Insight Selling – The Key to Good Strategic Account Management
Are you leveraging insight selling for strategic account management? The strategic account management process is about building value-driven relationships with your key customers. It is a synonym of Key Account Management. The strategic account manager’s role is to identify those key customers that generate maximum revenue and profitability as compared to other regular accounts. These managers act as a bridge between the company and stakeholders on the customer side. The idea is to increase customer lifecycle value by starting small with a free trial or test project, adding value, and building trust. Insight selling may come across as a complex term but broken down into digestible shots is a simple term to absorb and practice. Insights that the seller offers the buyer during the entire buying journey, from the first call he makes to the email he writes, helps the buyers in their decision. The 3 Stages of Insight Selling for Strategic Account Management 1. Collaborate Collaborate with the buyer in discussions about his current situation. See if you can spot a problem or an opportunity. See if your buyer is trying to mitigate ‘pain’ or increase ‘pleasure’. Once you identify this part, collaborate with him in discussions on ideas of how to solve his problem or get a solution to his situation. The buyer needs a partner, a friend who thinks out of the box, who is not part of his team, yet is ready and willing to partner with him in ideas without getting into bean crunching. The buyer needs to see that the sales rep is proactive and willing to take things further in the long term. Once he sees that the sales rep is willing, the buyer begins to develop a liking towards the sales rep, which is the key step in building trust. 2. Persuade The moment sellers start looking at buyers as human beings like everyone around us is, they stop thinking of them as devils, who are there to pick a thorn in everything sellers have to say. In selling, it is called ‘stepping into the shoes of the buyer’ or ‘empathetic listening’. Whatever you label it, as sales reps we need to think from the buyer’s point of view. Some tips: What is the buyer looking for? Maximizing his ROI. Give him the numbers, the statistics, and case studies he needs to be convinced about a good ROI. Help him calculate, even. No harm! Be an expert not just on the product you are selling, but the pros and cons of your product and also the competitors’. More than that, make sure you know the numbers game like the back of your hand. Because the buyer first wants to know whether going with you is a rationally and financially correct decision. Convince the buyer that he is choosing a minimum risk, safe position, when he decides to go with you. Buyers, like you and me, are a frightening lot. Inwardly. They don’t show it. But remember, it is always lonely at the top; and making the right decision about something, which costs a lot of money may be a frightful moment for your buyer. Help him by providing case studies to show that when he goes with you, he is choosing a minimum risk position. Do not hesitate to focus on the risks involved with other choices, in case, he chooses those. A buyer will want your insights into his decision. You have already won him over by collaborating on the journey so far; now he wants you to help him take the final call. You are in a position of power but also in a position of immense responsibility. You have to talk about the risks involved clearly with his choice, but you also need to help him mitigate those risks. This will help the buyer partner with you. 3. Co-create Co-create with the buyer. Make the buyer feel that you are helping him make the right choice. If you haven’t already learned your lesson the hard way, the buyer dislikes it when the sellers try to hard sell or push their way down his throat. He is more inclined to consider buying from you if you make him feel that you are helping HIM make the right choice, and not pushing your choice on him. A key human emotion is that every person needs to reinforce the feeling to himself that he has taken the right decision. Help your buyer do that. Insightful and intuitive selling helps in building long-lasting, trusted relationships between the seller and buyer and goes a long way in building your Strategic Accounts, and also helps in better Key Account Management. If you liked our blog, you can also read about the 6 strategies of Cross-Selling. You can also explore our blog on cross-selling and up-selling in which we’ve elaborated how it can be used to grow business in 2021.
