3 Sales Productivity Apps Key Account Managers need
Sales Productivity apps are an important add-on tool for Key Account Managers in addition to their Key Account Management software. Times have changed and these apps are a luxury no more, they’re a necessity for efficient key account management. A key account manager needs these tools for efficient key account management. Why? Sales and account managers need to collaborate for possible farming and mining opportunities within Key Accounts, especially in the larger and more complex ones. Often, account managers have to work with sales to bring the new project in or close it themselves. Considering that, here are a few sales productivity tools that can help sales teams and Key Account Managers collaborate better and achieve their goals more effectively and efficiently. HubSpot Sales (Previously Sidekick by HubSpot) HubSpot CRM lets you manage sales pipeline, log sales acceleration activities and get insights from the activities of your sales team. How does it help Key Account Managers (KAMs)? Quickly add tasks for sales reps, such as follow-ups or up-sell conversations. Deliver sales insights to sales reps on the road with mobile alerts. Improves team communication with a full account history in a single view. Prevents deal from getting lost or delayed with activity tracking and the next steps. Inside Sales Box A Sales Acceleration Platform built for teams to manage and accelerate sales processes. A high performing sales team can deliver predictable revenue, consistently. What does it have for KAMs? Increases productivity of sales teams with timely reminders and sales cadence. Shares important information about contacts, such as emails, documents and files, and contact info with a click of a button. Connects with 3rd party applications through Zapier. Integrate your KAM technology and get started with Inside Sales Box. LinkedIn Sales Navigator Sales Navigator is a sales performance platform, helping organizations increase the productivity of sales teams. How do Key Account Managers leverage it? Focus on the right people – Find the right prospects quickly with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This sales tool features a sophisticated algorithm to give you lead recommendations that are tailored to you. Easily save leads and create a sales lead list. Stay informed with insights – Get sales insights for more effective selling. LinkedIn Sales Navigator has the tools to help you stay informed and up-to-date about your prospects. Be in the know with timely and accurate information to turn cold calling into warm conversations. Build trusted relationships – Create a professional, trusted brand and engage with confidence by leveraging your own and your company’s network. Do you think I missed an application? Are there other applications that have helped boost your productivity?Yes, there can be. It totally depends on the use case.Visit MarTech Advisor and the Salesforce AppExchange for a range of sales productivity and key account enablement tools like DemandFarm.
Listen to this, Key Account Managers!
You may be hearing and seeing a lot of things Key Account Managers, but what most of you need to up your quotient on, is listening. We have heard a lot of talk on listening. But have we started practicing real listening? We have probably not, because, in sales, we are more interested in giving our sales talk, than hearing the customer out. We are focused on one thing – to make sure that whatever we have practiced as a sales pitch should not go unsaid, that we should not be missing out on the important parts. So what is listening? The real meaning of listening is to listen patiently to the customer so that you understand what he is saying or what he is trying to say but is not voicing it. Not all customers or people are explicit or matter-of-fact, when they are talking, you have to learn to ‘read between the lines’ when your customer is talking. This will help you understand him, his perspective, his need; this will help you assess the situation overall. This will help you tailor your pitch to suit the situation and the customer, and we promise; it will be more effective than a ready-made, standard pitch. The unfortunate truth is that, how much ever we talk about listening, it needs to be taught with examples. A daily has quoted that 2% of salespeople are taught ‘listening’ formally. Here are some eye-openers, err, ear openers on listening: We derive 55% of a message’s meaning from the speaker’s facial expressions 38% comes from how he says the message that is his tone of voice and just 7% from the actual words spoken! 50% is how much information we usually recall immediately after we listen to someone talk. We can listen at twice the rate than a person can talk. How to listen and handle a call well. Listen without interrupting – Initiate the conversation and then sit quietly, listening to the customer intently. Acknowledge what is said – Acknowledge what the customer has said. This does not always mean you are in agreement. This just shows that you are listening, which is enough to keep your customer talking. Ask questions – Ask questions to get clarity on what the customer is saying. This way you will learn more than the obvious. Recap and restate – If there is an objection raised, or if it is something the customer is saying, restate it to be on the same page with him and let him know that you are on the same page. Address and overcome – Don’t beat about the bush. Tackle the objection directly by using factual information. For this, you will need to have the product information and the knowledge at your fingertips. Close – Very, very important. Do not leave any loose ends. Close that particular meeting by stating clearly the next steps expected and from whom. Be polite but the state. Move the sale forward in its journey. Correct course, if need be and commit – A sale is never a one-time ‘Hit the bull’s eye’. It takes time. Often, in the journey, the customer will add different inputs that will change the course of your plan. Moreover, will mean that you will have to correct the course, Be patient. Don’t be in a rush to commit just so you can close it. Show your willingness to alter and present again, but with clear timelines specified. I hope these were some handy tips to learn and practice the art of listening and ensuring you engage correctly with your customer and add to the sales effectiveness during every customer interface. God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason, as it is said. The sooner we practice using our two ears, fully, we get closer to our sales objective. You can also download our whitepaper on the Hype & Art of KAM. P.S- Have you ever wondered, How many Key Account Management professionals are there around the world?
