Account-Based Selling – The Beginner’s Guide to B2B Account-Based Sales
Account-Based Sales Is account-based sales or account-based selling a part of your go-to-market strategy for B2B sales? Why? Why not? An account-based selling approach to growth could stem from the following reasons. Your offering caters to a specific segment of a larger market, e.g., B2B outsourcing companies in the IT services space. Your product-led growth is tapering off because of competing products. The existing inbound marketing funnel is providing marginal growth. When you sell to enterprises and check one or more points off the list above, the lead-based approach becomes futile. Through our failures and triumphs of losing and closing deals, we have now learned that it makes more sense to customize our account-based selling approach and strategy to convert rather than going through the entire range in a sales funnel. The Pareto Principle indicates that, in a B2B sales set-up, about 80% of revenue comes from only 20% of customers. In such a scenario, becoming strategic about the accounts that bring in the most revenue and investing more time, revenue and manpower in engaging and growing them has become imperative. In the mid-2010s, account-based sales or hyper-segmented selling emerged from the concept of account-based strategy. Even though the idea is comparatively recent, it holds the potential to alter the reality of how organizations buy and sell. In fact, a report by Gartner, 2020 predicts that Account-Based Selling (ABS) will be the basis of sales for most technology vendors, and the volume of this market will exceed $5 billion per year. Enterprise B2B Sales demands a shift of focus from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality.’ What is Account-Based Selling? Account-based selling is a strategic ‘hyper-segmented’ sales process that has been developed to pursue a few but high-value accounts rather than several individual leads. It focuses on enterprise selling in the B2B sales context to target larger accounts with large deal sizes and non-linear buying journeys. In such purchase processes, an average of 11 stakeholders are involved in the decision-making and account-based selling or ABS through stakeholder mapping tries to incorporate all the key people in the transaction, taking into account their business interests and offering them a consultative, customized solution. Account-Based Selling takes a holistic view and relies on cross-organizational alignment. It involves coming together of the various departments such as Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, Finance, Product, Engineering, and the C-suite within an organization to align on the same goal and strategy. It requires the teams to work together to generate high-value engagements with the people in these accounts across a number of platforms with an approach that is tailored to that account’s need. It is no longer a numbers game, but a value game with account-based selling. KAM Glossary: Crucial Account Management Terms Explained Account-Based Selling KPIs While transitioning to the account-based methodology from a traditional B2B sales approach, updating and tracking relevant KPIs becomes crucial. Following are some you can start with: 1. Account Conversion Rate Conversions are the estimation of the success of your account-based selling strategy. Following are some parameters that you can compare conversion rates with for better comprehension of the impact ABS is having on your organization. CAC: Customer Acquisition Costs LTV: Customer Lifetime Value ACV: Average Contract Value and Length of the Average Deal 2. Engagement Account-based selling improves engagement with your accounts. Despite a long nurturing process, you can quantify development by tracking how keenly the right people at an account are engaging with you. Engagement could be anything from if they talk to your sales team, if they are using your products, if they are interacting with you on your socials to if they respond to your marketing efforts. You can also track success in engagements by channels and figure out what the people in a particular account positively respond to. 3. Data Quality Rich, scientific data is one of the most important investments you will make in your account-based strategy. Data quality is built through exhaustive research of your target accounts. You need to understand divisions within your target account and identify the key stakeholders within them. Your data should include their roles and contact information and a built-in mechanism to update this information as and when it changes. 4. Sales Cycle Length The B2B sales cycle length is the number of days it takes for a deal to close. It becomes important to measure this in an effort to optimize the process through focus on the needs of the account. In ABS, personalization is the key identifier in achieving that. 5. White Space White space analysis helps you identify the gap between the information you have about the account you are targeting and the information you need to close the deal. Efforts should be made to keep this space as narrow as possible to increase the overall account-based selling effectiveness. Reduced white space opportunity will help you tailor content and communication that is more accurate and relevant for your accounts. While tracking account-based selling metrics, the focus should be on quality and long-term insight driven customer relationship building and revenue would follow. Is Account-Based Selling for You? Now that you know what KPIs you will need to track, let’s dive into if ABS is for you. Transitioning to an account-based strategy requires significant time, manpower, and investments. You need to pit the following factors against the metrics that are discussed in the above section to evaluate what is best for your organization. The ABS strategy lets you allocate resources towards targeting larger B2B accounts and close fewer deals but expand your revenue and deal size. Jon Miller from Engagio talks about the WHO, the WHAT, and the WHERE of account-based sales development to evaluate if it’s worth dipping your feet into. The WHO of Account-Based Selling The WHO describes the accounts you need to go after and the people in those accounts. The more accurately you can understand your buyer, the better- as it may give you a clear understanding of who you are marketing and selling to. Buyer Personas