9 Quick Steps of Key Account Management Process
Key Account Management Process The title may make it all sound easy and that the Key Account Management process can be created in 9 easy steps. But as you may already know it isn’t that simple. However, the sooner begun, the better done. Let’s cut to the chase and start knocking out the 9 steps easy and quick. KAM Glossary: Crucial Account Management Terms Explained These 9 steps go over key account planning, setting up, implementing and reviewing a key account management process. Step 1: Building a Framework Build a Key Account Management framework that suits your needs, targets and goals. Define your Key Account Management journey including adherence to processes and the timeline for your targets. Build roadmaps with milestones and goal-setting. Step 2: Account Segmentation Identify and use analytical thought to determine what your key accounts are. Analyze both potential and current contribution to determine key accounts. Use analytical thinking to understand stakeholders and understand your key customers. This helps the sales team segment the client accounts into different buckets. This will enable salespeople to come up with the right strategic action plan based on account positions. Nearly 33% of a SaaS vendor’s revenue is usually a result of a few key accounts. Nurturing these key accounts and growing with those relationships is important to produce stronger results while lowering selling costs side-by-side. Segmenting key accounts, therefore, becomes essential for future growth. To learn more about the need for key account segmentation, the types of key account segmentation and various customer segmentation strategies, check out this blog here. Step 3: Defining Roles and Responsibilities Identify the major personas that will be involved with the key account management process – Account Management, Sales Enablement, Sales Leadership, Sales Ops, Revenue Ops etc. Determine what their roles will be, how it will play into your Key Account Management process. In addition, establish how they will collaborate with each other. Step 4: Draw up a Key Account Plan Blueprint This blueprint should clearly state the main direction, opportunities, and priorities for each Key Account. It should have a direct link to customer information and should be built as a collaborative effort between internal and external stakeholders. This should then be made available and accessible to all involved in the account. It is also important to check if you have had the customer involved and cued into this plan. Having clarity on which information is important and which is not is also essential. A large amount of information is of no use if it is not relevant information. In addition, it is important to have the information regularly updated, and in real-time ideally. Step 5: Get into Action The key is to get into action and have a clear plan. This should include pondering on questions like: This should include: What needs to be done? By when (clear timelines need to be specified and agreed upon and followed)? Who will be involved and who takes ownership? How will results or success be defined, measured, reviewed and communicated? What’s your troubleshooting plan? What are the roles and responsibilities of all parties involved? What is the escalation POA? Last-minute crisis in case the account is in danger? Step 6: Track, Monitor, and Recalibrate Account plans are dynamic and relationships keep changing. It is inevitable that you will lose some whitespaces, or miss out on some crucial data in the process. It is essential to keep track of Account Plans, continuously monitor changes and recalibrate based on these changes. In addition, a vital part of the Key Account Management process includes course-correcting plans along the way to ensure growth and progress in your accounts. Evaluate Now: Framework to Assess your Key Account Management Maturity Guide Step 7: Communicate with internal and external stakeholders The plan stays on paper if it is not shared and buy-ins are not done in time. Internal Stakeholders Internal stakeholders that are the team members need to know the customer status and value to be delivered at all interfaces. Clear roles need to be charted and communicated. A few questions need to be answered: – Is the customer status/value recognized at all touchpoints? – Regarding the proposition, what you will / will not deliver? – Are the roles of all of the account managers known? Read Now: Stakeholder Mapping for Key Accounts External Stakeholders Externally, customers need to have details of all members on his account. They need to be in agreement with the proposition, opportunities, priorities, and activity. Once again, there are a few questions that must always be dealt with: – Do customers on that Key Account have access to the details of the account team? – Are they bought into the proposition, opportunities, priorities, and all planned activities? – Have the KPIs been shared with and agreed by the customer? Step 8: Opportunity Planning As important as it is to manage accounts via Key Account Management framework, it is just as important to have a proven framework for Opportunity Planning. Having a framework for monitoring opportunities, opportunity planning & management capabilities ensures that you don’t rely just on your CRM for knowing your customers. Map stakeholders and identify potential hurdles, keep track of your team’s progress on large enterprise accounts. Use relevant intelligence to strategize and plan tactics to build a buyer-focused opportunity plan. Read Now: The Practical Guide to Sales Opportunity Management Step 9: Monitor, Control, and Review the Key Account Management Process This step checks the critical parameter and is the final determinant of success with regards to the following: – Value / profitability – Plan progress – jointly monitored efficiency – Whether the identified opportunities have materialized – Whether the Account management KPIs and SLAs have been achieved – Formal measurement of relationship quality using a formal evaluation process – Whether you would still place this account in the Key Accounts roster These nine steps, if followed diligently and exhaustively, will help you set the Key Account Management process in place and make it
Top 3 Highlights of Dreamforce 2019