Key Account Management Software: 4 Features to look out for
Key Accounts are complex, global entities and it would be impossible for even the most accomplished Key Account Manager to keep track of and govern the Account manually. There is a need for software and tools for Key Account Management to help the Key Account Managers realize the optimal potential of the Account. To that end, here is a round-up of some of the must-have features of a KAM Enablement technology – whether it is a tool, software, or app: 1. Visual Representation to aid Strategic Decision Making Because of the way the human brain processes information, a visual representation always helps in simplifying complex data. Visualization is a quick, easy way to make strategic decisions in a universal manner, and execute accordingly. When it comes to key accounts, you need to have a landscape view of available white space opportunities and scope continuously for business and value creation opportunities. A visual representation in a KAM technology enabler or software can not only help you see the bigger picture, but also analyze and improve your selling points, and explore opportunities with existing key accounts. 2. Organizational Hierarchy In B2B selling, you are not selling to one person. It is usually a group of decision-makers, who influence the deal based on their position within the organization. In-depth awareness of the organizational hierarchy is, needless to say, a must. A comprehensive account management would go beyond to even highlight formal and informal affiliations, disposition towards the brand, etc. It will indicate which relationships need nurturing, by whom, in a timely way. A Key Account Management Software should clearly indicate whom to connect with, at each stage of the selling process, with an added option to make behavioral notes about each contact, so you make the most of the time invested in building relationships. 3. Data Consolidation and Management Imagine a situation where half of your key account’s data is in spreadsheets, and the other half is spread over PPT’s and word docs, and elsewhere. How inconvenient would that be? Key Account Management software must provide a consolidated platform, which collates data from varied sources, in a consistent format, in one place, so that the right internal stakeholders can access them and be on the same page. With a central repository that everyone can access in real-time, the additional headache of version control is avoided. It will help you focus, and invest your valuable time in strategic account planning and collaboration, instead of laboring over data collation and documentation. 4. Analysis and Tracking When you are managing Key Accounts, you need to keep track of Key account Plans and goals. A Key Account Management Software must help you with an actionable approach to tenure-based plans, along with easy-to-access tabs on the account plan screen. A good module that can help achieve these must provide you with insights to check progress on activities so that you can make the right strategic calls at the right time. In an ideal key account management software, your company’s sales process is expressed visually in a pipeline form, showing where all deals stand in which stages, and each stage subdivided into activities and tasks. Learn more about how KAM Enablement will help you grow your business in 2017. Download the e-book here.
