Posts with Category "Strategic Account Management"

Seller-Driven Demand: the Greatest Untapped Opportunity in Key Account Sales

Imagine for a minute you sold everything you should be selling across all of your firm’s capabilities to your existing clients. If all the buying centers bought all of the capabilities they should be buying, how much would your key account sales increase?

When people spend time analyzing this carefully, they find the potential to expand sales to existing clients is huge.

Given the great potential for growth, many companies give proactive key account sales quite the effort, but few achieve the results they should. The problem is they can’t, or for some reason simply don’t, create their own opportunities.

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How to Tackle the Hidden Killer of Account Growth

By Mike Schultz & John Doerr

All the strategies. All the meetings. All the planning.

All the effort you put in to maximizing your sales to existing accounts will be for naught if you don’t first talk about, and then do something about, this hidden killer of account growth.

Your people don’t trust each other.

We don’t mean everyone thinks the guys down the hall are all lying, cheating, sniveling Salty Sams. It’s often more subtle:

Your account leaders don’t know enough about the other areas of your business and how they operate to trust them with their most important relationships.
Your account leaders don’t know enough about what the other areas can help clients achieve to believe that their clients will be thrilled if they buy it.
Your account leaders have been burned in the past by bringing other people (or, perhaps, specific people) in, so, whether consciously or not, they avoid broadening the conversation.

Then again, it could be Saltysamism. It could be they doubt each other’s competence. Or that the product they sell isn’t so great. It could be a host of issues.

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Accountability in Strategic Account Management

By Mike Schultz

In our 5 Keys to Maximizing Sales with Existing Accounts report, we noted a number of different ways that organizations can shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to maximizing account growth. Compensation alignment and accountability are two big ones.

In our Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management, we found that high performers were more than twice as likely to have compensation and reporting structures aligned to support account growth. And, as well, high performers were much more likely to hold teams accountable.

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Sneak Peek at the Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management with Our SAM Infographic

By Mike Schultz

In our white paper Why Strategic Account Management Fails, we noted that high performers in strategic account management were significantly less likely to face 16 of 19 common challenges in strategic account management. We didn’t, however, have space to go into much detail in this specific area. Since publishing the white paper, we’ve been asked quite a bit for more detail on the specific challenges faced by companies that engage in formal strategic account management, and the differences between high performers and average / below-average performers.

Though access to the full Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management is reserved for one-on-one interactions and for our work with clients, we are happy to share this more in-depth look at some of the challenges that stood out to us...

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