Strategic Account Management

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Sitting in a war room planning account strategy is time and resource intensive. It takes our most senior people away from direct client contact and face-to-face sales activity and, whilst strategising can be fun, the ROI often proves elusive.

By definition, ineffective Account Management Strategies fail to achieve sales, they waste resources and carry significant opportunity costs: just a bunch of adults frittering away an expensive afternoon or worse, many afternoons. This is clearly not worth the trouble. However, it still begs the question, ‘is there anything out there that can improve business results, other than common sense and native wit?' Yes there is and we know how to help you implement a system of account management that is sustainable.

When so much in business and management has a poor evidence base, actually there is good evidence that structured approaches to Strategic Account Management yield productive long-term relationships and future business. More importantly, these approaches are teachable, and carefully applied, they will increase your sales. These approaches enable your senior sales and marketing people to work together in agreeing on direction and the detailed actions in support of the direction.

What we offer
Account management and the meetings that support it, is another of those organisational systems that is important, but hardly ever urgent. When the operational pressures begin to bite, it can quickly become an early casualty. We will help you build a sustainable infrastructure that secures a system so effective that it becomes resilient against attempts to sideline it when the heat is on. We will help you:

• Implement an evidence-based economical approach to account strategy that means effort is expended on effective, rather than ineffective techniques.
• Develop a set of systematic approaches so that you and your team work from common assumptions in strategic account planning; rather than bickering over definitions, frameworks and procedures they will be busy progressing the account management itself.
• Learn and implement techniques for effectively getting onto the customer's wavelength.
• Work to dedicated account management meetings processes that quickly identify the right actions, decisions and solutions.
• Build a disciplined coaching system for account managers that supports their efforts to sit down, research and properly plan their account management strategies, before going face to face with the client.
• Create a set of account management standards, and the audit procedures that tell if you are meeting your standards.
• Once the system is bedded in, we will help you create an ‘apprenticeship' model so that you can quickly bring new hires up to speed with your account management system, without needing to send them on a training course.
• Create the pro-formas and procedures for the entire strategic account management process; we will give you the basic templates provided in soft copy, royalty free.
• Address the crucial implementation issues with the Sales function and the senior executives who support the sales effort.

A summary of our approach

We work with you on issues of implementation, critical mass, and sustainability so that your investment isn't wasted. We don't just abandon you once you have filled in the happy sheets.

We teach you the systematic approaches, but we also get down and dirty in order to develop your skills in responding to challenging sales conversations on the fly. For more on this, see our item 'Selling Business Solutions'.

Two brief examples of development programmes we have run for our clients on Strategic Account Management.

At a leading software organization, we worked with teams in Switzerland , France , Germany , Holland and the UK to develop their account plans and account management. The teams consisted not only of those directly involved in sales, but also a wider group of those involved in servicing the account. This enabled a free flow of information, more rigor in challenging the competitiveness of plans and left all those involved in the account to be clear on their part in achieving the goals.

At an international IT Solutions company, we extended the Account Management process to include Senior Delivery Managers. These Delivery Managers had established long-term "trusted advisor" relationships with their Customers and could contribute wider intelligence about opportunities. Through the process, they gained a greater strategic understanding of their Customers' businesses to lever further sales opportunities.