Digital Key Account Management- Unlocking the secret to managing Key Accounts
Previously published under the Council Post for the Forbes’ Business Development Council The Pareto principle, better known as the 80/20 rule, is applied for numerous purposes in boardrooms all over—but the essence holds true for a majority of cases in the business world, especially when it comes to managing and retaining customers. The idea and allure of gaining new users always outweigh the duty of catering to existing customers. And it makes sense why: More customers result in better streamlining of resources and approaches, leading to more savings, higher profits, and better output. But this shouldn’t come at the cost of key accounts contributing to the company’s ongoing revenue. Handling these key accounts is often considered an art. As anyone with knowledge of the enterprising history of business would know, it is only the suavest, sociable account managers who can manage relationships between organizations that are mutually beneficial. The roots and troubles of Key Account Management At the peak of the industrial age, about 50 to 60 years ago, businesses differentiated between strategic customers and regular ones. They treated their large accounts preferentially, and the practices to maintain a big account were translated into methodologies which led to creating templates. This led to a layer of complexities in which consultants would create a sometimes 50-page template to manage a key account. Over the years, this has become theoretical and no longer actionable. In the end, account managers end up creating account plans which amount to nothing but filling in the fields of complex templates which may never be referred to again. What began as an initiative to improve product and solution quality by focusing on the most valuable customers has turned into a complex process that is, at best, seen as a nuisance. And at worst, it can harm relationships between organizations. The cracks in traditional key account management practices have proven untenable in the current scenario, where it is often impossible to have a meeting in person. The fundamentals of account management, which relied on keeping in touch with key clients, are no longer viable across industries and verticals. This luxury of time doesn’t exist in the current scenario, as customer preferences change regularly. The representatives for key customers are looking for a partner who can empathize and help them succeed in their business roles, not a cog who provides what is necessary for the supply chain. When organizations treat their key accounts as strategic partners, the real value of relationships can be seen. Finally, a renewed focus on individual careers has made the movement of employees between companies much more common. This often means that the traditional KAM data is rendered obsolete much more quickly. Why Key Account Management? Even after all the drawbacks, organizations keep trying to accomplish key account management the traditional way because it yields results. Yet key accounts are responsible for 33% of sales revenue, according to a survey by Gartner. A poll on Analytics and Advice for B2B Leaders by Gallop shows that organizations that excel at key account management see disproportionate account growth solely by their ability to engage their customers. The numbers are impressive, too: 34% more profitability, 50% more sales and revenue, and 33% greater chance of being the top choice of clients for future business. The results can be seen fairly early as well. One survey shows that customer satisfaction increases by 20% within a few years of establishing a key account management program, which usually is reflected by a 15% increase in profits and revenue. The benefits compound over time, as KAM programs that are operational for five-plus years usually report figures that are nearly double. Taking the Digital Way Ahead With digital account planning, we are seeing a significant shift for the good in the area of strategic account management. B2B companies that had the luxury of time in the past are moving at a faster pace. The employees typically lasted for years in one organization and often could negotiate multi-year deals to provide products, parts, or services. This is almost unheard of in this era of constant change and optimization and one-year contracts. But when the focus was on keeping the client representative happy earlier, account managers could span out their planning across multiple years at once. Digital tools help in key account management by ushering in a new way of business. Digital key account management transforms key account planning into a dynamic, data-driven process that provides actionable information and insights. The intelligence present in the organization regarding its key customers—what one might term tribal knowledge—resides in the way clients and key account managers interact and add value to the relationship. But this seemingly unstructured information can be captured into an enterprise memory which can be replicated or used by a team rather than a single person. What the Future holds With the record created by digital key account management, an enterprise memory is built which narrates the story of a client’s needs and problems. This provides a solid start to those filling in for their colleagues or replacing someone. With the help of these tools, employees can approach the problem of managing a key account more creatively and provide the necessary human touch with efficiency. The cognitive skills of account managers still rule the roost, and no level of automation can replace the intuition an experienced key account manager brings to the job. It can only enhance it.