How to Ensure Your Key Accounts are in Good Health – Top View
It is all very well to think and expect that your C-Suite in your Key Account Management structure will live up to your expectations vis-à-vis Key Account Health and they will know every little bit of detail that needs to be known. However, if you are using traditional health monitoring methods, then this is next to impossible. After all, when your Key Accounts scale up, how much is one Director or a handful of your top people going to know about the details?It is, therefore, necessary to have a transparent system that addresses the 3 points listed below: Is your KAM team cued into the key goals and success parameters of their clients? Sharing the above in black and white with the team assigned for KAM Sales is very important to measure the performance of the Key Accounts. This adds to the building of trust and retaining of the Key Account as the client sees your team as his trusted advisors, who are working with him towards a common goal. Unfortunately, though, this is not the case. Many Key Account Managers are not aware of the tangible goals or have not got it in writing. Are the contracts well documented and broken down in small, understandable, easily accessible dockets? The answer to this is usually, NO. Contracts are big 30 pager documents which are lost in the grind and dug up only before the all-important reviews or during a crisis. The Strategic Account Management team often forgets or is not aware of the small details on say Page 24 that a client may refer to when he is not happy. At that time, it is too late. As the top management, it is important that you have your entire team completely cued into each and every detail of the contract, however, big the contract. The best way to do this is to document the contract into small-sized dockets accessible to all for regular browsing. These need to be discussed and rehearsed during every weekly meeting for quick recall from the team. This practice ensures that the goals listed down and well discussed are also well followed and achieved. Has your team put down in writing clear internal goals that increase the probability of retaining that key account? Internal goals have to be quantified to measure what the team is up against. The account health as defined above depends on the frustrations in the account management that crop up. It helps you, as a Director, to quantify these frustrations and discuss this with the team clearly, so that you can all put your heads together to improve the situation. Generic, non-tangible goals and performance measures are not enough; they should have a strong metric system in place that can be easy, transparently monitored from anywhere. Team members need to have access to this system. Clear, measurable insights into Key Accounts are known to increase not just customer retention, but also positively impact profitability by 25 to 125% DemandFarm’s Key Account Management software helps you and your Key Account Management team to quantify these goals, spot the gaps and improve them for better performance in the relationship mapping and profitability of Key Accounts. Also read our blog on Key Account Management VS Regular Account Management.
Do you know the Importance of Key Account Management Software?
Are your key accounts dear to you? I understand. For most b2b, key accounts contribute the majority of revenue. Thus, their success is dependent on how they keep and grow these key accounts. B2B leaders would leverage a Key Account Management Software to enable this imperative. Which brings us to the question, how does software help grow key accounts? Account Intelligence Where should an account manager go for account intelligence? A company’s financial information and growth details, Key Employees with their titles/ social profile/ function/ contact detail, Top management changes, organization structure, Important announcements or news and other business initiatives? The account planning tool provides all the above account intelligence in a matter of clicks. Account Understanding The software also helps the Account Manager: To understand the level of relationship with the account – Strategic or Tactical or in between (cooperative/interdependent). To understand the attractiveness of the account through parameters like future growth, type of long-term contracts, and level of relationship mappings. Conduct competitor analysis of the account. Thus, helping the Key Account Managers build the account landscape to map the products/services to buying centers. In turn, identifying ‘White spaces‘ of growth. Account Planning The software makes annual key account planning easier by providing all the data for planning and providing ready-made templates to complete their plan. The plan will include strategy, activity planning, and revenue goal setting. A good Key Account Management software also helps the Account Manager to present and track the plans anytime anywhere. Account Collaboration Key Account Management software provides a perfect platform for various internal stakeholders often globally spread to collaborate on planning, activities, and analysis of the key accounts. The software also serves as a single source of truth for all account-related data. Analytics Key Account Management software provides the Account Manager with analytics and dashboards to make the right decisions and take the right actions. Some of the key metrics it provides are, Revenue target vs achievement, Account growth, farming and mining effectiveness, Pipeline, For the executive leadership, the software provides powerful analytics using aggregated data of all key accounts. It helps answer – what do all the account plans together indicate, which product/solution you won/lost industry-wise, and much such analytics to enable effective decision making. Productivity Account manager runs the risk of doing many repetitive tasks that are non-revenue bearing. Automating repetitive tasks improves the productivity of Account Managers. Some examples are creating the account plans, presenting the plan directly from the software, exporting account info pdf, preparing for QBRs, tracking activities and financials, generating reports, notifications, and reminders, ease of creation, and consumption of data across devices. Platform The importance of Key Account Management software is that it is a single platform for account managers to create and consume data. It provides account intelligence, account financials, opportunities, contacts, account plans, account engagements, and dashboards in a single platform. The platforms provide a single source of truth and save the account manager the hassle of logging in to various enterprise applications for accessing data. All in all, Key Account Management software enables account growth through deeper analysis, better planning, and reliable governance. In the future, this will get even more powerful with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. A Good Key Account Management Software A good key account management software helps analyze, plan and govern the strategic accounts of a b2b company. It is used to build account landscape and organization charts easily using CRM data. It helps analyze key accounts – both qualitative and rule-based. It also provides account intelligence through external web sources. The creation of a strategic account plan is integral to such software. It has productivity tools like presentation, export, plan trackers, and in-app training/adoption. The executive leadership should use key account management software to analyze aggregated data of multiple accounts to make the right decisions. Organizations that base their revenue growth on key accounts are guided by a key account management software that prompts insights to expand key accounts.