Dreamforce 2019 Dreamforce – undoubtedly one of the largest tech events in the world. Salesforce’s massive event gathers more than 170,000 attendees at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco. Dreamforce 2019 was an electrifying week filled with innovation, excitement, and inspiration. 4 Days; 2,700+ sessions; 50+ speakers Did you get a chance to catch up on any of the keynotes or ‘fireside chat’ between Marc Benioff and Apple’s Tim Cook? But other than these wonderful conversations, there are few important highlights of Dreamforce 2019 which you need to know! Welcoming the Newbie – Tableau Since Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau for a whopping 15.7 billion in an all-stock deal in May, lots of efforts are put in to employ the massive capabilities of the leading analytics platform inside Salesforce. Salesforce has also made huge investments in AI which can boost Tableau’s efforts shortly. In the keynote, Adam Selipsky, President and CEO spoke about the need for building a data culture within every organization. Starting the keynote, Selipskya specified the merger as a “natural combination” to join Salesforce. In terms of fit & overlap, Selipsky and Benioff gave a high-level overview of what to expect. Anyways, users and partners can definitely expect some high-level analytical advancements in the Salesforce platform very sooner. ‘Hey Einstein’ – Voice to Customer experience ‘Hey Einstein’ is similar to Alexa or Google’s assistant but a more focused solution for the workplace. It’s all about bringing Salesforce closer to the community by introducing voice access to Salesforce data which will enable salespeople to quickly access data on the go and to ask the system questions about their data. Salesforce is soon launching a tool that will allow companies to quickly build basic Einstein skills to pull up data from Salesforce. Salesforce Chief Product Officer Bret Taylor gave a small demo and added that “We’re really excited about the idea of voice in businesses — the idea that every business can have an AI guide to their business decisions”. The list of announcements included. 1. Einstein Voice Skills Ready-made dialogue snippets and tools tailored toward specific roles or industries, designed to help “admins and developers to build custom, voice-powered Salesforce apps”, which could be rendered as Alexa Skills, Google Assistant Actions, or other tasks that can be carried out by voice assistants. 2. Service Cloud Voice Resources that closely integrate contact center functions with Service Cloud-based applications and services, enabling agents to avail themselves of Einstein in all its capabilities through a “unified agent console”. 3. Einstein Call Coaching Console for managers that use conversational data to spot trends and provide sales reps with best practices and insights to support designed to improve customer experience (CX). Trailhead GO One of the key announcements at Dreamforce was a deepening of the partnership between Apple and Salesforce. The Giants – Apple and Salesforce have jointly come up with a new companion app Trailhead Go – a sales coach and learning solution which is compatible with iOS and iPad OS. This also implies that no Android for now. Announced in Dreamforce and now integrated with the Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce has entered into the Edutech market providing its users and partners with the best technology resources. Though priced at $25, it’s worth it because of new enhancements of AI and Voice power. Also note that Salesforce has redesigned and launched its Salesforce Mobile app with advanced features like deeper analytics and insights to users, using Siri shortcuts and FaceID with Apple’s design features. It’s completely free and is available in the app store. Conclusion With all these exciting announcements about partnerships and developments, Dreamforce 2019 has ended up leaving us excited for the future of technology. What was your highlight of Dreamforce 2019? Write to us and also stay tuned for our next blog on ‘Account Planning sessions in Dreamforce 19 – Everything you need to know!’
Why Strategic Account Management Needs More Work than Normal Account Management
The strategic account management process is about building value-driven relationships with your key customers. It is a synonym of Key Account Management. The strategic account manager’s role is to identify those key customers that generate maximum revenue and profitability as compared to other regular accounts. These managers act as a bridge between the company and stakeholders on the customer side. The idea is to increase customer lifecycle value by starting small like with a free trial or test project, adding value, and building trust. Strategic account management is a function that more often than not, loses its criticality in the mire of operational account management. While most Account Directors and Managers wholeheartedly agree to the fact that Key Accounts need a different level of investment in terms of time, resources, and frequency, this still remains an area that does not receive its due. The reasons may differ but whatever the reason, the results of not paying heed to Strategic Accounts, are almost always the same – poor. So we know that we simply cannot afford to ignore Strategic Account Management. Account Planning Softwares can help optimize the time and effort in developing strategic account plans. The correct implementation and understanding of strategic account management are paramount to the growth of revenue. But let’s now understand ‘WHY’? It’s the old rule that has always worked – The 80-20 principle: The rule says that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Pay attention to this 20%. These 20% form your Key Accounts. It is like a gold mine – the more you dig, the deeper you will go and understand: You get to the gold, only as you dig deeper. Your strategic accounts are like a gold mine – Complex, deep, and not easily read. Just sitting on them is of no use, until you start digging and understanding the people there. How do they operate, who is the key man/woman in the hierarchy? Who is the influencer? How will he/she help me? Is my main influencer leaving that company? In that case, do I have a backup man? There’s nothing superficial about Strategic Account Management. You need to dig deeper and for that, you need an effective tool. Relationships have no formula. You got to try and make them work all the time: Strategic accounts involve many people across multiple functions, hierarchies, and geographies. Relationship mapping needs hard work and smart work. It is not an overnight heist. In cases that win equally on merit, the winner is usually the man who has won the customer’s trust. From this perspective, it pays to look into certain key questions: Are you assigning dedicated time to this key man/woman? Are you listening for cues to leverage the relationship and business? Are you reviewing the relationship? How often are you doing it? Do you have a relationship-building action plan? More than one key project at a time: Strategic accounts have more than one key project going on at the same time and you cannot afford to accord a step-motherly treatment to any. This means Account Directors need to be focused on each of these projects in equal measure. This requires creating strategic account managers for each project who are able, capable, and know the ropes of Key Account Management. It also requires training them on a regular basis. For a CSO or Account Director, it means creating a team of key people in order to achieve a superlative performance. A CRM is not enough: The key to strategic account management is making sense of the big data available to you. While a CRM may be giving you the data, you need to work on this big data, analyze it and leverage the findings to your benefit. He who uses big data to narrow down and get to the key focus areas is usually far more successful. The first step to focusing on your Strategic Accounts is to focus on them, use the right tools and leverage the findings by taking action. Also, learn how to set up your KAM process in 9 steps or read other blogs on strategic account management. Explore the complete guide to Cross-selling and Up-selling to identify unexplored opportunities for your business as well as your clients’ business and grow better in 2021.