Selecting Account-Based Selling Tools: The Essential Features
Account-Based Selling / Account-Based Sales (ABS) Tools Account-Based selling is no easy feat. It’s a complex, time-consuming process that can take your team months to perfect. But once you’ve cracked the code, it can be a compelling way to grow your business. Thankfully, advances in sales technology are making it easier than ever to implement an account-based selling strategy. Today, account-based sales tools empower sales leaders to understand the nuances of customer interactions with the proper context of their accounts. And the end results are no less than significant boosts in the CLV of each account. Account-based sales tools are software or technology solutions that support the execution of an account-based sales strategy. These tools help sales teams identify, target, and engage with high-value accounts by providing insights and intelligence about the accounts and their key decision-makers. But all this is only possible if account managers can overcome the involved limitations of traditional CRMs such as not being equipped enough to execute account planning to its full potential. This is primarily because traditional account planning execution happens offline with an increased reliance on PPTs and spreadsheets. This often leads to the absence of a single source of truth for data and reports along with a missing systematic link between Account-based Management and Account-based Selling. Thus, this calls for a system that empowers account managers to paint a comprehensive account picture and collaborate with every account stakeholder. Fortunately, new sales tools are emerging that help account managers overcome these limitations. These account-based sales tools provide a centralized platform for managing customer interactions and account data. They also offer features specifically designed to support an account-based selling strategy. 8 crucial must-have capabilities in account-based sales / account-based selling tools: Account Intelligence : The ability to surface insights about individuals and companies that can be used to identify new opportunities and create a strategy for targeting these accounts. Relationship Mapping : The ability to see how different individuals within an account are connected and track all interactions between team members. Whitespace Identification : The ability to find and target new prospects in accounts with the most growth potential. Account Planning : The ability to map out essential information about prospects such as the decision-makers, competitive position, and the core strategic components to win these accounts, among others. Opportunity Management : The ability to track all interactions with an account and all related opportunities and identify which deals are most likely to close starting from the first to the last stage. Pipeline Management : The ability to manage all deals in an account and their associated stages and values. Forecasting : The ability to predict future sales outcomes by understanding which deals are most likely to close and estimating the value of those closed deals. Collaboration : Identifying and updating contact and account data by unlocking a holistic picture of every key account. Creating coaching content alongside, such as process playbooks is also crucial. Once you have the right account-based sales tools in place, it’s essential to ensure everyone on your team is using them effectively. That means appropriately training sales reps on using the tools and giving them the tools they need to be successful. The best account-based sales tools make it easy for sales reps to identify and target key accounts, build relationships with key stakeholders, and track all interactions with those stakeholders. This information can then be used to create targeted content and sales pitches relevant to each account. How Account-Based Selling Tools Help Maximizing Account Revenue Account-based selling tools are vital to maximizing the revenue from every key account by bridging the gaps between intent signals and growth opportunities. They do this via Connected Apps Ecosystem : Account-based selling platforms integrate with existing data and tech stacks to drastically improve forecasting accuracy. Predictive analytics can help identify which deals are most likely to close by analyzing past customer interactions and current account data. Sales Enablement : Account-based selling tools provide the sales team with the right content at the right time to help them close more deals. This content is tailored to the specific needs of each account and is delivered through channels that the customer is most likely to use. Account-based Selling Strategy : The right account-based selling tools can help sales leaders to develop a detailed account-based selling strategy and an account-based selling framework. This strategy will identify the best path that best integrates with the existing complexity of tech stacks. We are proud to share that DemandFarm has been recognized as one such leading account-based sales tool from a globally leading Independent Research Firm in the space of Account-based Sales Tools. Forrester Recognizes DemandFarm as a Mature Vendor in Account-Based Sales Technologies The report gives insight into what companies that use Account-Based Selling tools can expect. DemandFarm is mentioned as one of the few vendors that can provide account insights, opportunity tracking, and relationship mapping. For more information on how to maximize account revenue, please contact us. We would be happy to discuss our services and the many benefits of using an account-based sales tool!
