New Sales Enablement Ideas – SAVO’s AMPs, Part 2 – Strategic Account Management

In the second of an eight-part series, we continue our focus on SAVO’s AMPs. (Read part I HERE.) Today, we take on strategic account management. Years ago, SAVO’s John Aiello realized the chasm in many organizations between what marketing was producing and what sellers were telling customers. To solve this problem, he founded a consulting firm intent on closing that gap.This firm quickly defined the Sales Enablement space and designed a technology that enabled sellers to do their jobs more efficiently and with better results. SAVO is reaching back to its consulting roots and packaging services with its technology offerings (AMPs), to help leverage what they have learned in the past 10-plus years about the importance of strategic relationships.

Answer some questions to decide if closing this gap is important for you:

• How much of your revenue comes from your top 10 accounts? (I have worked with many companies where it spanned between 10% and 40% of revenue.)

• What percent of wallet share do you have in these accounts? (Most often these accounts represent revenue that must be retained, but can be grown significantly. But, you don’t grow this by just selling more products, you need to be consultative (we covered that topic in part one of this series), and your sellers must be strategic.

• Can I afford to lose this customer? These large customers may or may not be your most profitable, but the revenue you earn from them may be covering many costs that would require you to significantly retool your organization if they took their business elsewhere. This alone could be a reason to apply strategic account management.

Bernard Quancard, the President and CEO of SAMA, explains the important role of strategy in selling, “The recent past has seen companies doing what they needed to survive: cutting costs, preserving cash and focusing on the short term and the bottom line. But today, companies are once again focused on driving growth by creating value through innovation with customers. No initiative is better suited to lead this charge than strategic account management.”

In some companies, these key accounts can reach hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars. In these cases, the key point of contact must be elevated from strategic account manager to general manager of the account. No matter the size of your top accounts, applying strategy doesn’t have to be a mystery.

Selection

Before you go to the effort of training account teams and providing strategic account planning tools, you must ensure the accounts meet minimum thresholds. Some may be very definitive (e.g., number of employees, revenue or industry). Many will be subjective (e.g., relationship, propensity to outsource, behavior, perceived value of your services). You need to determine which accounts need you to turn up the volume via strategic account management.

Build Team

You don’t grow large accounts without a team approach. Develop a collaborative team that includes cross-functional experts from the seller’s world as well as members from the buyer’s organization. This always seems like an early step, but I would suggest holding off on this one until you move through the next step. When it is time to assemble a team, you need a place to collaborate — a place to keep your plans and tools. SAVO knows this and provides a electronic war room to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Develop Strategy

It’s difficult to identify all team members needed to grow this relationship if you don’t have a strategy. Your firm likely develops strategies in many parts of the company. You can harness you own best practices to build out a framework for strategic development. This is where many over complicate things. Think about the basics: client profile, situation analysis, relationship status, value drivers, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, team structure, client team structure, vision statement and tactical plan. A company such as SAVO can help you determine what belongs in your strategic client plans and provide templates to integrate with technology.

Communicate

The person in the role of strategic account manager must be skilled in the art of influence without authority, as he or she will often coordinate the efforts between many departments. Communication templates and standards ensure everyone involved knows what to do. SAVO consultants ensure you use best practices of sellers with these skills and that you promote those success factors throughout the organization.

Measure

Conducting the Client Business Review at regularly scheduled intervals is key to collaborating with the client. Tracking the strategic plan’s progress and planning for the future is key to success. SAVO has leading-edge thinking about how to develop business reviews that provide value and drive future conversations; they bring in Data-Driven Assets (DDA) to ensure that sellers can customize communications with just a few clicks to produce relevant charts.

While it’s difficult to sum up such an important business practice in a short blog post, our friends at SAVO have been able to simplify this topic, and they are ready to help you develop your strategic account management program.

This post also appeared as a guest post on SAVO’s blog.

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