Key Account Planning Simplified
If you are a key account manager, I understand what you go through every year during the account planning process. You want the key account planning simplified. Jacob is responsible for building the key account management strategy and executing the plan to achieve annual targets. Bridging the gap between planning and execution is a challenge, always. The even bigger pain point is getting started on and building the plan itself. He is required to spot the real opportunities for value creation and growth across the length and breadth of his Key Accounts. All this tends to become very overwhelming. Typically, this situation reaches a crescendo towards the end of the year when key account managers end up spending a month or two, preparing account plans for the next year. This is thanks to complex methodologies and visually appealing PPT templates that most of the times make the simple; complex. I am dumbstruck. I strongly believe that key account planning can be simple, and exciting. I encourage all key account managers to peruse the following checklist. DemandFarm has done its best to simplify. You will find this simplicity also reflected in the Account Planner. Do give Salesforce Account planning and MS Dynamics Account planning a shot when you are logged into your Salesforce or MS Dynamics instance. Key Account Planning Checklist The As-Is Account managers simply jump into the key account planning process. Investing time and focus to understand the current state of key accounts is a valuable intervention capable of giving the key accounts a much-needed direction. Knowing win/loss areas, active opportunities, the orientation of the contacts in the accounts, and the accounts’ market position with respect to the competition are valuable markers to establish the As-Is. Identify whitespace opportunities Once the as-is is done, key account managers have a clear sense of where the current growth opportunities lie. Juxtaposing those opportunities with competition and mapping them with internal capabilities opens up the ‘whitespace’. Simple. Align the sales process to the buying process B2B buying has changed. CEB had a data point which said, “57% of the purchase decision is complete before a customer even calls a supplier.” On similar lines, SiriusDecisions says, “67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally.” Therefore, Strategic account management Plan has to build strategies that proactively seek out opportunities. Getting an account landscape which identifies buying centers in the account and the ability to map them with internal products/solutions can align sales to the buying process. Learn More: Opportunity Planner by DemandFarm boosts tracking capabilities in 65+ opportunities for Dairy MAX Align the Plan to the annual account targets Account targets count. At the end of the year, it is the only thing that counts. Ironically, during sales account planning and execution there emerges a tendency to do more. This often distracts the account managers from the targets. Account planning and execution-only have to ensure strict adherence to strategies and initiatives that are directly linked to account targets. Nothing else matters. Not even a Metallica concert. Use a real-time tool The problem of making account plans in a PPT is this – it is passive and remains passive through the life of the account plan. It is only seldom that the KAMs revisit the PPTs to align their align and adjust their annual account plans. And it isn’t that the KAMs don’t want to. Updating account plans becomes an operational problem in an ever-changing environment. Dynamic, responsive and real-time updating account planning tools like the ‘Account Planner’ can support account managers by saving them from operational grunt work. How would you rate the account planning template& process of your organization? Simple or complex? What initiatives have you taken to simplify? What worked? What did not? What technology tools were leveraged to simplify and improve the process? If you’re interested in transforming your sales post the pandemic, explore our blog on Sales Acceleration in Account Management and how it can help you grow your business in 2021.
