value co-creation Archives - Strategic Account Management Association

Announcing a new way to track and manage your most important customer relationships

The Strategic Account Management Association and Arpedio announce a joint development agreement that continues SAMA’s ongoing commitment to bring forward tools that enable the work of strategic and key account managers.

SAMA and Arpedio, the Danish provider of sales and strategic account management insights and software, have announced a partnership to create a cutting-edge tool designed for strategic and key account managers to objectively assess their customer relationships and then progress through a value co-creation journey using SAMA best practices.

A recent survey of the SAMA community identified developing SAM-enabling tools as the community’s most urgent area of need, bringing into focus what continues to be an area of strategic focus for SAMA.

“Strategic account management enablement is all about tools, training and coaching,” said SAMA President & CEO Denise Freier. “This new feature uses as its organizing principle our SAMA intellectual property and best practices around value co-creation, and it can be used to coach teams around that process.”

We see it as an ideal complement to our existing, long-term technology partnership with Valkre, which offers a complete and progressive platform for enabling the work of the SAM as prescribed by the SAMA Playbook. We will continue to leverage Valkre’s offering in SAMA’s certification curriculum (CSAM), and the partnership with Arpedio just adds another digital tool companies can use to transform how they create value with their customers.

“Arpedio builds on its key alliance with SAMA to put SAMA’s knowledge in the hands of all strategic account managers,” said Ulrik Monberg, Founder & CEO of Arpedio. “Formalizing what has long been a key relationship between SAMA and Arpedio is a major milestone for Arpedio.”

The tool is ready to use and can be implemented in less than 30 minutes. To see how companies are already using Arpedio’s platforms to streamline stakeholder mapping, automate sales playbooks and bring discipline to the value co-creation process, read this article in the recent issue of Velocity magazine.

“We use Arpedio’s suite of tools ourselves to give a common structure and strategic lens to managing our most important customers. It’s quick, it’s easy to use and it’s powerful. It forces you to step back and say, ‘Where am I with this customer, and what do I need to do to get to the next step?’”
Harvey Dunham, SAMA’s Managing Director for Marketing and Strategy.

“SAMA has defined what makes a strategic account management program successful, and we provide a way of anchoring it in Salesforce CRM,” said Daniel P. Kallestrup, Business Development Manager for Arpedio. “It is the perfect match, resulting in professional execution, efficient teamwork and ongoing coaching.”

Please note: To take advantage of this tool, you must be using Salesforce as your CRM. For information on how this joint development agreement can help your SAM/KAM organization better manage its most critical customers, contact Harvey Dunham at dunham@strategicaccounts.org.

About SAMA

The Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) was founded more than 50 years ago to help expose B2B companies to tools, methods and processes that enable them to forge closer relationships with their most strategic customers and co-create new sources of sustainable, customer-driven growth. We help companies become essential to their most strategic customers through competency-based training, conferences in Europe and North America, publication of original research and customized services like benchmarking and peer-to-peer learning.

About Arpedio

Arpedio is a sales-enablement company and full-stack Salesforce.com consulting company operating globally in a dynamic, cross-functional and complex sales environment in a variety of industries. Learn more here.

Case study, Industrial goods

A co-creation expedition with a strategic account: Air Liquide and STMicroelectronics

By Lorenzo Castrogiovanni, Strategic Accounts Director, Air Liquide, and Mustapha Bouraoui, Vice President for Strategic Marketing, STMicroelectronics

In March 2019 SAMA honored Air Liquide and STMicroelectronics as co-winners of the 2019 SAMA Excellence Award for “Implementation of specific customer engagement strategies enabling, and successfully impacting, the value co-creation process.” What follows is the case study that led to the award.

This is the story of Air Liquide’s successful cooperation with one of its strategic customers, STMicroelectronics, a leading semiconductor manufacturer delivering solutions that are key to Smart Driving, Smart Industry, Smart Home & City and Smart Things. By establishing a structured framework aimed at innovating together in the sphere of Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0, ST now sees Air Liquide not just as a strategic supplier but also as a true partner and a potential customer.

Before the implementation of this customer engagement initiative, Air Liquide enjoyed an excellent business relationship with its strategic customer ST. And yet, their exchanges were focused on the ST’s manufacturing and purchasing organizations, leaving Air Liquide with only limited access to the product- and application-development groups of ST.

The co-creation venture began when Air Liquide proposed to share its technological “pain points” and “constraints” associated with its own digital transformation to ST’s marketing managers and product developers — an overture ST welcomed for the reasons visible in the following chart.

