Time to Question key account management relationships
Key account management relationships So you are in a key account management review meeting, going over the year’s plan with the global accounts team and the business heads. During the meeting, it emerges that your key account planning could fall short this year. As a senior key account manager, you present the reasons – Team Churn in the Key Accounts, followed by Organization restructuring in the accounts. All present go into a ‘thinking’ mode, only to be interrupted by the CEO, who steps into the meeting to exchange pleasantries. “Hey, what’s going on?” You say, “Boss, unexpected organization development issues at my account could jeopardize this year’s goals. “Pop came the question, only CEOs ask.” OK. So how are we doing in terms of our relationships with this account? And how does this relationship scale with time and corporate actions?” The question didn’t surprise. For you, yourself have been looking for account planning solutions since the time people issues have been surfacing at the key account. Key Account Management Relationships are the core As we see in the example above, key account managers can make significant gains by taking good care of their relationships at the key accounts. Surprisingly, it does not get the necessary attention until confronted by a dire situation. It is ironic because sound strategic account management is supposed to anticipate such issues and propose proactive remedial measures. Gaps, when discovered, could be both – strategic and transactional. Strategic Gaps Such gaps are identified because the key account management strategy missed considering such factors in the overall strategy. It does happen that while collaborating with the key account for value creation, teams from the key account side tend to discount disruptions that could emerge from their side. It is natural for key accounts to be more cautious about their suppliers. An established Key account management process driven using systems and structure can very well address such limitations. At times, the hunting nature of the business at supplier organizations also tends to impact the focus on relationships within key accounts. Transactional Gaps These are mostly operational issues that are discovered only when they happen. The reasons could range from incorrectly updating the CRM to not documenting minutes from the last meeting. Identifying, addressing and testing these gaps will enable key account management driven businesses to leverage relationships better. Eventually, this could help better value creation and confront challenges when they crop up. Questions to Ask If you are an account planning driven business that has witnessed situations where depreciation in relationships (for reasons whatsoever) has compromised business goals, the following questions are a good place to start. Who are the people who count in the Key Account? Status – Can you connect each name and role back to the existing client relationship? Budget – What budgets does each person at the key account control? Decision Makers – What specific areas of the decision-making process does each person participate in? Power Equation – Who is a champion, gatekeeper, influencer, detractor orally? Influence – What internal stakeholders or networks can be activated to develop or nurture the right relationships? What are the relationship dynamics amongst the team members at the Key Accounts? Capturing the who’s who in the key accounts is ok. It is indispensable to push further. Key account management teams don’t stop at that. They go further and capture the intensity of the relationships that exist within the key account teams. Ask yourself – Are you able to bring a real-time, flexible, and responsive approach to managing multiple stakeholders? How to map and track people and their ever-shifting connections, motivations, dispensations, and affinities? Are you set up to have custom-made contact plans that can evolve with the relationship dynamics? Can these changes be captured formally and reflect throughout the system to all internal stakeholders? Relationship Context? Actionable insights from the above relationships require the presence of context. Context would help set the agenda at all times. Big Picture – Can you connect the roles and titles to the bigger picture of the account relationship? Are you set up to create value in the customer’s context and not just in your own comfort zone? Quick View – Do you have an easy and convenient way to view these networks of context and spot opportunities for value creation? Institutionalizing Relationships? Key account relationships should outlive the KAMs and all the members that constitute the strategic account planning teams. Therefore, it is critical to building accounts and people’s knowledge into the system so all internal stakeholders are tuned in and can do their part seamlessly. The key questions to ask are as under. Time – How much time and effort is spent on making – in real-time, and as productively as possible – the right information and context available to