4 account penetration strategies to take your retention revenue to the next level
One of the most important laws of growing a SaaS business commands that every company has to face the proverbial “valley of death”—long and dry spells of famine caused by several factors. It’s par for the course that most high-growth SaaS companies stall out in the range of $20–$40 million ARR despite a breezy initial success in scaling their business from 0–1. Other times, external market forces—such as the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic—can cause growing businesses to hit a plateau in their growth trajectory. In many ways, such episodes of growth impediment are sort of trial by ordeal to test the perseverance of a business and its teams. If a company is able to storm the rough weather, it will likely come out of it stronger and ready to take on any challenge. If they don’t survive the challenge—too bad, they probably didn’t have the mettle, to begin with. One way ambitious companies and their GTM teams cope with the rough times is by shifting their focus on an area that is often overlooked, i.e. their existing customers. Of course, it’s tempting to double your business just by pounding out hundreds and hundreds of new leads every month. It’s the exact kind of growth playbook that makes you a VC darling and helps you secure several rounds of funding initially—but not when you hit a wall. When your company is tumbling down the death valley, it’s more logical to focus on your existing base of users to extend a helping hand than to scream for help in a vacuum. There are many upsides to refocusing on your current users to expand your retention revenue. An average sales cycle when selling to existing accounts is 50% shorter than closing deals with new accounts. That means little to no investment in new customer acquisitions, exploiting new revenue channels, and expanding your TAM potential. In a long time horizon, most B2B companies earn 70% of their revenue from 20% of their customers. Taking that as an average, it’s only logical to have a pre-emptive account planning strategy to enable sales opportunities on your immediate radar. Here are four strategic account penetration tips to expand your revenue potential, improve customer lifetime value, and enrich sales velocity. 1. Leverage account-based customer marketing Account-based selling and marketing are nothing but evolved, perhaps more refined, versions of account management or account farming. Sales coaches and theoretical consultants keep adding new templates and playbooks around this topic to reframe it as a new concept, which has made ABS and ABM more complex topics than they actually are. The result? In one of its recent findings, CSO Insights reports that 54.9% of B2B companies have gaping holes in their account penetration strategies. Often, the culprit is the broken hand-off processes between cross-functional teams and information silos even when the teams are catering to serve the same account. For account-based customer marketing to succeed, you should have a proactive strategy to implement your campaigns—not a reactive approach to upsell and cross-sell when an account matures. Start by identifying the target accounts and engage in frequent conversations with them to understand their broader business requirements. This will help you gain visibility into their business environment, sales pipelines, revenue targets, growth bottlenecks, and end-customer needs. Once you have the data, create powerful content stories and messaging to show them the opportunity cost around wasted money, process delays, and long conversion cycles. Strategically position your solution—through a blend of display and retargeting ads—to showcase how using your solution can help them not just to overcome their current problems but achieve their revenue milestones. The idea here is to present your team and solution as strategic partners in their growth rather than mere software vendors or implementation partners. Here’s yet another strategy to leverage account-based sales and marketing to expand revenue growth—use whitespace analysis for farming key accounts. It’s basically a tool to help you identify whitespace farming and mining opportunities, discover areas where you can grow your account, and align or map your resources to accomplish your goals. Whitespace analysis gives you the advantage of strategically positioning second-order selling opportunities with a clear view of the account landscape. For instance, you can use whitespace analysis to identify potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities within your existing key accounts. With whitespace mapping, you can easily find opportunities for additional account penetration and expansion based on an account’s past performance, similar purchase patterns, and competitive landscape. A well-done whitespace analysis of key accounts will help you identify your best selling offerings or products, see gaps in product or service lines, spot revenue opportunities with little to no competition, anticipate and build capacities, and maintain a high-growth pipeline. To pull off most of the ABM campaigns successfully, you would need a solid partnership between marketing and sales because the silos between the two teams would jeopardize your chances of exploiting lucrative revenue opportunities. A tight alignment between marketing and sales can lead to a 32% increase in year-over-year revenue growth. When the two teams join forces with each other, the partnership opens new doors of business opportunities for expanding your retention revenue. For example, sales enablement is an arena where the two teams can come together to improve their team KPIs while bumping up their companies’ revenue. According to stats, businesses that have sales enablement as an integral part of their sales process have a 49% win rate on achieving forecasted deals. This lends itself over to account penetration too. The marketing already has core first-party data that they can leverage to create impactful content assets and create account-based email drip campaigns. They don’t have to open their purse to spend a dollar on acquiring new customers while the sales can borrow marketing’s expertise to create valuable sales collaterals like pitch decks, comparison docs, business cases, and so on. The collaboration is a win-win tactic for both teams and you can even tether the two teams to a common KPI to encourage a tighter alignment.