Objectives from the perspectives of both traditional supplier (Air Liquide) and customer (STMicroelectronics)

Ultimately, this mutual engagement allowed ST to support Air Liquide in its digital transformation, providing guidance, ideas and solutions in order to speed up prototyping of use cases while at the same time allowing Air Liquide to share its vision and requirements with ST to help them to develop technologies and solutions for the broader industry.

For Air Liquide, the engagement offered an opportunity to receive support for its digital transformation directly from a global industrial semiconductor leader while enhancing customer intimacy and positioning Air Liquide as a potential customer for ST. It also established valuable relationship capital beyond manufacturing and purchasing through a significant number of initiatives that are currently under development.

This initiative sits at the intersection of account management, customer experience, digital transformation and cooperative innovation.

Air Liquide and ST rolled out this engagement in several steps, over the course of approximately 18 months. Below is a brief outline, which can be utilized by any customer and supplier with similar mutual objectives.

Step 1: Identify the right counterparts on the customer side, develop a trustful and fluid relationship, agree on development steps and align around the mutual goals for the initiative.

Step 2: Identify high-level sponsorship on both sides.

Step 3: Identify key stakeholders on both sides. For Air Liquide, this included approximately 10 chief technology officers, for ST roughly 10 vice presidents of marketing and product development.

Step 4: Identify the key pain points and constraints of the customer’s current technological developments in the domain of Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0. For Air Liquide these included development of effective systems to track compressed gas cylinders, sensors to monitor the oxygen content in the blood, methods for measuring hydrogen flows in fuel cell vehicles and devices for predictive maintenance.

Step 5: Share pain points prior to the engagement to allow full preparation on the customer side.

Step 6: Run the“Innovation & Cooperation Expedition.” This full-day workshop provides a forum to exchange ideas and advice, and to collectively select the most promising elements for future collaboration.

Step 7: Establish a joint development roadmap encompassing additional networking opportunities, joint R&D activities and development of proofs of concepts (PoC) with the goal of eventually positioning the “supplier” to acquire the “customer’s” solutions.

Step 8: Present engagement outcome and shared roadmap to high-level sponsors to ensure support during the follow-up phase.

While this initiative has proven very successful, it did take time to implement because both sides had to enlist the participation of a relatively large number of executives, with busy schedules, and who needed to understand the project’s potential benefits. Additionally, Air Liquide had to engage all its chief technology officers and then formally identify all the technological constraints and “pain points” associated with every aspect of its digital transformation.

The project’s long horizon (18 months) also presented its own challenges, namely keeping stakeholders mobilized, motivated, open-minded and informed while the engagement unfolded. In the end, the results have proven extremely positive:

Relationships have been established between the various stakeholders on both sides, with the engagement followed immediately by a more in-depth exchange of information.

Air Liquide’s chief technology officers have received invaluable guidance in terms of examples, ideas and long-term vision from their ST counterparts.

Air Liquide and ST established a priority list of three potential PoCs, with accountable personnel assigned on both sides and a roadmap for future development. Moreover, additional ideas have been discovered in later discussions that may lead to additional projects.
ST has invited Air Liquide delegations to own initiatives usually devoted to ST’s own customers.

Ultimately, Air Liquide and ST plan to share the benefits of successful PoCs with other strategic customers of Air Liquide, thus leading to positive customer experience for Air Liquide, further customer intimacy between ST and Air Liquide, and new business opportunities for ST — a new virtuous circle of value co-creation among the three companies.

Ultimately, the progress of this initiative is monitored by both companies’ CEOs — a sure sign of a mutually beneficial customer-supplier relationship.

SAMA training and certification, Strategic account management process

Creating joint solutions: Drive execution and communicate value (Part 3)

By Phil Styrlund and James Robertson

In the first two posts of this series, we discussed how larger business forces are pushing companies to rethink how they work with their customers, and how the most advanced companies are responding by systematically plumbing their customers for insights they can use to jointly create new sources of business value. In this post, we move on to the fun part: creating joint solutions, driving execution and communicating the value.

Create joint solutions

In this crucial phase, the company and customer:

Agree on and apply an approach to creating joint solutions that leverage the enterprise resources, capabilities, enablers and strengths of each organization
Collaboratively engage in structured ideation and brainstorming to identify “beyond-the-product/-service” enablers and generate potential solutions
Screen solutions and enablers for inclusion, exclusion or further development considering their relevance, impact and feasibility
Align, engage, and commit relevant resources to develop the prioritized solution(s)
Value engineer to optimize the solution for impact and differentiation considering solution components and enablers that can be added, eliminated, elevated or reduced
Prototype and test the solution with emphasis on agile development — testing early and failing fast, at the lowest cost

At the outcome of this phase, both organizations have co-created a joint solution relevant to the prioritized opportunity and have agreed to move ahead to build and validate the business case, communicate compelling value and to pilot and then implement the solution, joint initiative or new business model.