internal stakeholders? Institutionalising – How safe you are from attrition and losing control of valuable relationships because of people’s changes? Process – How easy is it for you to capture the right information into the system as a part of the process What can technology do for this web of Relationships? Technology holds the power to automate many manual tasks. Thus, freeing up time the KAMs time to ‘think’. Manual management of vital relationships with a spreadsheet or notebook is not just inefficient, it’s also a risk. It only makes key account management vulnerable. Are any of your relationships being managed manually? Do you then face the following limitations? Missed Opportunities – Are you missing opportunities due to a lack of visibility or ability to connect people to the business context? Single View – Can your tool help connect the dots across all the variables and show both – the big picture and the micro-picture, based on the need? How many of these 15+ questions on account relationships can your current key account management strategy answer with confidence? Should there be more questions that need to be addressed? Should we also look beyond relationships into the realm of product/services, market,
Key Account Management, The Jewel in Sales’ Crown
Sales is a critical function in any organization and have always been able to attract internal resources, both human and capital. Key Account Management began as an add-on to sales or a different way to structure departments and assign responsibilities. Though it received plenty of account management focus, there were few specialized human resources and even less capital or technological resources. Only when the number of key account managers reached a tipping point did firms felt the technology-pinch, unable to support collaboration, consolidation or standardization of methodology. But the times changed and with them the behavior of the Key Account Manager. So why have companies been willing to spend resources on CRM, sales training, etcetera but not on KAM? It could be because top-line results are credited to front-line sales while key account managers slog behind the scenes. Top management commitment is important, but it is not enough to create a successful KAM program. Without adequate resources can a company create the foundation on which to build a robust KAM system? In our experience, a three-pronged approach to KAM yields the best results. 1. Choosing the right Key Account Managers: Your best salesperson is not necessarily the best key account manager. Along with influencing skills, they also need collaborative and general management skills, the ability to interact with internal and external stakeholders, to identify problems and design appropriate solutions. It definitely helps to have a manager who can take a long-term perspective on building relationships. While you may choose a person for the role based on some inherent traits and skills, it is also important to invest in training key account managers to help them achieve their full potential. 2. Choosing the right technology: Just as sales managers are enabled with CRM, key account managers need to be enabled with KAM-specific technology. Key Account Management software draws data from a CRM like Salesforce, thereby avoiding data entry and duplication. It supports collaboration across multiple departments and executives at different hierarchical levels. It helps create a relationship matrix and identifies white space or white space opportunities. A standardized process and unified view help improve performance. 3. Measuring and monitoring achievements: Here is a truism that is often ignored: Sales targets and key account goals are not the same. If you want a key account manager to develop a long-term perspective, you have to create long-term goals and pick quantifiable criteria that measure the health of a key account. Account management tools are a great asset as it gives you a multi-dimensional view of the key account; revenue, profitability, deals in the pipeline, relationship strength, untapped potential, share of customer’s purchase and more. Each parameter is measured and monitored individually, followed by analytics to calculate the overall health of a key account. The first CRM software, introduced in the nineteen-eighties, was a simple digital Rolodex! It took several decades and massive technological innovation before CRM became a necessity, not an option or luxury for sales professionals. However in today’s technologically advanced world, decades have shrunk into years and companies that have not invested in KAM technology are not able to exploit, or even recognize, the potential of their key accounts. Your budget should no longer be a debate about CRM or KAM. If you want to maximize growth and tap the potential of your key accounts you need to enable your key account managers by investing in KAM technology. Stop treating KAM as a stepchild. In today’s customer-focused, solution-oriented market, KAM is the jewel in sales’ crown.
Will Real Time Reporting for KAM Help Sales Ops Breathe Easy?
