Strategic Account Management Association

Understanding What Your Customer Needs to Solve

Key strategies from the healthcare and biopharmaceutical industry that any SAM can incorporate.

By Janice Nissen

As account managers in our respective industries, we have — no doubt — developed a detailed understanding of our customer’s journey. Identifying their pain points and how to solve them are, at this point, table stakes.

However, with the amount of variation that we now see in changing customer expectations, new channels of information and communication, and disruptors to traditional buying patterns, it becomes incredibly important that we, as account managers, are seeking a more holistic approach toward understanding of our customer’s journey.

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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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Strategic account manager skills and competencies

The Acumen Sextet: An Evergreen Framework for Account Management and Customer Success

By Noel Capon and Gus Maikish

This blog is an excerpt from an article in the Fall 2022 issue of Velocity Magazine.

In our book, Customers Win, Suppliers Win: Lessons from One of IBM’s Most Successful Strategic Account Managers, we share and analyze enduring best practices and principles of account and customer success management. We do so from our respective career perspectives as a researcher, teacher, and consultant (Noel) and an expert practitioner (Gus). Although account management has received significant attention — and is the rationale behind the growth of the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) — because of its obvious importance, our book takes a different tack by trying to understand what made one highly accomplished account manager consistently successful across more than three decades of change in technology, business trends, and boom and bust in the wider economy. What emerged were six skill sets, or acumens, that made this success possible. We believe our Acumen Sextet captures what account managers must master to do right by their own firms and their customers.

Strategic acumen

See the big picture for both the firm and the customer; engage in high-level resource-allocation decisions — for the firm and the customer — for both long- and short-term objectives. Strategic acumen requires a deep understanding of both organizations.

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