White Space Analysis Template for Key Accounts
What is White Space Analysis? White space analysis is the process of digging through the sales data to hunt for new white space opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling. White space is essentially a gap that a business can use to scale its revenue with its products / solutions / services. A simple yet powerful tool for locating White Space in key business accounts I have learned over the years that a business process and strategy can have powerful outcomes if it can be explained in a simple way. But ‘simple’ does not mean ‘easy’. It is often construed that way. Simplicity only makes understanding the problem easily. But arriving at the solution to the problem could still be hard. White space Analysis helps you to discover areas where you can grow your account, align and map your resources. This can help you identify your farming and mining white space opportunities. The analysis report provided can reveal some insight into what can be improved in the near future to increase sales and ROI. One of the ways to simplicity is to identify the two variables/parameters and put them on a two-dimensional X & Y-axis. Then think of various possibilities at a different position of this grid. I set out to build software for Key Account Management. One of the basic, but fundamental problem was to understand ‘Account Landscape’ and ‘Account Mapping’ to identify areas of growth in a Key Account. As usual, I started thinking of two variables – people on both sides. This means the products & services of both parties again, opportunities, strategic initiatives of the customer and of my company, global footprint of the account. Finally, I arrived at ‘Buying Centres’ of the buyer Account & ‘Offerings’ of the seller as two variables to build the Account Landscape. The resulting matrix is a simple and yet powerful tool to understand the Key Account. Where is the whitespace in your business? Deciding what offerings (products/services/solutions) to take to market is not easy. That is the most fundamental aspect of any business. That’s for the management to decide. But an Account Manager has to identify the ‘buying centers’. These are the units in that account where one can take my offerings independently. These are usually divisions/functions and for a global account combined with regions. For example: ‘Retail Banking Europe’ & ‘Merchant Banking’ could be buying centers for a Bank. This will set the Account Manager thinking, which offering is applicable to which buying center(s). Which of those boxes are easier to penetrate? Maybe because my offering there has a compelling value proposition for that buying center and there seems to be no incumbent competitor either. That is my ‘White space’ of growth. The following Account Landscape shows the progress in that account over the years. How White-Space Analysis can help you? Let me share how white space mapping actually helped a DemandFarm customer to unlock $40 million from the existing 23 accounts. A $600 million IT services company with 50+ key accounts used the account landscape to map and grow their accounts. When DemandFarm has implemented a couple of years ago the account managers of these accounts were asked to identify various buying centers of the accounts. Here we have taken an example of Airbus. So, the account manager of Airbus identified Helicopters, CIO Org, Commercial Aircraft, etc. as the Buying Centers. Before this, we had already configured various service lines or Offerings which the customer was taking to the market. For e.g. Engineering Consulting, Enterprise Security, IoT, then had Platforms and so on so forth. How can you identify White Space business accounts? Having created these Offerings and Buying Centers in the account, DemandFarm generated an account of Landscape. This is how the account looked in the beginning, we had all the Offerings as the Columns and the Buying Centers as rows. One can see Opportunities & Engagements at multiple places. The account was well placed then, but the revenue growth of the account had stagnated. Because of the standard offerings like Engineering Consulting, Enterprise Security, etc. which were less relevant now. So, the company introduced new Offerings. One such example is when DemandFarm acquired a big Salesforce competency shop enabling them to offer services around Salesforce practice. The challenge was to make the account managers embrace this change and grow the existing platinum accounts which seemed stagnant. Then, Salesforce was configured as a new offering and started appearing on the account Landscape as the new column. Since this was a new Offering the account managers were made to think where this new Offering could be sold. Obviously, it cannot be sold to the existing Buying Centers and therefore two new Buying Centers were identified & created namely Sales and Marketing. The combination of these new Buying Centers & the new Offering became the focus area or the ‘white-spaces-analysis’ for growth. White space mapping helps you to map areas to grow your service or product. After this, the Account Manager created a plan to grow business with the new offering in the new Buying Centers. While the old buying centers were not generating new business, the account manager was still able to plan for an additional $1 million in Marketing and another $1million in Sales Buying Centers. A similar exercise in all strategic account management for all new offerings leads to an additional plan of $40million in 2017. They are well on their way to achieving $28 million of that plan. There is a lot of power in simplicity and visualization. However, it should not be concluded as ‘easy’. Explore the complete guide to Cross-selling and Up-selling to identify unexplored opportunities for your business as well as your clients’ business and grow better in 2022.
Strategic Account Planning – Process, Challenges, Solutions
What is Strategic Account Planning? Account Planning for Strategic Accounts or Strategic Account Management is building value-driven relationships with your key customers that can help in long-term development and retention, thereby maximizing the revenue potential. It is a synonym for Key Account Planning. The account management process has always been complex. The complexities exist at all levels – thinking, documenting, presenting, planning, training, and reviewing. According to a CSO Insights 2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, 90.6% of those surveyed said that strategic account planning was relevant to them and, therefore they would do it. Therefore, key account managers must know how to build strategic account plans with the best practices. Using account planning software like DemandFarm’s Key Account Management Software can substantially streamline operations. Taking you through the entire process and strategies may be a bit too long for a blog. But in this one let me make the ‘thinking’ part a little easier with frameworks, directions, and principles for a phenomenal strategic account planning exercise. Why is strategic account planning important? Strategic account planning enables sales professionals to understand their customers better – know their needs, goals, and challenges enabling them to create customized solutions and address specific customer requirements. Account planning also pushes businesses to take proactive measures to address potential customer issues. Important Processes of Strategic Account Planning 1. Decoding the present scenario Understand account information in terms of revenue/profitability/growth, products/services, geographic spread, and the account’s initiatives and plan for the year. This is publicly available data that can be easily found, so it makes no sense to use this to analyze your client’s financial position and organizational structure. The most relevant questions and the ones that will be unique from your competitors are questions like: Which areas of your business are most important to you? Where do you see yourself in two to four years? Are there areas of interest that you might either reduce or grow? What kinds of obstacles do you worry about? What would you like to see from a prime supplier? 