Real-Time Reporting won’t just help; it could power Key Account Management model to success. A veritable game-changer, possibly. The DemandFarm Blog has consistently argued how Key Accounts are latent revenue drivers. The hourglass metaphor neatly sums up the growth potential Key Accounts hold. Unfortunately, these opportunities are not evident to the extent that they become compelling. Thus, most of the time, the Key Account Management strategy is fraught with a ‘business as usual’ approach. The absence of real-time reporting plays a little role in accentuating this problem. The sales operations team entrusted with the reporting function recognizes this challenge. But what can they do? Reporting on Key Accounts is saddled with complexity. On one hand, we have the overwhelming business of the Key Account and on the other, the way organizations manage Key Accounts internally – endless Excel files sitting at various locations, PPTs whose templates keep changing, not to forget the occasional paper memos and thesis emails, and ultimately some closed-door meetings that may not have been minuted. The sales operations team has its task cut out. Why anytime reporting? Because, why should it be any other way? Ok, that was the short answer. The longer one starts with the status quo and ends with transparency. Diagnostic Status QuoToday, Sales Ops teams prepare reports by collecting data from various sources. Some of the data sources are within their control and mostly a click away. However, some, including financial metrics and sales team activities, require coordination and repeated email requests. This adds ‘point of failures’ to the workflow. Even if things work out on time, manual reconciliation issues, omission commission errors and ‘Acts of Man’, make reporting one BIG job. What this means is that the reporting process takes a couple of weeks or more? This lead time runs the risk of depreciating the value of any reporting insight if derived. What may be needed is a real-time, insight-driven report that Spurs necessary and relevant business action. Not a diagnostic that just presents what happened. Transparency to the C-Suite Key Accounts are core to an organization’s strategic plan. Their performance gets attention not just from the Head of Sales, but also from the CEO. The C-Suite, especially, is well-positioned to make a material difference to Key Accounts, by virtue of existing relationships and scale. The current diagnostic approach to reporting compromises the leveraging power of C-Suite in 3 ways. Reactive: The C-Suite has a dependency on reporting teams for insights. Thus, their reactive response. Additionally, review meetings become clarification/ correctional sessions instead of collaborative engagements designed to move forward. Optimistic Dressing: A manual approach to reporting, inadvertently, encourages optimism, and to a great extent when it comes to C-Suite reporting. How do we correct this? The big picture: the C-Suite gets reports from various Key Account teams at various times and may miss out on the BIG PICTURE of multiple Key Accounts and what that may mean to the overall organizational strategy or health. It also helps track several Annual Plans and how they are faring compared to the projections. A real-time accessible report can make the C-Suite an integral team member of the Key Account Management process. Sales Ops leaders realize this potential of any time reporting but have their own problem of plenty. The Tough life of Sales Ops An article from Harvard Business Review cleverly presents the hardships of Sales Ops by jotting down some job descriptions (JD) for the role of Sales Operations. Here is what one of the JD looked like: Strategy Contribute to the 1- and 3-year business vision as a member of the executive leadership team. Evaluate sales force strategies, plans, goals, and objectives. Contribute expertise to optimize sales force and territory sizing, structuring, and alignment. Operations Oversee sales performance analyses and reporting, territory alignment, and customer profiling and targeting activities. Administer quarterly sales incentive compensation plans and the goal-setting process. Manage sales force automation and CRM systems and processes. Provide data, analyses, modeling, and reporting to support sales force quarterly business reviews. This 85-word excerpt from a JD had just ‘one’ word for ‘reporting’. Beat that. The good folks at SalesLoft in one of their eBooks dedicated to sales operations leaders broke down this role into three. Process Data, and Implementation As you guessed correctly, reporting falls under Data and is just one of the functions executed by Sales Ops. So without automation, there is a good chance of reporting becoming a distraction. In addition to this, Sales Ops are also burdened with technology and account planning tools. These days, the best sales teams are empowered by technology solutions, tools, and data. These technology solutions and tools have enabled many organizations to create sales force effectiveness and sales growth. This flow towards technology has indeed made Sales Operations a vital part of the sales by uniquely positioning them to leverage data and technology. All this requires Sales Ops to put strategic time into sales enablement, warranting the need for automated reporting. After all, we are talking about expensive salesman hours. KAM Technology to the Rescue A Key Account Management tool can surely help organize data better and enables sales leaders and indeed all stakeholders to have access to reports and data anywhere anytime. Leverage Existing Data – Leverage existing CRM data to populate analytics rather than depending on the managers, SDRs, and KAMs to fill it out for you. Collate all the data into a single format and store it in a single place so everybody can access and interpret it consistently and in real-time. The platform for Collaboration – It can provide a platform for collaboration between the many stakeholders involved in managing and growing the most strategic customers by making reports and actions shareable and interactive. Insights Like Never Before – Deliver the right customer-centric insights for clarity and action. The landscape, whitespace, opportunities, relationship ‘type’, ‘health’, and ‘attractiveness’ everything to make strategic decisions about key accounts. KAM Technology empowers Sales Ops teams to service and drive business focused
How can KAM Sales help your Organization?