Triaging Key Account Management
Triaging. The Free Dictionary explains Triage as, “A system used to allocate a scarce commodity (food / medicine), only to those capable of deriving the greatest benefit from it. Triage is used in hospital emergency rooms, on battlefields, and at disaster sites when limited medical resources must be allocated” I will excuse you if you thought we were going anywhere near the above situations. That isn’t the case. The focus remains Key account management (KAM). Triaging is useful in addressing the ambiguity associated with Key Account Management’s critical first step i.e. selecting key accounts. Identifying Key Accounts Successful strategic account management requires a strong start. Identifying key accounts is one of the first critical steps. There are several ways to approach this of course. A good starting point would be to locate the stage of Key Account Management the organization is at. Is it an advanced practitioner of KAM/ Just getting started? Somewhere in the middle? Here are some more considerations Offer – Wouldn’t you differentiate key accounts from the rest of your customers? Lifetime Value – Key accounts should not only show revenue potential but also margin expansion. The existing current contribution will also be key. Service complexity – Key accounts have custom requirements that warrant varying degrees of service. Defining a key account, is well, key. Often, it isn’t clear and leads to ambiguity. Ambiguity Determining shortlisting criteria for selecting key accounts isn’t straightforward. Some factors are black and white, making for clear decision-making. Given the inherent complexity in key accounts, ‘grey’ is what will confront decision-makers, often. They would be lucky to get away with less than 50 shades of ‘grey’. To deal with this, university researchers in the strategic account management space were quick to start a ‘Science’ vs ‘Art’ debate. While the debate continues, triaging could help cut through some of the ambiguity. Triaging Prioritizing key accounts is necessary, but not sufficient. Triage is vital. During natural disasters and medical emergencies, teams have to decide – who really needs help, who doesn’t need it at all and who can wait. That also means the very difficult decision of deciding to give up on those who can’t make it. True, it does not entirely solve the ambiguity problem in selecting key accounts. But, it does move the needle forward in sticky situations. Approaching Triage DemandFarm proposes a ‘triage framework’ for key account teams who are still deciding which accounts to include as part of their key account management strategy. The framework is not recommended to decide on existing key accounts. ‘Demoting’ key accounts is a sticky subject and beyond the scope of this article. Key account teams would appreciate how easy it is to include companies as key accounts compared to managing and growing them – or worse, ‘demoting’ them. The DemandFarm ‘triage framework’ is best suited to helping KAM teams answer the following question.“ Who should not be a key account?” It is one way of approaching the meaningful identification of the most valuable accounts Table heading – Triage Framework (sumender to make an image of the below table) Broadly, there are 4 factors categorized as external and internal. The above table is a suggested triage framework that will guide organizations in answering the question, “Who should not be a key account?”. External Factors External are those factors that are dependent on the business environment and market conditions. These are as under. Market Position – Rate your account on the basis of its current market position and its future potential. Is the market growing? Is the company account growing its market share? Is the account lagging competition? Innovation Orientation – How is the account responding to innovation? According to the theory of ‘Diffusion of Innovations’, where does the account fit? Are they innovators, early adopters or laggards? Are they ahead of the curve or prefer to follow? Internal Factors Internal factors are those that are deemed to be under your control when dealing with the account. Strategy Influence – Do we have enough control to influence the current and future business strategy of the account? Will they take and value your opinion for key business decisions? Would we be a vendor or a strategic partner to the account? Operational Complexity – Will the account management be transaction-intensive? How easy is it to get approvals? What organization do we need to develop to deliver on the scope? What is the intensity of the existing relationship mapping with stakeholders and their colleagues? Do we see opportunities for margin expansion? Scoring the Framework The triage framework also contains scores and weights for scientific decision-making. The following scale is suggested. Score from 1 to 10 (1 – least favorable; 10 – most favorable) Weights or Percentage should not exceed 100% for all the 4 factors combined It is pointed out again that this score is only to help identify a “non-key account”. It is suggested that organizations pursuing key account management, should clearly define a threshold score below which an account would be rendered as a “non-key account”. At the same time, a score above the threshold will not necessarily make an account ‘key’. Finally, this is just a starting point – getting into the exercise, one will find several relevant variables to add to the grid. Will a key account management software help? Thanks to big data engine and predictive analytics tools, the white space opportunity exists to make the ‘selection’ and ‘triage’ steps, a bit scientific. Automatically capturing quality data and developing scoring mechanisms (similar to the above framework) to identify key accounts could make key account management methodical and predictable. Have we arrived there, yet? You could try triage to answer that question. If you liked the blog, you can also read an Interview with Adrian Davis, President- Whitestone Inc.
