Customer knowledge Archives - Page 2 of 5 - Strategic Account Management Association

Customer Engagement, Learning & Development, Value co-creation, Webinar

How to Make Strategic Customer Engagement a Top Competitive Advantage in 2024

The Congruity Group

In today’s dynamic business environment, where customer expectations are continually evolving, building and maintaining strategic customer relationships is critical to organizational success.

To help revolutionize your approach to customer engagement and create a lasting impact on your company’s growth, we’ d like to share a recent webinar organized by our friends at The Congruity Group. Click here to check it out.

Led by Tony Bodoh and Juli Clark of The Congruity Group and special guest, Mark Williams, from McKinsey & Company, this free webinar is designed to equip the C-suite, sales, and customer success leaders with the insights and tools necessary to validate alignment with your most strategic customers and cultivate meaningful connections as a strategic business advisor.

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Healthcare, Uncategorized

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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