What DemandFarm brings to the table! (Milind Katti at the SaasHoles Podcast)
Milind Katti at the SaasHoles Podcast Key Account Management is rapidly changing from traditional methods to becoming digitized. Watch Milind Katti, COO & co-founder at DemandFarm, in conversation with Kevin Gaither and Pete Jansons in the SaasHoles podcast. Find out how DemandFarm came to be pioneers in Digital Account Planning. Track the shift from individual-driven to data-driven account planning. Get to know the benefits of converting tacit knowledge to enterprise memory. Check out the following topics in this podcast: Relationship Mapping & Account Management Building relationships as account managers The role of automation in SaaS Hunters vs Farmers in business
The rise of Digital Account Planning and how DemandFarm created its own niche
When we started DemandFarm, we realized that for B2B firms, winning an opportunity is not enough. It is about winning an account in the long run. Keeping that in mind, our vision was to build digital tools for making account-centric sales effectiveness even more prominent. That was the vision with which we had founded the company. And then, we started building account planning tools around the central theme of account-centricity, and over the years, we have seen astounding traction as it took over and helped in making account managers productive and the overall account management process far more effective. The Market Gap we have filled While the CRM has been very good with Opportunity Management, it does not have any process to support large account management, like account planning. Even today, a majority of companies do account planning on PowerPoints and Excel sheets. It is a disparate process with very little standardization. While account-based marketing solutions have helped, there was a big need for a technology solution to address account planning, or account-based sales, which was still very relationship selling driven. With our digital account planning solution, we have done that, and have addressed a big market need. We have helped enterprises answer relevant questions such as: How relevant are your offerings? Does it solve a specific challenge that the customer is facing at that point in time? Do you have on-demand data that can help you make the right decisions and make the right interventions at the right time? How strong are your relationships in terms of breadth and depth? Digital account planning tools can help organizations take a measure of how mature is your communication with the customer. In simple words, digital account planning tools can provide much-needed intelligence and clarity into some of your key accounts. For example, when multiple members from a sales team interact with a large client, there is a lot of information about the client that is there with the individual account managers. DemandFarm’s OrgChart can help in converting this tribal knowledge to enterprise memory by capturing the organizational hierarchy, affinity with client stakeholders, their decision-making power, budget control, internal political mapping, and more into a visual canvas available to all. Similarly, DemandFarm’s Account Plan module is designed to help enterprises create an annual plan for each key account with clear goals and objectives using both qualitative and quantitative insights. Account plans can be created based on account segmentation parameters such as relationship health and account attractiveness or competitor analysis going beyond SWOT to wallet share analysis. Our key account management software has now evolved to a point where we have been able to create a new category, Digital Account Planning, which was not known as a category a few years back. We have succeeded in institutionalizing the account planning process and have helped several organizations standardize the key account management process across organizations in less than 3 months. Once implemented, account managers are equipped with all account insights that may impact their active opportunities and leadership has a global view of key accounts at the click of a button. More importantly, they are able to effectively plan across regions and across multiple teams in a seamless manner. Enterprises also have increased visibility of potential and growth ambition within key accounts. Digital account planning tools give meaningful insights to overcome questions raised by the account manager such as – How to keep track of who all they know and what all they know about them? Where do they lie in the formal hierarchy of their organization? Who controls what budgets? More importantly, DemandFarm helps enterprises evolve contacts to relationships. Account Managers are able to keep a check on internal influences within their customer organizations. The heat maps help Account Teams take informed decisions in the opportunity pursuits. Who to target? Who else to bring into the meetings? Who is our champion? These questions can be easily answered now.
Jarrod Johnson, Chief Customer Officer at TaskUs talks about DemandFarm’s Account Planner
Jarrod Johnson Chief Customer Officer at TaskUs stopped by to chat with Kevin Gaither, Jamie Carney and Pete Jansons at SaasHoles to talk about DemandFarm’s Account Planner. Jarrod shares his experience of using DemandFarm’s Key Account Management Software and goes ahead saying “DemandFarm is the most robust, integrated strategic account planning tool I’ve ever seen.”