Impact of Presidential Elections on Key Account Management Strategy
Who do you think would be the next President of the United States? Any change that happens in the US economy substantially affects the world economy. In the past, the US economy and markets have responded well to the elections when the results have been predictable. However, this time things have been very unpredictable. The Times has called it “the most surreal Presidential campaign in modern times.” The very fact that Mr. Obama is not running again for President is a very crucial factor. If you are a senior executive running the P&L of an Enterprise IT (Information Technology) outsourcing company, I can imagine your nervousness. Over the years, while successfully helping numerous enterprise companies enhance their sales effectiveness through DemandFarm, we have realized that Key Account Management is highly useful for Enterprise IT outsourcing companies. This is because great relationships between the enterprise consumer and IT service provider are what get them more and repeatable business. These Key Accounts (or set of enterprise consumers) for these IT services companies correspond to key sectors such as Automotive, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Infrastructure, Technology, etc. Each of these sectors might experience a boom or slack due to the government’s tax policies, economic reforms, etc. Let us take a few examples to explain this. The Democrats and Hillary Clinton have been quite keen on health care reforms. If Ms. Clinton comes to power, analysts anticipate the further development of ‘Obamacare’. This can be a boon for life sciences companies and healthcare organizations such as managed care facilities, hospitals, insurance providers, and medical technology companies. If one or more of your Key Accounts happens to fall into these categories, you might want Ms. Clinton to win. Now few sectors might not do as well under Democratic rule. Take pharmaceuticals for example. The Clintons have fought to lower pharmaceutical prices for a long time. During his time as President, Bill Clinton took a pledge to stop drug companies from price gouging and his administration took measures to stop that. Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced in September that they plan to “hold the pharmaceutical industry accountable and rein in drug costs.” If we look at the other side of the picture now, if Republicans come to power oil and natural companies may benefit. Mr. Trump is quite serious about oil’s significance to the American economy and wants the country to be energy independent. Trump administration could increase new pipeline construction and drilling, which might result in increased supply and low oil costs. This could also result in more business for oil equipment manufacturers. There is a possibility that Trump may lift the current ban on U.S. oil exports. While things may seem good for oil and natural gas companies, clean energy companies could face setbacks because of the obvious reasons. If you are a senior executive running the P&L of an Enterprise IT outsourcing company, thoughts about which other sectors not mentioned here might perform well or suffer would be crossing your mind. What will happen to my Key Account that falls into Pharmaceuticals or Renewable energy sectors? Should I be asking my CEO to lower the targets for my team for this FY in the next meeting? And finally, who is leading the election race right now? To be honest, five days before the final election result, not even the best analysts can answer these questions with 100% confidence. Also, even after the results are announced you will have to wait for few months to see what policies the new president and government are following. However, one thing is clear – your Key Accounts need some pretty watertight planning and managing in these uncertain times. Key Account Management Technology or KAM Tech can come to your rescue. KAM Tech is a Key Account Management software or a set of tools that helps the key account manager manage and grow Key Accounts. If you have complex B2B offerings, to get consistent chunk revenues from your Key Accounts you need to go much deeper, do a proper analysis, make an actionable plan, and govern those accounts strategically. Just closing the first few deals is not enough, you need to farm and mine into those large accounts for deeper and wider engagements. DemandFarm has been able to solve this problem for hundreds of enterprises. Just imagine a solution that integrates with your existing systems such as Salesforce and you get fantastic analytics without putting in any extra data. Armed with key account management tools such as White Space analysis, farming and mining effectiveness, financial analysis, communication patterns, etc. you can build a powerful and actionable account plan. In short, you can be prepared for any situation that might arise. Still, thinking about whether KAM Tech can help you? The elections may be too close to call, but this one is a no-brainer. Experience it today, and sit back and enjoy the outcome of the elections, knowing you got at least one thing under control.