What is Key Account Management (KAM) Sales? Key Account Management, or KAM as it is called, is usually not a transactional activity. It involves larger stakes and requires a buy-in from all stakeholders that are involved. After all, KAM Sales is not a single activity we are talking about, but a whole relationship that we are putting on the table. Essentially KAM Sales is a much wider term than sales will ever be. Typically, there are certain challenges that arise with it every now and then, such as, short-term interest wins over long-term goals. Secondly, it can be overpromising. This often leads to mishaps and even fatalities of Key Accounts, especially in cases of overpromising and under-delivering. When everyone at the organizational level is not looped in, there could be a rise in confusion, chaos, and inefficiencies. But all these probable gaps can be taken care of if certain things are seen to. Identify the Key Accounts for KAM Sales Every Account can’t be categorized under Key Account Sales. Identifying key accounts is crucial. Strategic and complex organizations, which are inclined to participate in collaborating and co-creating value should be adopted as Key Accounts. These Key Account Sales should have potential and considerable long-term possibilities to ensure maximized lifetime value. Conduct a historical study of KAM Sales data Key Account Management Sales does not mean jumping into an engagement that may turn out to be lopsided, one way or the other. Once the potential is identified, it pays to study past data to understand the dynamics of the account in areas such as product, pricing, service- gaps if any and growth potential. Based on this, a mutually beneficial contract can be drawn. Find and train the right people for KAM Sales positions Key Account Managers may not be your best salespeople and vice versa. Sales Acceleration needs a unique skill set in the key account management scenario. It is more of an overarching function like that of a Project Manager. This is a CFT, a cross-functional team that will come from top to bottom in the hierarchy and left to right, across functions. It is integral to have the right team who knows what the stakes are and what they have to do for their accounts to grow exponentially. Track, Measure and Build The true measure of a Key Account is in the lifetime value of that customer to your company and the value-added to the customer’s bottom line. This is what one needs to track and measure regularly and build a Key Account Management Sales program that evolves with the customer’s or rather, the Key Account’s evolving needs. The Sales team overseeing the Key Accounts should comprise of people who can identify customers that can be moved up the KAM status. The alignment between marketing and sales will define the success of your KAM technology adoption program. It is all about collaboration and co-creating success. This is how we feel KAM Sales can be a fruitful endeavor for any organization, please reach out if you have any thoughts to share on this topic! I’d love to hear from any reader who’s been inspired by this blog.
Can Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning impact KAM?
My marketing team often insists that I write about Key Account Management. Until now, I often thought that since there is already so much written about it, how could I possibly throw more light on the subject with the aim of ‘adding more value’ to it at the start of the new year. So, here’s what I thought I’d do; I thought it better to summarize all that I have written in the past and open up a new discussion on whether or not (and most importantly, how) Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Language (ML) can be used for Account Management. May I just mention here that I don’t know the answer to the above! Not yet at least! But here’s what can help: I had once written about how to segment key accounts. It is essential to understand, at least once a year, which of your accounts are your ‘strategic partners’ and in which accounts you are a ‘tactical vendor’. Or somewhere in between-Cooperative/Interdependent relations with clients. This exercise need not be complex or time-consuming. Another time, I had elaborated on white space analysis and metrics to track for Key Accounts in a two-part blog. We can identify areas of growth in an account by building an account landscape that consists of the ‘Buying Centers-Offerings’ matrix. The account growth if analyzed separately in terms of ‘farming’ and ‘mining’ growth will give a real picture of where the growth is coming from and future possibilities. With the growing use of technologies like AI and ML, my mind is often occupied with assessing its true value on Key Account Management. Does it support KAM just as well as it does marketing, sales, and other associated business activities? Honestly, I still don’t know the answer. Even as a participating industry professional I too am often confused with ABM/ABS/ABE claiming Key Account Management space with AI/ML. For those uninitiated, ABM/S/E stands for Account-Based Marketing/Sales/Everything. While I do agree that AI/ML algorithms can be built to identify the right accounts through intent/ searches/ announcement these accounts can also be targeted effectively using display advertising based on role/function and their watering hole (media). All the AB(X)s still only focus on acquiring an account in the B2B marketing context. That is not Key Account Management. The fact is, KAM is what you do after acquiring the strategic account. Some of the most critical elements of Key Account Management include: Understanding the customer’s business deeply. How they are structured, which business units are growing rapidly, geography-wise spread, what are the strategic initiatives and management changes – are some of the areas to study. Creating a solution using my products/services to create more value for the customer’s business challenges. Understanding which of our current engagements could grow as well as which are at risk and what are the new doors to open. Collaborating and building relationships with people in the customer organization as well as internally within my company. Making account plans with the above information leading to revenue goals, specific actions, and timelines. All these listed elements are human processes that require a fair amount of cognitive thinking. Every account for a key account manager will have unique situations requiring tailor-made solutions, approaches, or strategies. I don’t see a possibility of it ‘trending’ to make any regressive analysis here. The key takeaway is that – any good account manager will use heuristics rather than a deduction to make decisions. The best I have achieved is to create frameworks, (not processes!) for strategic account management. A key account manager is constantly asking questions to herself and her collaborators. Whereas, AI/ML is about answering questions. That is where I am stuck and I am hoping 2021 will give me some clarity on this. You can explore the innovations in KAM Technology in recent years by reading our Ebook.