2. Understanding the Voice of Customer (VOC) Ask any strategic account manager, and they will tell you that the days are gone when the client account landscape was represented by a one-way dialogue for engaging prospects. Today, account heads are shifting their listening and response mechanisms quicker as VoC represents a huge chance for driving loyalty and increased sales. What challenges, concerns, and problems have clients been discussing? How can you address those problems with the products/services of your company? This kind of insight is usually not available publicly. It involves having an in-depth discussion with customers to understand their plan and pain points which can help in new product development or even tweaking the current product to suit their strategy and requirements. The success of this depends on the quality of relationships between the client and their customers and the knowledge of both customers and your business. 3. Building Strategic Connections Through Relationship Management With Accounts You can have multiple types of relationships with clients, and they can be either Tactical, Cooperative, Interdependent, or Strategic. You can use a simple weighted attribute method to arrive at one of the four. A skilled account manager uses the best practices and strategies to plan and create the account management organizational structure with an account plan and process in place. Having the right training and using certain principles increases the skill set of the manager to deal with strategic accounts. With People Sketch an organization chart with hierarchies, titles, and roles of all the contacts that matter. What is also helpful is to identify your supporters/detractors/champions among those contacts. Who controls what budgets? Who influences whom, both positively/negatively? Why? To convert deals and present your customers with a high-grade experience, you need to be informed of the positions your contacts hold within their business and their level of influence in the decision-making process. Mapping their level of influence and their relationships within the organization can help you to concentrate your efforts on the plan appropriately. Relationship mapping helps the sales and marketing units of the business to optimize their lead generation plans and increase revenue from existing accounts. Modern technology keeps the method of creating relation maps automated. Gathering insights using modern technology can automatically keep your relationship mapping efforts up-to-date. 4. Growth Opportunities Based on the above 4 data points, identify the buying centers in the account and map which of your products/services is consumed in which buying centers. Understanding Buying Centers can help key account managers in account planning and innovation. The Buying Center is a 40-year-old concept associated with Webster and Wind and can be hugely useful. The Buying Center is a part of the organization that involves a bunch of executives who have varying influence on the B2B buy decision. Performing a complete buying center analysis is an essential first step to help key account planning managers understand which messages and tactics best convey the value of their products. That can give you an idea of two types of growth areas: Mining Growth Finding out which of the existing projects/contracts/businesses can grow this year is where mining can happen. Farming Growth What new opportunities can be explored this year in your strategic account management process? That’s where farming growth comes in! All this can allow you to set a revenue goal for the year. Download Now: The Most Comprehensive White Space Analysis Template for Strategic Key Account Growth Build a Strategic Action Plan – A Strategic Account Plan Template You need to analyze a few categories to build an action plan for your accounts. You can start off by listing down action items, specific activities, monthly plans, and the support required, along with timelines. We are a firm believer in keeping the key account management process simple yet powerful. Over-analysis can lead to paralysis, so keep it short and simple. I would emphasize more action items and numbers and less on theory. In today’s dynamic business
The 7 Biggest Challenges Account Managers face while making Account Plans
Strategic Account Management may be accepted by the organization and the leadership as a good Account Management practice, but it is not devoid of challenges. Once the managers start practicing it, they realize the real-world problems or rather, challenges that they must face while creating strategic account plans. Let’s take a good look at the 7 Big Challenges faced while creating strategic account plans. Where did we get this top secret information? Straight from the managers themselves and their organizations, of course! KAM Glossary: Crucial Account Management Terms Explained 1. The eternal tug-of-war between short-term and long-term Even when the organization has made a policy decision of having a Strategic Account Management cell for Key Accounts or Strategic Accounts, some managers may find it difficult to choose between the short term and long term. Many times, the short-term wins as it is more achievable and managers often feel a quick sense of accomplishment. That’s exactly where the challenge lies; to choose the long-term over the short term when the situation so demands. It isn’t enough for managers to hit short-term goals and give themselves the pat on the back, it is integral to concentrate on strategic account plan goals like maximization of customer lifetime value too! Guide: Comprehensive Career Path for a Key Account Manager 2. Having access to an effective strategic planning tool Strategic account management needs more work than normal accounts and hence better tools. Although strategic account plans are about building key relationships and nurturing them, this process does need to be automated. There are various strategic account planning softwares and tools available that help the managers in planning and managing their strategic accounts well. But having access to a suitable tool may be a challenge, to begin with. Challenges of strategic account management can be overcome by ensuring the planning tool is made a part of the responsibility of the strategic management team and the leadership. 3. Having a good relationship with all key customers (other than that one key customer) within each Strategic Account It’s not enough to have a good relationship with just one key person within one Strategic Account. People move from one organization to another. Strategic Account Managers cannot afford to put all their eggs in one basket and need to form good relationships with other key people within the Strategic Account. This ensures that a great account isn’t lost, simply because the biggest influencer left the organization. A dynamic OrgChart can be extremely helpful to ensure that Strategic Account Managers know exactly where the influencers and detractors lie in an organizational hierarchy. 