The Key Account Management Secret No One Tells You About
Key Account Management is necessary for the organization’s growth. Let me share its secrets. An Old Friend Brings Up An Old Challenge A few months ago an old friend from business school reconnected with me and wanted to meet up for a chat. During the evening, I was happy to learn that he is doing well in his career – so well that he is looking after close to half of his company’s major clients – quite a feat. Once all the congratulating was over, though, I could hold back no longer and had to ask, “so, how do you ever sleep at night”? With all the complexity that each Client entails, managing one is tough enough. And here, my friend had several Key Accounts, albeit with an extremely competent team of Key Account Managers to work with him. But the fact remains it could not be a cakewalk. ‘Yep. It has been more than tough. For a while there I had given up sleeping at night! And in all those waking hours, I have been giving it much thought. So this is why I am here today. Sometimes you need to undo what works to get the formula to get better and sometimes you just got to maybe go back to the basics”.Me (antennae on high alert for some juicy insight about Strategic Account Management ) “Tell me all about it!” Casing The Conundrum “You know the drill with Key Accounts. Each Account Manager is the king of his castle. As long as it ain’t broke, you do not try and interfere as their Manager..you just look at the numbers and keep your thumb up. PEOPLE…(he paused meaningfully).. is the key to Key Account Success. It is all about relationships mapping – their relationships with clients and internal stakeholders – and Intel – in their head and their laptops, emails, wherever – you know the drill. Of late, my level of dependency on these people had been bothering me. You know, in spite of our best efforts to create a desirable work culture and environment, I have no guarantees on how long any of them will stay with us. If even one of them leaves, it would take me months to rebuild what may be lost – if at all I can rebuild it to the same level. This was what kept me up at night.There has to be a way to take Account Management from person dependent to process driven..but that would mean taking away the very essence of Key Account Management – which is that each Key Account Relationship is owned, grown and nurtured by a dedicated Manager who had the freedom and flexibility to meet all his Key Clients’ needs in the most customized, individualized way! Quite a conundrum!And what’s more, (he was really on a roll now, my friend!) my Key Account Managers are all highly experienced professionals…they have been doing what they do for a long time..and they are darn good at it…but it is difficult to get them to work in ways other than what they are used to…they see it as a disruption to their work and often it’s quite a challenge to get them to participate in anything like that. Recently we spent a bomb on a sales excellence methodology training and everyone said they really enjoyed it – but guess what..once they went back to daily life, it was business as usual – my Ops guys sifting through a million different files and presentations to make sense of what was going on with each Account, trying to stitch together the big picture for me, you know…how could we operationalize all that we developed in the methodology training in a coherent way across the board? You know, given that whole conundrum we just spoke of…how can we possibly……institutionalise the core KAM processes?” I finished for him.“Exactly. How can we? (pause) Should we?” That was then That conversation left us both with a lot more questions than answers but in the time since then; I took this challenge back to our team at DemandFarm. Anything that keeps KAM professionals up at night keeps us up at night, so we spent a lot of time working on the basic question – can- and should- we attempt to operationalize the core Key Account Management model to improve efficiencies, effectiveness, and governance in large B2B organizations? And if we did find a way to do that in our Key Account Management Software, would it be adopted by KAMs? Would it take away from their ability to customize and improvise the way they managed and grew their Key Accounts?We have spent several months tearing into this question and its implications. We have looked at it from many angles, many perspectives. The pros and cons of doing such a thing. And slowly, we did see the light at the end of the tunnel. It was time to set up a meeting with my old friend.