Key Account Management (KAM) – Past, Present and Future
KAM Definition – Key Account Management is a strategic approach distinguishable from account management or key account selling and should be used to ensure the long-term development and retention of strategic customers. The acronym used by professionals in this industry is KAM. Past What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers “value” is decisive – it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper’ – Peter Drucker Origin of KAM The origin of KAM lies way back in the era of Peter Drucker. A learned man, he understood the concept of customer dynamics and forecasted the change during his time. It was then that organizations realized the concept of soft selling, and started focusing on relationship mapping with their customers. According to research, companies that focused on long-term relationships with customers generated more profits than the companies that focused on short-term customer goals. Hence maintaining long-term happy relationships with customers became a ritual with practices like contact management, behavior-based loyalty and reward programs, etc. Organizations began to develop separate teams of ‘Account Managers’ that were solely responsible for looking after and managing the company’s larger and more valuable Accounts. Special teams were even developed to manage ‘high potential’ Accounts that needed to be nurtured and developed over time for a potentially rewarding relationship. Pareto Principle As the markets evolved, customer – buyer relationships evolved. The Pareto Principle was a defining observation – 80% of revenues came from 20% of Accounts or Customers. Those Accounts were later referred to as ‘Key Accounts’. Organizations started focusing on resources primarily on Key Accounts. However, Strategic Account Management was still an underserved opportunity. The people responsible for managing Key Accounts were in reality ‘Key Account sellers’, managing opportunities rather than the relationship. Present It is only in the recent few years when companies have started realizing that when buyers and sellers share a collaborative, interdependent relation, productivity increases in the long term. Looking at the current market scenario, there seems to be a rise in overall KAM technology adoption and awareness across industries globally, but if we talk about the United States, the overall Google searches for KAM have remained constant over the past 5 years time. In the graph from Google Trends below, you can see the number of searches for Key Account Management in the United States over the period of the last 5 years. Well! A possible reason for the stagnancy could be a lack of perception about KAM as a dynamic or trendsetting function in the organization. Key Account Managers are a bit like unsung heroes, chipping away at complex relationships, away from the limelight. Needless to say, they have almost the same pressure as the regular Sales team to meet their quotas, but because successes are not so fast or visible, they tend not to be top of mind when it comes to the development of enablement or automation tools like CRM. Automation is generally some modified version of CRM because the focus tends to remain on the Key Account Managers individual relationship building skills. Methodologies for KAM Sales tend to be homemade, and core processes are not systematic or consistent across the organization. However, like every other field, technology is driving the world and KAM can’t escape for long. Key Accounts are getting increasingly complex, dynamic, global and networked. There is a genuine need to be able to automate and institutionalize key processes, reduce a person’s dependence, enable the people who drive KAM, manage data and analytics and of course track customer goals and opportunities in a more structured way. Associations like SAMA are trying to spread awareness globally about Strategic Account Management & emerging technologies through their efforts and events. We are looking forward to seeing a lot more KAM tech in Dreamforce’16 coming up this October. However, the traditional mindset that considers KAM an ‘art’ tends to question the scope of technology. We say it’s time for organizations to start asking- can technology transform the way we manage and grow our Key Accounts? It’s a question that we just can’t afford to ignore anymore. Future The future of KAM is about not just increasing productivity in the long term but about creating value for all shareholders in the ecosystem. With increasing complexity, it’s imperative to look for solutions that operate at the cross-section of the art and science of Key Account Management and help take execution to the next level. On the positive side, some industries are leading the charge for KAM, with Google trends showing a positive increase for KAM searches over past 12 years across Banking, Health and Business and Industrial areas. These are also the early adopters for KAM technology. The 90s was the year of CRM; 20s can be the year of KAM technology. What do you think? We’d love to hear your views on the past, present, and future Key Account Management, and especially on technology to transform Key account management. Write to me and we will share the best ones with all our readers on this blog next month!
