Welcome to this second post in a three-part series we’re publishing on Account Management.
In Pt.1 we introduced account management and explained that the way your customers buy is changing.
Now, let’s get into how you need to evolve to make that change benefit you…
Existing customers are potentially your biggest revenue growth opportunity.
Indeed, the top five initiatives for organisations are typically Revenue Growth, Customer Retention, Profit Growth, Sales Effectiveness and Increased Revenue per Customer.
Four of these are lagging indicators, business results that come in some time after sales activity for a certain time period.
They correlate directly to account management effort and how well it is executed.
Consider this.
If your metrics and bonus structures incentivise your salespeople to just go after new business, you might be shooting yourself in the foot.
Because one customer who does business with you over, say, 10 years of a strong commercial relationship will probably be worth more to you than 10 new customers who might just buy from you once.
Many sales organisations feel that they’re not maximising the potential of their existing accounts.
That means account management professionals are leaving dollars on the table…and allowing competition to steal business from you.
What Are The Issues In Account Management?
So what are the issues here? What is preventing us from doing this?
The first issue is often lack of knowledge. In many cases, while account management professionals know what to do, they’re sometimes at a loss as to how to do it.
We make a sharp distinction between process and methodology.
Process is the ‘what’ you should do in order for you to get from A to B.
The methodology is the ‘how’ you choose to do it.
Account management, especially when it involves account teams, marketing departments and partner organisations, can be a complex task.
Information sharing and communication are critical.
Everyone needs to be on the same page, knowing the objectives and their specific role in accomplishing them.
When people are in different regions and don’t have the right tools at their disposal, then planning, updating and disseminating the knowledge and instructions becomes a major ordeal.
Properly aligning a global account team across regions, borders, languages and cultures, to act as one unit, helping each other, can be a very big task.
What Makes Great Account Management?
In CONSULTER’s experience, it is mostly lack of knowledge or field experience that is the most critical issue. So how do you create great account management?
There are five main areas to great account management. These are: Profile, segmentation, create opportunities, select and do.
Before you develop your ‘go to customer’ strategy, you first need to research your market. Only then can you begin to understand the profile of the market and your customer – the issues your customers think about and their organisational structure.
Some units of an account are more attractive than others. So, you need to segment the account — establishing which particular niches in the account are of high value to both you and your customer.
Once you’ve prioritised the segments in your account, then you can look to create new opportunities.
You must address your customer’s business needs as though they were your own.
Figure1: The context to account planning
You need to select the appropriate strategy to approach the account and focus on those areas that will provide maximum return on your efforts (so long as those returns are aligned with your customer’s needs).
With the right strategy in place, you need to focus on execution — building a business development plan for the account while leveraging marketing, partners and other resources to help you succeed.
If you adopt, use and keep using a structured account planning methodology, you’ll fix issues before it becomes too late, lose your way less often, and get to where you want to be.
In our final post in this series of three, we’ll walk you through how to profile your customer and segment your market for a more effective and sustainable sales strategy.