Our proposed approach for creating joint solutions starts with a prioritized customer “CareAbout,” aligns relevant products and services, and integrates enterprise capabilities beyond the core product/service that impact what the customer and/or end-user cares about most.

A structured approach for creating joint solutions

Central to successfully creating joint solutions is the ability of each organization to leverage its enterprise-wide capabilities. Value enablers are defined as any asset, capability, company strength or resource beyond the core product or service offering. While the idea of drawing on relevant cross-business, enterprise resources to co-create solutions with strategic customers sounds logical, fundamental and simple, in our experience it’s not always easy — and not common practice.

For many co-creation initiatives, this is where the “rubber meets the road”: when the joint solutions team engages and requests relevant resources, beyond the product, from across the business. To facilitate access to solution enablers and support their integration into new, “beyond-the-product” offerings, we suggest the following:

Ensure executive-level support and communication of the “grander why,” i.e., why creating value with strategic. customers is central to your company’s strategy and success
Engage and align the “critical crowd,” i.e., relevant internal stakeholders — early in the process — well before you make a specific request to invest their time and resources.
Build a comprehensive list and categorize enabling capabilities around core value themes such as reducing cost, improving efficiencies, growing revenue and elevating the customer experience.
Identify customer and company gaps in capabilities, i.e., value enablers, that are missing yet critical to co-creating value. Determine if these are capabilities you can build, buy or source from elsewhere.
Identify and engage “owners” of key value enablers using the customer’s voice to articulate why these capabilities/resources are important, the impact on the customer’s business, the value to the company, the cost of inaction, the joint solutions roadmap and “what matters next.”
Leverage relevant enablers to co-create solutions using structured brainstorming and creative design thinking to generate concepts and potential solutions.
Move forward to prototype, test and refine your solution.

Communicate value and drive execution

In this phase, the company and customer:

Develop their business case and compelling customer value proposition
Establish and execute their plan to deploy the joint solution/initiative
Agree on a governance framework, project plan, scorecard and review cadence to drive joint initiatives forward, faster
Reflect to capture lessons learned, build on what’s working, and assess opportunities to adjust strategy and scale solutions

Quantifying and communicating compelling, differentiating value to key stakeholders within the customer’s organization, and to the customer’s customer, is fundamental and essential to the practice of co-creating value.

Ultimately, if the value of your solution is not recognized, believed in and accounted for, your company will not be able to capture and realize the value co-created in the joint solutions process.

Value propositions are a well-established, yet often poorly practiced, concept in sales and marketing. Through research we’ve established that fewer than 10 percent of customers see their suppliers “creating real value, and being worthy of a long-term strategic relationship.” As one customer commented on their supplier’s value proposition, “This sounds like brochure-speak.”

We need to ask ourselves the question, “Why do value propositions seldom resonate?” Based on our research and work with clients, we’ve established that when compelling value propositions DO resonate, it is because they:

Focus on what matters most to the customer
Clearly articulate the differentiating value of your solution compared to the best alternative
Are quantified in the customer’s currency
Provide evidence of impact and proof of your company’s ability to deliver

A compelling value proposition will include these characteristics.

We suggest a simple value creation framework to collaboratively develop your compelling, relevant, quantified and differentiating value propositions. The framework provides a non-prescriptive structure for communicating thought and enables authentic articulation of your joint solution’s impact on the customer’s top “CareAbouts.” This framework, structured around four words — them, us, fit and proof — assures relevance and resonance by aligning what you bring (i.e., your solution) with the customer’s major needs and priorities.

Them: What do they care about? We need to truly understand what our customers care about. What keeps them up at night? What are their key issues and concerns? What is important to them? How are they measured, paid, and rewarded?

Us: What do we have? Here’s where you articulate relevant products, services, and value enablers. What pertinent capabilities and assets can you bring, beyond and/or wrapped around core products and services?

Fit: How does what you have impact what’s important to the customer and customer’s customer? Quantify and describe the impact of your solution on the key issues, concerns and value drivers of your customer and customer’s customer. Articulate your solution’s difference compared to the next best alternative.

Proof: Prove it! Provide the examples and evidence of the value you will bring and demonstrate proof that you can deliver and execute.

Applying this framework guides us to create, articulate and quantify customer-centric value propositions that resonate and enable the company and customer to realize value created through the joint solutions process.

Like what you’ve just read and want learn more? The Summit Group facilitates SAMA Academy’s CORE 2 workshop, “Co-creation and quantification of value.” Click here to learn more about SAMA Academy, to see a list of upcoming workshops and to register.

This is the final installment of a three-part series. Read parts one and two.