Janus-Faced Key Account Managers?
Key account managers share a love-hate relationship with key account management methodologies. Ironic, isn’t it?Often, I have heard KAM purists say that the best Key Account Management is to understand customer’s strategic goals and find ways of helping them achieve that. The Key account managers aren’t amused and retort, ‘You know what is the strategic goal of my customer? They want to rationalize the number of vendors to half this year. The remaining vendors have to find ways of saving at least 25% of the price. Another classical KAM theory advice is, ‘You must “co-create” value with customers. An Account Manager from a plastic molding company heard this at a conference. *Later during coffee break* “Oh yeah ‘co-create’ b**l sh*t.” One of his customers wants to convert many engine parts from metal to plastic. But refused to spend jointly on developing the prototype and mold. The best he could get was supplying fixed volumes for the first year if prototyping is successful. He knows that in the second year, he has to compete for the price with other vendors. So much for ‘co-creation’. It is foolish to broad-brush key account management. KAM in different industries like enterprise SaaS, plastic molding, IT Services, and commodity steel will be different. I think we should begin by making KAM methodologies simpler. The theorists and coaches have gone too deep and far to differentiate one methodology from the other. Therefore many are utopian and not practical anymore. It partially explains why key account managers hate to follow them to the ‘T’. Utopian Key Account Management For example, other days I came across a relationship map template where every customer contact was to be tagged with 5 parameters. Political Role Personality Type Your Relationship Coverage. Each of these parameters has 5+ options to choose from. This is over and above hygiene attributes – name, title, department, location, reports to, reporters, budget controlled, opportunities….. Is it realistic to get this data for even 3 dozen contacts in an account? Even if you get it who will document this? Even if one does, who will update this data every quarter?Come on, be a sport. This is an example of only ‘Contact Relationship’. These coaches/ theorists have complicated and made unrealistic all other elements of KAM like Account Planning templates and Account Segmentation. On the other extreme, KAM practitioners (Account Managers) have left it to ‘Heroes’ or serendipity. Basically relying on that individual with good relationships and domain knowledge to manage the account. Or leave it to chance – being there at the right time, with the right people, and with a solution that fits NOW. Ideally, strategic account management stakeholders should strive to strike a balance. Account manager comfort has to be balanced with account priorities with account planning being right there at the top.Perhaps, the time has come for us to go back to KISS for KAM. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Here is how to keep it simple. You just have to read my strategic account management process blog.
Did you read MTA’s Buyer Guide on Key Account Management Software?