4. Interacting with enterprise-level organizations and key buyers at the top level Strategic Account Planning requires a CXO-level management involvement in any client. This bottleneck may arise due to a lack of training. This is very easily rectified with proper recruitment, training and a top-down approach to Strategic Account Management. 5. The actual implementation of the Strategic Account Plans Strategic Account Plans will remain so unless they’re put into action by a motivated Strategic Account Manager. The biggest detriment of a Strategic Account Plan is actually its implementation and thus it must be taken into account while creation. 6. Formulating a fair and comprehensive compensation policy for Strategic Account Managers Since the conversion in a Strategic Account happens over a period, incentive planning and compensation for Strategic Account Managers cannot be the same as your Salesforce, yet needs to be fair. Proper metrics need to be defined and implemented, which is a major HR challenge. It will keep evolving over time and will vary from organization to organization. 7. Training and skills in strategic account management What kind of training and skill sets do Strategic Account Managers need to acquire and how frequently do they need to be trained, is often the question. It’s a crucial decision that leadership needs to take, as it is not a good idea to take chances with the capabilities and delivery of the Strategic Account Managers. We are certain there are many more such challenges and that we can list more than the seven mentioned here. What is essential to this subject is the fact that the Top Challenges for high performers do differ from the Top Challenges of the average performer. Average performers are more concerned about the most fundamental challenges that are lower in the challenges hierarchy, such as ‘having access to an effective strategic planning tool’ and ‘the tussle between short term and long term goals’. On the other hand, high performers would be more concerned about challenges such as ‘fair compensation policy for strategic account managers based on sales results’ and ‘effective ways of building and communicating value’. Do share with me, your top Challenges of Effective Strategic Key Account Plans/Management!
Salesforce Org Chart – For Contact Hierarchy and Relationship Mapping
Org Chart and Relationship Mapping in Salesforce with DemandFarm Account Management is evolving every day. If you are a part of the sales/account management team, a better understanding of your client and improving the strategic relationship with them is indispensable to cracking any deal. Do you think a small tool – Org Chart builder in Salesforce could be your savior in this? Contacts being the heart of your client’s organization, managing them efficiently is critical for which Salesforce has become a ‘default’ in most sales-driven and account-driven organizations. While the baton is with you, over a while contact data gets ‘muddled’ useless. Meanwhile, still betting on PPTs and whiteboards will land you at a high risk of losing your valuable clients to competitors. It can also lead to slow decision-making, missed growth opportunities, and avoidable waste of effort. So, strategizing accounts, equipping yourself with the right tools, and efficiently managing your tasks will be the key to being on track. Salesforce Account Planning could provide much-needed clarity and help you manage your accounts more profitably. Why do you need a Salesforce Organization Chart? 1. Visual Map of Contacts Salesforce.com functions as the go-to system for all aspects of a customer relationship. But David Taber, the author of the Prentice Hall book, “Salesforce.com Secrets of Success,” remarked rightly in this post how quickly data gets discounted in salesforce. This happens because of the following reasons: Lack of process in adding customer data Ever-changing hands in marketing, sales, and support Omission and commission errors To be fair to users, the existing user interface showcasing contacts in a ‘list view does not help either. It seems fine until the number of contacts is in single digits, but not when contacts grow beyond a manageable list. That is when the need for visual relationship mapping arises. The last three salesforce organization chart software inquiries at DemandFarm had a very simple requirement. They just wanted a tool to display their salesforce contacts visually in the form of an organization chart. 2. Handover and Onboarding I just got off an org chart demo with a sales operations team. Would you guess their biggest complaint in managing contacts within Salesforce? It isn’t to do with managing contacts. It is when an account manager or a sales rep leaves. A simple process to hand over accounts always seems missing. The issues do not stop at handover. When a new account manager joins, it feels as if the current account is in a state of mess. A neatly populated Salesforce org chart builder could make this transition frictionless and even more exciting, maybe. 3. Sales Enablement Initiatives Sales operations and salesforce admin teams work together to help sales teams spend more time on quality sales conversations than the operational hassles of setting up systems like Salesforce. In this endeavor, sales ops teams are always on the lookout for tools and processes that improve the functioning of sales and account teams. The simplicity of the best org chart software that is native to Salesforce is a compelling use case. DemandFarm’s Organization Chart in Salesforce DemandFarm’s Salesforce Organization Chart is a powerful interactive tool that is native to CRM i.e, you require zero integration. Key Account Management in Salesforce becomes a breeze with Demandfarm. The tool is so simple that you can build a Hierarchy map of your accounts in just a few minutes by dragging and dropping them with pre-built templates. Organization Chart Features 1. Hierarchy Mapping Hierarchy mapping is a visual representation of the client’s organization which can lend you a lot of deep insights about their profile like white space opportunities and associated budget. 2. Influence Mapping Influence mapping helps you understand the kind of influences each contact has over the other inside the client’s organization. With this, you can upsell and increase your revenue. 3. Relationship Mapping Relationship mapping gives you an understanding of the relationship you have with each of the contacts in the client’s organization. Based on the relationship/affinity, you can plan the right approach to avoid any mess. 4. Power Mapping Power Mapping can help you in knowing the right person with the highest decision power in your client’s organization. To shorten the sales cycle and close the deal, is very critical. Conclusion Building the Salesforce Org Chart is the first step toward effective key account management (KAM). Without the Salesforce Org Chart, there is no Strategic Account Management. Let’s start building Organization Chart for all large key accounts now. It is a journey. Over some time, this Org Chart will be your most potent weapon to defend and grow revenues in the account. It is not one time nor is built by one person. It is a collaborative effort by multiple people over a while. Hence it has to be easy to build within Salesforce. DemandFarm’s Org Chart is one such tool. Go ahead and take a free trial today!
