face entail such complexity that focusing only on one of the poles outlined above (e.g., top-line vs. bottom-line growth) will rarely provide optimal answers. For Sam to succeed, she will need to facilitate the continuing investment of internal resources to develop innovative products and services for OilCo. These investments are significant, so she will need to ensure healthy profit margins for the account to justify these investments. But she will also need to bid for new work streams and contracts with OilCo, where she will face competition from other technology providers.

In highly volatile, demanding and intensely competitive contexts (i.e., in today’s climate), making trade-offs between two approaches seldom drives meaningful value creation. Rather, the current environment requires novelty, holistic approaches, flexibility and new ways of ensuring sustainability. Take the hospital business, for instance. Hotel companies need to both develop novel ways to provide a superior guest experience while also maintaining high safety standards to prevent COVID-19 in their hotels. In life sciences, companies need to implement a holistic approach to respond to the varied, often competing, demands coming from diverse stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, payers and hospital management executives. I could cite similar paradoxes facing companies in manufacturing, logistics, professional services and other sectors.

The question then becomes how can strategic account managers deal with these paradoxes and competing demands in ways that enable alignment and deeper engagement with their clients, ideally resulting in above average growth? When faced with competing demands, people usually adopt one of three approaches.

#1: Trade-off. In this approach, leaders evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each choice and then select the option that best meets their objectives. Very often, to address these competing demands, executives take a trade-off “either/or” approach. They evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each choice and then select the option that they think best meets a particular goal. For instance, in pursuing the accomplishment of the annual sales quota towards the end of the period, one could consider the tradeoff between upselling/cross-selling to existing customers versus advancing deals with new customers. This approach is likely to result in accomplishing one objective at the expense of the other.

#2: Compromise. Fundamentally, this approach addresses the integration of elements from both options to find an improved alternative. For instance, a classic paradox from the innovation management literature involves the tension between exploration and exploitation. Exploration is focused on identifying and investing in new technologies and new capabilities to develop new value propositions. Exploitation, on the other hand, emphasizes scalability and efficiency in the use of existing resources. In addressing business growth, a leader may feel the need to compromise between exploration and exploitation.

This, however, may not be an optimal choice. In today’s marketplace, long-term success requires excelling at both exploration and exploitation simultaneously. Excessive internal focus can limit the search for new opportunities in the marketplace, while excessive external focus can hinder the commitment needed internally to resource the execution of strategic account plans.

#3 A third approach, different from the trade-off and the compromise, can be defined as engaging. The approach relies on identifying and in engaging the synergies of opposing alternatives. As an example, Unilever engaged concurrently the “profit” and “purpose” paradox back in 2010 when the company set out to grow its business while also increasing its positive social impact and reducing impact on the environment. Unilever’s mission today is “making sustainable living commonplace,” illustrating its commitment to engage in finding the synergies between the two goals of profit and purpose.

Paradoxical thinking is challenging, given the temptation to focus on one alternative at the expense of another, swing from one extreme to the other or get stuck in the middle and miss out on the benefits of either pole.

You may be thinking, why bother, when embracing paradoxical thinking doesn’t come naturally to most of us? Because encouraging tensions in managing our complex and strategic accounts can yield promising and novel results. Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever, said this: “Stressing tensions puts pressure on how we use resources and lower costs as well as on how we innovate.”

Tom Muccio, Procter & Gamble’s former president of global customer teams, based the company’s strategy to grow with its key account Walmart by adopting a paradoxical thinking approach, enhancing relationships with buyers and simultaneously with other functions (logistics, IT, operations and supply chain). By doing so, Muccio enabled mechanisms to not only solve day-to-day operational problems but also to implement the “reinventing the future” strategy, a long-term-oriented framework to bring about mutual growth for both the retailer and the manufacturer.

Paradoxical thinking often helps to surface assumptions, thus enhancing the quality of decision making. Rolls-Royce evolved from being “just” an admired engineering company to also being an innovative provider of advanced services and power solutions in Aerospace, Land & Sea. Their servitized business model has become an inspiration for many other companies in a range of sectors. Only by holding a paradoxical mindset could one envisage the design of an organization that simultaneously excels at creating dependable products while also offering complex services to customers. The service-oriented model that Rolls-Royce pioneered created innovative revenue mechanisms that better align the interests of the company and those of its customers.

Developing paradoxical thinking can also help us identify new strategic options and capabilities that otherwise may have lain hidden. While linear thinking would lead one to believe that businesses are better off focusing exclusively on developing their core capabilities, highly dynamic business environments require the ability to expand services beyond core offerings. Everyone knows Amazon as one of the world’s largest online marketplaces, but not everyone realizes that Amazon Web Services (AWS) owns a 32 percent share of the world’s cloud services market. And while AWS may contribute only modestly to Amazon’s overall revenue, it accounts for a large share of Amazon’s total profit.

Some organizations proactively create and foster paradoxical thinking. Lego, for instance, identified 11 management paradoxes, and they encourage managers to consider them in the context of their contribution to the company. Lego encourages its leaders “to be visionary” but also “to keep one’s feet firmly on the ground.” The company pledges to “aim at consensus” while also being “able to cut through.” Leaders at Lego are encouraged “to be dynamic” and also “to be reflective.”

In 1973, the design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber coined the term “wicked problems” to describe challenges that are ill-defined, ambiguous, subjective and too complex to be solved by rational systematic processes or by pre-defined solution concepts.¹ In today’s world, characterized as it is by high levels of interconnectedness and increasing complexity, key customers will look to their most strategic suppliers for solutions that are non-trivial and non-obvious. They will – explicitly or implicitly – demand that their suppliers put forth the effort to help them address “wicked problems” that affect their businesses and their customer bases.

Your strategic accounts will surely face wicked problems, if they are not already. Whether it’s redefining their business models in times of pandemic, finding new energy sources to help combat climate change, connecting highly disrupted global supply chains, diversifying technologies to counter the scarcity of components, engaging a productive workforce with unconventional values and attitudes… your strategic accounts are experiencing wicked problems. Addressing them requires paradoxical thinking, and thus, strategic account managers need to develop the ability to think paradoxically by embracing seemingly opposed strategic options. They need to leverage resources creatively to help their customers achieve their goals, which often have conflicting and paradoxical dimensions.

To use a sports analogy, strategic account managers may need to become triathletes. In sports, your physical features may favor one particular discipline (say, swimming) over others (say, running). In triathlon, participants need to train to develop strength simultaneously in swimming, cycling and running, as winning a triathlon requires the holistic and simultaneous development of all. Likewise, effective strategic account management requires the ability to engage simultaneously commercial, relational and operational agendas.

Account managers will need to develop ambidexterity to seamlessly navigate across both the long- and the short-term dimensions of their customers’ strategies. To do this successfully requires more than just account managers who are willing to embrace new ways of thinking. They also need an organizational environment and governance systems that acknowledge and recognize both outcome-based and measurable financial performance as well as activity-based, behavioral performance. A balanced combination of both enables SAMs to better align their companies’ priorities with their customers’ requirements and ambitions.

Paradoxical thinking can enable account managers to find an optimal balance between stability and change – in other words, to accelerate process improvement with their key accounts and consolidate and preserve the stability of resource allocation decisions. At the end of the day, the success of strategic account management programs requires sustained commitment over time.

If you, like Sam Richards, experience competing demands in your work, reflect on your default approach and consider paradoxical thinking as a way to better engage with these seemingly conflicting demands.

Javier Marcos, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Strategic Sales Management and Negotiation at Cranfield School of Management (UK) and the Director of the Key Account Management Forum. You can find him on LinkedIn.