Envisaging the Future of Account Planning and the Role of Analytics and AI
Every account or customer is like a fingerprint – unique and having a distinct persona and behavior. Developing an account-centric culture is among the top mandates for every company, but not every company has an effective way to track its progress. Initially, companies relied on CRM for opportunity management, but still lacked in processes to handle large account management. Account Planning Tools were created to help firms provide the required intelligence into their key accounts. As the environment has changed, account planning tools also have had to evolve to handle new opportunities and help enterprises resolve their existing challenges. Enterprises must carefully create shorter, bite-sized data and content in appropriate formats for 30/45/60-minute virtual meetings to ensure comprehension and respect time commitments. It is also important to prioritize information that is critical to educate customers and provide buying help and requires stakeholder inputs and/or approval to move conversations forward. Learn More: The Future of Key Account Management Report – A Global CSO study by DemandFarm Leveraging Analytics for Key Account Planning Analytics is another powerful arsenal in account planning tools. Analytics can play a precise role in account centricity. Armed with detailed insights, you could prepare detailed proposals/quotes depending on each key account requirement. Enterprises can review target achievements and create reports which facilitate the creation of apprised account management decision-making and strategy formulation. This will help to prepare pricing documentation for the business’s products/services prior to sending financial proposals to key accounts. Analytics can also help in identifying the future trends and opportunities in the industry as enterprises can not only understand what their customers are trying to tell them but also their future plans and concerns. Most importantly, analytics can help in throwing insights on the non-captured value of a customer such as referrals and learning and innovation benefits, which may add to the economic value derived from Customer Profitability Analysis and Customer Lifetime Value. Watch Now: The Shifting Landscape of Strategic Account Management / Key Account Management (featuring SAMA) Leveraging AI for Key Account Planning AI is definitely going to impact almost every field, and it’s only a matter of time before it starts impacting the account planning process too. Currently, most of the key processes in the account planning or management space involve a level of cognitive ability and thinking to create a unique value proposition for specific clients. Though these are early days, AI can and will probably evolve to a stage where AI tools embedded within the account planning tools are able to guide which parts of a client’s engagement can grow further in engagement and which are the ones at risk. Watch Now: The Changing Role of Technology in Key Account Management (featuring Forrester) By 2025, Gartner expects 80% of B2B sales interactions between buyers and suppliers to happen in digital channels. The future of account planning will hence see a huge transformation in strategy, processes, and resource allocation that moves the process from being seller-centric to buyer-centric and from analog to hyper-automated, digital-first engagement with customers. Account Planning Tools will also have features where it will be possible for enterprises to collaborate in real-time with their clients. It will increasingly be common to co-create solutions by inviting clients to collaborate using whiteboarding tools. Increasingly, decision-making will be based on data, analytics, and AI, not on intuition and experience. Organizations must be ready to engage the “everywhere customer”. A shift to buyer-oriented, not product-oriented integrated commercial channels will be hence critical to meet customers’ changing expectations and preferences for digital and self-service channels.