Thinking of which is the best Key Account Management Software in the market? Here is the answer. MarTech Advisor (MTA), one of the world’s leading sources for marketing technology news, research, product comparisons & expert views, recently published an extensive Buyer’s Guide to Key Account Management Software. This 32 page KAM Bible covers a wide range of topics from opportunities that induced the need for KAM enablement to listing Key Account Management software currently in the market. It makes us happy to announce that this exclusive Buyer’s Guide rates DemandFarm as the ‘Best-fit KAM & Sales Enablement tool’ in the market. Too busy to read the report? Don’t worry, we have got all of it covered for you. We have summarized all the useful information in this easy to read the blog. Without further ado, let’s look at the salient points that led to the rise of Key Account Management software. The Need for Key Account Management Software The inclusion of Key Account Management into various business processes has changed the dynamics of the relationship mapping between organizations and their Key Accounts. The importance of managing relationships with strategically significant customers was always a ‘no-brainer’, but only a few organizations were able to carry out the Key Account Management process efficiently. The times are changing for the better and organizations are investing both in Key Account Managers and Key Account Management tools. So what was the catalyst that brought forth this change… Catering to Key Accounts is paramount to an organization’s revenue growth. This fact is made evident by the 80/20 Pareto Principle which states that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Key Accounts are a boon that keeps on yielding profit. With cross-selling up-selling in Key Accounts, the revenue increases without the hassle of acquiring a new customer. The customers you will acquire with referrals from Key Accounts helps ease the strain on your marketing and sales efforts. Key Accounts are hard to acquire and even harder to maintain. In fact, the real challenge of an Account Manager starts after the acquisition of an account. The inclusion of Strategic Account Management processes into the organization helped the management of Key Accounts. However, a tool was needed for the effective implementation of these processes. The statements above prove the true worth of Key Accounts and the need to harvest, nurture and grow them. This need led to the inception of Key Account Management Software. Challenges resolved using Key Account Management Software: Data in Silos – Data in an organization is spread in silos or distributed across multiple systems. This restricts Key Account Manager from identifying and extracting complete information regarding their accounts. Key Account Management Software plays a significant role in handling this challenge efficiently. Lack of key insights – Even if a Key Account Manager is successful in accumulating all the data points, they are useless without key insights. A Key Account Management software helps extract knowledge from this data, providing the KAM with key insights thus aiding in realizing the optimal potential of Key Accounts. Multiple tools – With various individual tools and systems such as CRM, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, etc for their day to day work to manage Key Accounts, the life of a Key Account Manager became tough and chaotic. A Key Account Management software helps solve the complexity by directly integrating with existing CRM and providing insights and analysis from existing data. What should a Key Account Management Software deliver? A good Key Account Management software should increase Key Account Manager’s productivity while simultaneously providing him with key insights and tools to manage and grow Key Accounts. Key Account Management software should be a one-stop-shop for everything related to Key Accounts. Following are the things that a Key Account Management software should deliver: Visual Org Chart Communication Tracker Contact History Affiliations Mapping Data Management ( collation, formatting, storage, etc.) Data Consumption Approach Real-time, anytime, anywhere access Collaboration Tools Easy report generation, exporting and sharing Reminders & prompts Data Analytics Finance Tracker How to evaluate a Key Account Management Software? Choosing the right Key Account Management software is a challenge, which a guide book like this is addressing. Following are some parameters to evaluate a KAM software: Trial or Demo Cost of Deployment Ability to Customize Integration with existing CRM Onboarding and Customer Success Speed of Deployment Business Impact Areas Adopting an Account Management approach along with the right tool can help transform your business. Following are few KAM enablement impact areas: People cost – Account-related data in an organization is highly vulnerable. All the business intel is tied to Account Manager; if he leaves so does your data! Opportunity cost – An organization loses deals and opportunities every day due to the lack of key insights. These insights are hidden in data silos and are hard to discover without the right key account management tool. Business cost – Without the right tools, the highly paid Key Account Managers are forced to waste their time on creating reports, collating data and tracking down people. Key Account Management software in the market currently Following is a list of Key Account Management software in the market currently for Medium/Large segment: Now that you know about the best Key Account Management software in the market don’t forget to request a demo of DemandFarm. Remember, we are just a click away!
Cross-Selling – The 6 How-To-Do-It for Key Account Managers
The main strategies of cross-selling up-selling can be broken down into 6 strategies for successful Key Account Management as detailed below. If these are followed, they give good results, as has been proven in the past. Check if your Key Account Managers have the skills required for cross-selling: Implementing a good cross-selling strategy is where things might go wrong. A piece of very good and sound product knowledge is a must-have for your Key Account Managers. At the same time, they cannot go overboard and push the prospect to say yes to you. Each Key Account Manager’s product portfolio should be kept to a size where they know each product in their portfolio well and get familiar quickly with new additions. Cross-selling requires that customers get a good fit and benefit: Sales for the sake of selling does not work. You cannot push unrelated products to prospects. They will buy only if they see a good fit for the product for their needs. A good idea would be to create a solution for many products that would be of more value to the customer than individual products. An integral part of cross-selling is also counseling and advice to customers in helping them make the right choice. Moreover, in providing them good customer service long after the purchase is made. KYC is a good technique to find out the woes and the wows of your customers regarding your products: Key Account Managers should always keep the customers engaged and happy without being intrusive, at the same time, gleaning insights from the customers about existing products through questions and surveys. This information should be used to fill current gaps and work on new products to fill a possible gaping need. Be more than a salesperson to your clients: Clients always see salespersons as trusted partners and feel good when the salesperson behaves like one. To ensure that valuable information regarding each Key Account and client preferences and peeves stays with the salesperson, you should work on a database with all essential information and share it with the sales team. This can help salespersons to make customized recommendations to each client and explain how a certain product may benefit him by using specific examples assimilated through the database. Sales and relationship analytics through Automation: Automating the sales process helps in keeping a close watch on client decisions and purchases and then identifying clients who are most likely to buy additional products from you. These automation tools use buyer profiles and personas through a scoring or weight-age method to identify hot prospects. The right message and the right move at the right time are crucial to cracking a deal: Account Managers should know the buyers enough to understand what their next move should be when to make their next move, how to do it, what to say, and what will seal the deal. They should also have a finger on the pulse of which campaigns are working and which are not and which click with whom. Cross-selling needs establishing clear account planning processes, setting expectations, training the team adequately and continuously, and monitoring results, not to forget course correction whenever the need is felt. Technology is the one thing that ties together all cross-selling efforts.
