SAM Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Strategic Account Management Association

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.

Continue reading →

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.

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 →