Sales Playbooks for Key Account Management – Everything You Need to Know
All salespeople dream of rolling out strategies that run high on the ‘leads’ factor. But sales is not just about sustainable leads – it is about engaging with your audience and translating the brand’s offerings into tangible solutions to convert them into ideal customers. But how can you do that effectively without resorting to trial-and-error for every customer? This is where a sales playbook comes in. A sales playbook is a how-to guide that puts the correct strategy and tools at salespeople’s fingertips to maneuver every sales cycle stage skillfully. It walks your sales personnel through commonly-encountered scenarios, including prospecting and nurturing leads, when to sell what product or service, dealing with different types of audiences, and more. If understanding what a sales playbook comprises can be a head-scratcher at times, what with its many elements, knowing how to make it work for Key Accounts is doubly tough. Nevertheless, employing a playbook polished by their sales experts unsurprisingly gives companies an edge. However, rote observance of processes that may have gone out of date can stall, if not seriously impede, this growth. Unfortunately, even as fledgling digital applications gained traction within most business departments in the 2000s, many companies failed to leverage technologies to their full extent for sales. Adapting Sales Playbooks for the Digital Selling Age Two recent phenomena have turned this attitude on its head. First, ubiquitous digital interactions — that have reshaped the customer journey and, subsequently, the sales process. Second, the onset of the pandemic and the massive shift to remote work, which has forced sales personnel to navigate their business relationships online and, often, individually. This makes the sales process a bit tricky, especially when you consider the high customer expectations most key account leads harbor. Today, every employee reflects the company, and salespeople more so, for being the company’s first representatives. A consistent and uniform approach while mostly working separately can be difficult to accomplish if mishandled. This is where the digitization of processes can help. If incorporated smartly and appropriately, it can help companies capture and retain strategic accounts. For example, DemandFarm’s Org Chart digitizes an organization’s existing internal hierarchy, relationships, influence, and decision power (read more on this in the next section). All this and more deliver the following key benefits: Ease of Transfer: It is important for sales reps to have a connected view of data, and digitization enables the entire sales pipeline to be transparent to all team members. This means that if a salesperson is unable to entertain their prospective key client, anyone else from the team can take over with ease. Analytics Management: With every piece of information online, monitoring performance indicators, generating reports, and analyzing customer data to improve pitch and process is effortless. Better Process Efficiency: Complex internal processes increase the burden on sales reps. Digitization can mitigate this by facilitating sales teams to use less time and effort and fewer resources to do the same work, equipping them with more efficient processes. While the advantages of digitizing your sales playbook to manage your key accounts are clear, is it possible to do so without disrupting operations? Cue in sales tools for the digital world. Role of Digital Tools to Make This Easy To circumvent possible rejection of your transformed sales playbook, you must ensure two things before zeroing in on any tool. Understand the needs of your business: With more than a thousand vendors in the sales tech arena, there is no dearth of tools. However, it is important to understand which of these tools is ideal for your business requirements lest your investment goes to waste. Involve Your Team: Before deciding on the tool, talk to your team members about the issues they face and invite suggestions for possible solutions. Your sales team needs to be comfortable with your chosen tool to employ it efficiently. Components of an Ideal Sales Playbook in KAM Now that you’ve got a good idea of what to do before selecting your ideal tool, let’s go over the types of sales tools available to you for key account management. Sales Intelligence Sales intelligence involves analyzing data and using it to create insightful reports and estimate future performance. Whether it be sales performance reports or productivity logs or analytics on strategic account behavior, sales intelligence, as a function, takes charge of all data extraction and scrutinization. Relationship Intelligence is a crucial part of any Sales Intelligence process as it helps to map all the relationships and interactions among the teams of customers, both current and potential. It indicates the nature of each entity’s connections and influence on others. Relationship Mapping is important for any Sales Intelligence process because: It helps to gain insights into the relationship, no matter whether it be in terms of age, tenure, seniority, or any other factor. It is useful when trying to understand the growth rate of an organization, which can be achieved by examining the number and nature of relationships in the company. It is integral to any sales process, especially in business-to-business (B2B) companies. This is because the company’s growth is usually dependent on the growth of its relationships and how its team locks down key deals. Sales Enablement As the name suggests, sales enablement empowers salespersons with the resources they need to prospect, close, and nurture leads. This is facilitated by analyzing the data from the marketing, content, and sales departments and drawing on it to align the three cycles, consequently enabling sales personnel to close deals. Benefits of Sales Enablement include: Salespersons can effectively capture key accounts by streamlining communication between departments and providing resources like content and information. The sales team can be better prepared and equipped for upcoming meetings and presentations. Advanced analytics helps companies to understand the current state of their sales cycle, allowing them to identify areas of improvement and highlight the highest-value opportunities. Sales playbooks are an effective way of organizing both your sales enablement and relationship intelligence data into one place. You can read
Stakeholder Mapping for Key Accounts- How Digital Account Planning Tools can make an Impact?