Value Selling – as the First Step to Key Account Management
Needless to say that the first step to Key Account Management is Value Selling. Key/Strategic Account Management is incomplete without it. Value selling, however, exotic the term may sound, is a basic step to elevating your most important and critical accounts to the stature of Key Accounts. Most organizations are adept at using the STP (Segmenting, Targeting, Positioning) principle to differentiate their offerings in the market, vis-a-vis their target audience. But they still stand a big risk of losing the fine line of differentiation to their competitors who are eager to kill their first-mover advantage in no time at all. The truth of the marketplace which resembles a war zone at all times is that competitors are fast to move in and duplicate your hitherto unique positioning or offering. This makes your USP a commodity over time and this holds for most products and services over time. As per buyer perception research (Corporate Executive Board Research), out of the 100 times that sellers do a unique pitch and call their products unique, 86 of these times, buyers do not find anything unique about it; neither do they find anything compelling enough; in fact, the universal feeling is that the features are more or less the same as offered by other sellers of the same category of products. The truth is that organizations should see their products from the customer’s perception and not inside-out. You need to understand certain basics of Value Selling. The first rule of Value Selling is that prospects and customers need to like and trust you, the seller, first. If they do, then comes the next challenge – they seek the best value and the lowest risk. The eternally and arguable lopsided customer expectation of getting the best product at the lowest price is truth. That is what customers expect. They buy the product that fits these expectations the best. That means that they are willing to pay a certain price for a certain value. The universal truth about customers is that – Value and Risk are defined by the customer and not you, the seller. Thus, every salesperson needs to be well equipped and prepared to discuss tangible business cases, deliver desired outcomes to customers and manage risks while embracing value selling to accelerate sales. The organization should enable its sales force to deliver value to its customers ably and easily with the right sales enablement framework. For the products and services that are more like commodities, organizations need to get into automation to ensure smooth delivery to buyers in little time, perfect pricing and a great deal of standardization. In such cases, getting in a salesperson may not be a good idea at all. However, for products that are high-involvement and one-time purchases, and products and on which there is a lot riding, as seen from the customer’s point of view, these products need to be handled with a lot of TLC by the sales force. This is where Value Selling needs to come in. The salesperson who is the front end for such products needs to be well trained in the principles of Value Selling. Here, the organization needs to support them in training so they acquire a strong business acumen, key domain knowledge, and powerful insights to enable them to sell the right way and make a strong case in the organization’s favor. They need to be good at handling senior-level talks which are key to value selling. The salesperson needs to have the right kind of maturity in selling these value products. To recap, every organization needs to have product differentiation and understand the sales enablement, they need to have for every product category. Automation for the lower hanging fruit, the low-involvement products where buying is a matter of habit for the buyer; and for the high-involvement products, a different kind of sales enablement with training in the right skills, to enable the sales force to value-sell. Value selling is an art and once acquired can lead to the acquisition of key accounts for the organization and hence should be the first step in Institutionalize Key Account Management processes and methodology. However, without the right sales enablement framework, this is more likely to remain a distant dream. Explore our blog on cross-selling up-selling in which we’ve elaborated how it can be used to grow business in 2021.