Posts from March 2012

8 Strategic Account Management Roles Every Company Needs to Know About

Is your account team playing all the right roles?

Ask leaders at companies how much more they believe they could be selling to their strategic accounts and you don’t hear 5%, 10%, or 20%.

It’s usually more like, “We should be selling 2 times…3 times…even more.”

Ask what’s in their way, you’ll often get this answer, “Our strategic account managers just aren’t doing what they need to do to penetrate the account, cross-sell, and keep the competition out so we can truly grow our accounts to their potential.”

The reasons vary why this is the case. But when it comes to the strategic account management team, eight of the reasons are predictable. There are eight distinct roles that must be played for strategic account management initiatives to deliver at peak potential.

Few companies define the roles and play all eight well.

The first step to changing this is to know what these roles are. So here you go.

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Prospecting with Old “Friends”: Making Outdated Leads Work

By Bob Croston

Are you taking the opportunity to reconnect?

If your firm is like most, you’ve been using CRM software for years now. Name after name, title after title, data point upon data point, you’ve likely stockpiled a huge amount of prospecting information through various lead generation activities. You’ve created countless records and guided each one through your sales pipeline.

What do you do with those records once you can no longer push them forward? Again, if your firm is like most, you probably leave them languishing in your database, perhaps with a sad “lost – chose competitor” or “dead – no budget” tag attached. But these are more than just dead data...

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Creating a Culture of Selling with Rainmakers: Part Two

By Mike Schultz & John Doerr

Are your rainmakers armed to succeed?

In our last post about building a rainmaking sales culture, we discussed the three areas of organizationally-controlled influences you need to address in order to create the best sales environment in which your sales team can thrive and succeed:

Organizational Influences:

1. Expectations and Feedback

2. Tools and Resources

3. Consequences and Incentives

In this post we will discuss how to make certain you have the best rainmakers and potential rainmakers working in that culture. We’ll look at the three factors that are a part of who is on your team, who can sell, and, just as importantly, who will sell. These 3 factors are...

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