Stakeholder management is gaining more and more traction in recent years with ever-evolving customer needs and the advent of technological solutions for integrating relationship-building channels and capabilities. The expectations from both external and internal stakeholders are getting increasingly higher and pushing the envelope of stakeholder relationship management. Fred Reichheld, the Bain Fellow and Management Consultant at Bain & Company says that “For every customer that complains, there are 26 who don’t say anything. And instead of vocalizing their frustrations to your team, they simply stop buying from you and cancel their subscription.” This might not seem like much in traditional low-value sales where sellers have a large number of customers to cater to but it makes a massive difference in your bottom line when you are dealing with high-value key accounts. In fact, a study by Bain & Company states that by improving customer retention merely by 5%, the company’s profits can go up by as much as 95%. When you look at these two facts in tandem, it becomes critical to focus on the key stakeholder relationships not only for their sake but for yours as well. Who are the Stakeholders? Stakeholders in its general sense is a very broad term that can go on to include any individual or group whose decisions can either affect you and your business or be affected by the decisions you take for your business. These could be your customers, employees, partners, consultants, investors, and so on. In the context of key account management, the stakeholders are the people within your key accounts that have a say in the buying process, also known as external stakeholders, and the people within your organization that are overlooking and ensuring the buying process is not only a success but as smooth as possible are the internal stakeholders or the relationship owners. The unfolding of the modern B2B sales process has given rise to buying groups that consist of a group of people that increasingly possess more product knowledge and technical awareness that not only require their expectations to be met but need to be wowed too. This places the onus on your key account management team to step up their game and craft and execute an account-centric stakeholder relationship building and management strategy. Gartner Research reports that your customer is no longer relying on your sales and support team for attaining the information about your product or solution, they are conducting independent research and relying on both offline and online channels to make up their mind. A report by UserIQ states that 87% of respondents from SaaS organizations that have a churn rate of less than 1% report that, they are fully or somewhat aligned on key customer relationship management. To keep the churn rate at its minimum, you will need to keep your communication with your key accounts authentic, targeted, and relevant to keep your account engaged which is made possible by data-backed stakeholder mapping. What is Customer Stakeholder Mapping? 1. Definition of the Stakeholders’ Goals Stakeholder Mapping begins with defining the interests and goals of the buying centers in your key accounts. Knowing what they need and want can not only enable you to assess if the account is a good fit but will also help you provide a tailored offering that the stakeholders won’t be able to refuse. The key account buyer not only demands convenience in terms of accessing the information they might need but also want the communication and the expert consulting services to be authentic, targeted, relevant, and timely. 2. Segmentation of Stakeholders The next step in the stakeholder mapping process is to segment the individuals or buying groups with respect to their roles, attitude, influence, and the amount of budget they control. This Relationship attribution is the key to stakeholder analysis as it provides data-backed insights into understanding your stakeholders’ interests and goals. When analyzed properly it could also help you comprehend who is on your side and who is against, what pressure they are under with respect to meeting certain goals, and what are the internal dynamics of the organization so that you can strategize accordingly. Your key account managers need to know how to strategically map these individuals within accounts with respect to their role, their stances, and the amount of budget they control. All this stakeholder intelligence needs to be actioned upon and monetized to expand and grow that account. 3. Mapping of Stakeholder Relationships The next step in stakeholder mapping is to dissect the relationships that your internal stakeholder team has with the external team and also the ones that the individuals within their team have within themselves. This would help you learn who can positively or negatively influence who and to what extent? We all know that the account-based selling scenario can get very complex with multiple buying centers and buying committees that are responsible for these buying jobs. Individuals within these committees not only hold the power to influence the buying decisions (for example, by just delaying the purchase process and preventing it from progressing to the next stage) but can also influence other decision-makers within the committee to rule in their favor. Your key account managers need to know how to strategically map these individuals within accounts with respect to their role, their stances, and the amount of budget they control. 4. Nurturing the Stakeholder Relationships Stakeholder management does not end once the deal is closed but is an ongoing process that lasts throughout the customers’ lifetime which needs to be extended as long as the mutual business interests are sustained. Developing these long-lasting relationships turns recent adopters into loyal long-term customers. Once you have the above attributes of your stakeholders mapped out, you will have clarity on what communication needs to be directed at whom and when. Maintaining an Engagement cadence with the key contacts is as important as the level of engagement. Maintaining an Engagement cadence with the key contacts is as important as the level of engagement. e.g