Impact of Org chart on Key account management
Are you a key account manager who brings a lion’s share of the revenue for your organization? or Are you a sales ops manager who backs the sales team to come up with flying colors? You guys are the real heroes of your organizations. Maybe that’s why the challenges faced by you are critical. Do you believe that a 19th-century management tool is solving almost all the challenges faced by you in this 21st century? It’s true and not a joke. “If no Org Chart, then no Key Account Management” Org Chart is the smart tool that does all the wonders. It is a visual representation of the structure of an organization with some extensive information about the contacts. It is dynamically evolving every day with new features added up to strengthen its potential. DemandFarm’s Org chart is one such powerful tool with lots of updates made to benefit modern key account managers About Demand Farm: DemandFarm is a Key Account Management Software system solely focused on addressing the unique challenges that Key Account professionals face. With focused functionality, the software allows all stakeholders of strategic, Key, and global account programs to intensively cultivate, build, harvest, and profitably grow the organization’s most valuable relationships. Power of DemandFarm’s Org Chart Software : Hierarchy Mapping: Know who reports to whom among the contacts. Relationship Mapping: Know who are the supporters, detractors, and neutral contacts. Influence Mapping: Know who influences whom inside the organizations. Power Mapping: Know the power of each contact i.e, who calls the shot. ‘From Contacts to relationships to key accounts’ 250+ leading companies in various industries are leveraging DemandFarm’s Org chart builder to re-imagine key account management and growing their strategic relationships with key accounts. One such company is Veracode. Veracode uses Salesforce Org chart About Veracode Veracode is an application security company that provides an automated cloud-based service for securing web, mobile, and third-party enterprise applications. Veracode offers multiple security analysis technologies on a single platform, including static analysis, dynamic analysis, mobile application behavioral analysis, and software composition analysis.
Annual Planning Pains
It’s that time of year again folks. Yes. Holiday time, Thanksgiving time, Fall time…but also account planning time! Holiday plans, travel plans…and of course, Annual Key Account Plans! You know that adage- if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail! I had that in big bold letters up in my schoolroom back in high school. While it’s 100% true, it doesn’t change the fact that planning time is a big pain. KAM in simpler days and times Before I turned entrepreneur, I was a Key Account Manager with a large automotive giant. And this time of the year, usually meant taking stock of a lot of data from around the company- all on paper in those days- and trying to pore over all the numbers from all the sources and making sense of them, mobilizing my sources to see what the Client was planning for their year to come, strategizing with the leadership to develop my path for the year and of course, bracing myself for the internal sell, in case some major initiatives were needed to remain competitive. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Today, the very definition of key Accounts has gone from large companies to ultra-global matrix organizations, connected digitally across a complex network of relationships, tracking people’s movements across the globe, mountains of data across myriad formats- from PowerPoints to emails to the cloud…everywhere! In real-time…how simple my Key Accounts of yours seem in comparison…with easier lines of command, few verticals, and even fewer geographies. Shaking off the nagging doubt that ‘somethings been missed’… My compatriots in contemporary Strategic Account Management tell me that the sheer complexity of large Accounts today is not the real challenge- the challenge is managing all the data that is generated, and interpreting that to create strategic action points or annual plans. It’s simply not feasible for one individual to manage it manually – even with the help of software and a laptop. It’s amazing how many productive hours are wasted- yes, wasted– in simply collating the data required to start the process of annual planning – so many formats, so many sources. And even then, one can’t be sure if an opportunity to expand or grow has simply been missed or fallen through the gaps because one entity or buying unit or geography or vertical of the Key Account was missed out, or a certain connection wasn’t established with the right person at the right time in the client organization, or a new business vertical was recorded as an independent entity in the CRM system and didn’t show up in the Account data at all… Over to #painfreeplanning So obviously, technology can help track and collate everything better, and overall plan better, and there are lots of tools to make that happen…but the real secret sauce to shift the focus from managing to growing is to spend productive hours on data interpretation and strategic action, not on joining the dots and collating data from various sources, figuring out version control of the many PPTs floating around or cutting and pasting financial data from excel sheets. At DemandFarm, our inspiration is to create #painfreeplanning for KAMs everywhere. Our technology joins the dots and collates all the data in one format, in one place, right inside your CRM. You won’t believe how pain-free it can be till you try it yourself. And, all this month, we are giving you that opportunity. Experience the DemandFarm Salesforce Account Planning module – free for two months; no questions asked – and see if it works for you. More than a thousand Account Managers across verticals have already made the switch…it’s time you experience why. Happy Thanksgiving, Fall, and the upcoming festive season. Most of all, happy #painfreeplanning!