6 Attributes of a Successful Key Account Manager
Decades ago, psychotherapist Thom Hartmann proposed two mental models that described how people go about their work. The hunter mindset, based on nomadic societies, suffered from a short attention span but had hyper-focus for short bursts of time. The farmer, based on agrarian societies, was patient and worked steadily with the understanding that he would enjoy the fruit of his labor in the future. These two mental models have been used to guide hiring. Most recruiters look for hunters to fulfill sales roles and farmers to fulfill account management roles. This clear distinction between the hunter and farmer mindset gets blurred when hiring a Key Account Manager. In the past, hunters were focused on acquisition and farmers were focused on retention. A blend of these attributes is required to successfully fulfill a Key Account Manager role. Traditional Account Managers tend to be too patient and they acquiesce too quickly to unreasonable client demands. This is detrimental to forging a mutually beneficial and strategically viable partnership. On the other hand, a hunter mindset is too short-term focused and will often lose out on larger opportunities because of the relentless pursuit of the sales opportunities immediately in front of them. When recruiting for a Key Account Manager, look for the following: 1. Leadership A KAM should be a visionary. They should help everyone see and be excited by what’s possible. Their customers and their peers should respect them. They should be able to respectfully challenge and direct the customer in the customer’s best interest. This means they must have a degree of comfort with tension. Traditional Account Managers are too quick to cave in when facing tension with clients. Also, when progress needs to happen internally, they need to have the respect of their team. Team members should want to go the extra mile for them. 2. Communication This is a big one. The best KAMs are able to keep all stakeholders informed on all the important issues. They will often have to lead the presentation of project updates or account reviews. Whether oral or written, it is critical that all communications are concise, clear and convincing. Communications must also be highly nuanced for the particular stakeholder or group being spoken to. 3. Business Acumen Many salespeople are far too focused on closing deals and do not understand broader business issues. This approach is fatal when it comes to Key Account Management. A Key Account Manager must be able to see the bigger business issues for the client and help the client manage their business. They must also ensure all business deals are profitable for both sides. 4. Relationship Savvy Today’s Key Account Manager must be able to read people and connect meaningfully with a variety of personalities. They must understand that all progress is made through relationships. They must know when to take the lead in relationship development and when to enable others to take the lead. Their objective is to build a highly intricate web of many-to-many relationships between the client’s people and theirs – the more intricate the web, the greater the partnership and the higher the cost to switch to a competitor. 5. Results Oriented Today’s Key Account Manager must have laser focus on getting results for the customer. This means they must be proactive and not wait for the customer to notice they are not on track to achieving a particular goal. They must have a “no excuses” mindset. They do what needs to be done. They coordinate multiple resources to the achievement of the decided upon outcome. They will take the blame for failures and give credit to the team for successes because they are driven by outcomes not their ego. 6. Appetite for Learning A successful Account Manager recognizes the pace of change we are undergoing. Consequently, they are always open to training and development. They never rest on their laurels. Part of the respect they gain from others comes from the fact that others see that they are constantly growing in their perspectives and abilities. They constantly look for white space opportunities to improve in areas that they have identified as important. All of these attributes require a mix of a hunter and a farmer mindset. There are some things that must be looked after with a short-term laser focus. These short-term issues must be executed while simultaneously understanding how they fit into and accelerate long-term objectives and a long-term vision. It is an unusual mix of attributes as it requires mental flexibility. Those who possess these traits will lead their organizations and their clients too much greater rewards than we have seen in the past from either hunters or farmers.