Power of Relationship Intelligence for Key Accounts
Relationship Intelligence for Key / Strategic / Large Accounts Let’s face it- enterprise selling isn’t easy. There are dozens of similar products in the market, and figuring out what your customers want is a whole other challenge altogether. From days of yore, sales has always been about understanding your customers and their needs. A great salesperson goes beyond this, and leverages his relationships to solve problems clients face in their growth journey by cross-selling and up-selling. Hence it goes without saying that customer data is a crucial element to crack the enterprise selling puzzle. This comprises everything from your business experience with your clients- from who your champions are to who could be blocking possible deals. With the advent of digital selling, global organizations have to ensure that they are able to capture, track, analyze and act on this relationship data. They can no longer afford to ignore tribal information across their sales organization, and risk missing out on potential opportunities to grow their key accounts. Strategic account planning process would be rendered ineffective and slow without these facets. A strategic account will have many many contacts we will have to manage, communicate & build relationships. The questions are Who are those right people? Who is on your side- your biggest supporters and detractors? What is the formal hierarchy of those people? What are the formal or informal influences between those people? Who has the highest decision making power- what are the buying roles? With whom and when have we won or lost opportunities in the past? Who are pursuing active opportunities today? Who is that champion who can introduce me to that ‘unaware’ contact with a big budget? What is your level of interaction and cadence of engagement? Most of the above answers are what we sometimes call ‘tribal knowledge’, and are in the heads of multiple people in our company. Consolidating all this knowledge into a meaningful algorithm and insights that can lead to action is called Relationship Intelligence. Enter relationship intelligence! At a basic level, key account relationship intelligence is just all the information you have about your contacts, stored in CRMs like Salesforce and MS Dynamics. This consists of how many interactions you have had with your clients, their timeline and budgets, the service/product they are interested in, etc. In a nutshell, it is everything you have about a single potential client! Good relationship intelligence goes one step further and tries to gauge sentiment to give you the true picture of your business relationships. It is critical to understand if your outreach is actually effective, where you should prioritize your efforts to meet your sales targets. So now we know that relationship intelligence is the key to this- let’s take a closer look at how relationship mapping tools can aid global clients in their digital transformation journey! Relationship Mapping Tools – the future is today! Sales Prioritization Sales teams are always on the lookout for strategic intelligence which would help identify gaps, can save time, help them advise contacts, close deals faster, and generate more revenue. A salesperson has hundreds of leads to follow up at any time and the ability to prioritize is critical to meeting his targets. Relationships Mapping Tools help make life easier by leveraging sales data to give you clear and relevant insights about your contacts, giving you visibility in the client organization, and helping identify where to focus your efforts. CRM Enhancement & User Adoption A recent LinkedIn survey pointed out how ‘top performers are more likely to say that sales intelligence tools are “extremely critical” in closing deals by a margin of 49% to 29%’. However, parallelly Salesforce points out that 91% of CRM data is actually incomplete. Therefore, there is a clear gap in user adoption and CRM data integrity, which is leading to salespersons missing out on deals. True Relationship Intelligence tools bridge this by having two-way sync with CRM. This ensures that you don’t spend your resources on manual data entry, and focus on what you do best- selling! Data Visualization & Insights Sure, you have all your sales data inside your CRM but it is of no use if you can’t make sense of it. Sales organizations need to always have a clear picture of what’s happening with their networks, and churn of relevant stakeholders, etc. Data Visualization helps break down sales data in an accessible way, helping identify patterns and trends. It is also great for leadership to understand the status of engagement with clients, tracking communication flow between relevant stakeholders, mapping power and influence of client contacts, and identifying revenue at risk- a 360° view of the entire strategic account management process. We at DemandFarm recognized very early on the importance of relationship intelligence in the digital sales journey. In fact, we have worked with over 250 customers & 25,000+ Account Managers to become a leader in the Digital Key Account Planning space today! The Org Chart by DemandFarm helps you visualize relationship intelligence and enables you to keep track of all your major account relationships. Our product guarantees that you break past top-line targets and adds a dimension to your sales planning process by forging wider, deeper, and richer relationships.