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Sales Effectiveness In Strategic Account Management
Lego, the favorite toy brand for children and one of the most nostalgic ones for adults, had a bit of a downturn in the early 2000s. Back in the 1990s, Lego had begun innovating and expanding its product lines. What could go wrong with that? The brand new, action figure-like toys stood apart from the original brickwork that Lego had always been associated with. This shift worked terribly with customers, i.e., kids, who just wanted good old Lego bricks back. Lego almost went bankrupt in the year 2003, as Wharton’s knowledge base reports. Lego then had a change of systems. They first brought in a new CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, in 2004. His approach was to ask the kids what they want. Through extensive market research and efforts, he realized that they simply wanted to BUILD. They invested in a major, Cannes Lions-winning award campaign called ‘Imagine’ in 2006 and sustained it. They got back to the drawing board and recreated what they used to be best at. And they came back better. Fortune shares that back in 2015, Lego became the second biggest toy company in the world. Lego could have simply stopped the production of pre-built toys and gone back to what they were. But they decided to start things afresh by picking on each detail from product to sales to marketing and advertising. This is similar to how sales effectiveness works. It doesn’t allow you to concentrate on a categorical problem. It forces you to look at entire processes and overhaul what’s needed to not just fix things, but make them better and effective. What is sales effectiveness? Sales effectiveness doesn’t have a very rigid definition, as you’d gather from asking multiple sales professionals. Let us look at the most concrete and sensible understanding of the term, after weeding out misconceptions. Sales effectiveness (over some time) = Average output per salesperson (based on company strategy) Where, Output = profit/ revenue/ new product line sales. Further variables in this formula include what sales effectiveness refers to. It could be any of the following: Effectiveness at each stage of the process Effectiveness per territory, product, etc. Individual effectiveness against the average Effectiveness based on tenure Impact of investments on the effectiveness Further, the company strategy element here is crucial. Imagine your company is planning to push a new product line to slowly replace an older one. If your reps are very effective at selling the older line but not the newer ones, this effectiveness is futile. Key Elements of Sales Effectiveness in Strategic Account Management There is a lot of ambiguity surrounding sales effectiveness. Many confuse it with sales productivity and sales efficiency. To put some structure to the definition, you should take note of the following elements of sales effectiveness. Sales process: Firstly, you need to introspect and check if you have a real sales process. If not, you need to put one in place right away. If you do, you need to ensure that it exists not just for you and that everyone is aware of it. Next, ask yourself if it aligns with your target group’s purchase cycle. When you’ve ensured that all of these factors are aligned, check the effectiveness of your process. Opportunity management: How you manage your sales opportunities has certainly got a lot to do with sales effectiveness. This is also where account managers come in for strengthening wins. You need to have a clear sales pipeline with defined stages for appropriate opportunity management. Check if there are objective criteria attached to each stage. Not just this, but address the percentage of dormant deals in the pipeline. This is where effectiveness and efficiency both matter a lot. Another important factor is the accuracy of your sales forecasts. Sales enablement: Sales enablement is enabling your sales team to close deals with the help of resources they need such as content, tools, knowledge, etc. Sales enablement strategy is a function of both marketing and sales departments. Essentially, marketing does the research and studying and provides enabling material, while sales pass on critical information required for customers to make purchase decisions. Sales efficiency: Sales efficiency is largely a measure of the speed of sales operations. It is usually calculated for a quarter. Sales efficiency = Gross revenue of a sales team/ Costs incurred by the team Where, Costs incurred = salaries, perks, office space, training expenses, etc. Sales efficiency checks are used to uncover systemic issues in your sales processes. For example, is your sales cycle reasonable and feasible to the transaction size? How many meetings or calls does it take for a win? Introspect and nitpick within your sales process. Sales efficiency is all about taking a hard, critical look at your sales efforts and finding a starting point for improvements. Sales performance: Sales performance is the measure of your sales team’s efforts for meeting strategic sales goals. It is a checker for your sales team’s track towards reaching sales goals. There are a lot of quantitative metrics involved in studying sales performance. For example, what percentage of your sales reps achieve their assigned targets? How productive are your top 20%? There are revenue-generated, pipeline-generated, and opportunity-led KPIs for measuring sales performance. Your sales process, sales enablement efforts, and sales efficiency investments, all contribute to sales performance. For enhancing performance, keep highlighting areas of improvement, focus first on quality prospects, and make a tight yearly sales plan, among other measures. Sales skills: There can be a very long list of customer-facing and non-customer-facing sales skills prescribed for improving sales effectiveness. Customer-facing skills include prospecting, communication, discovery, business acumen, storytelling, active listening, presentation, and negotiation. On the other hand, non-customer-facing skills include technology, buyer research, time management, planning, judgment, and collaboration. Even though these are a lot of factors, focusing on each one can help you extract maximum effectiveness out of your sales reps! How Sales Intelligence impacts Sales Effectiveness in Strategic Account Management Sales intelligence is the need of the hour in a
Sales Enablement – Everything You Need to Know
Sales Enablement in simple terms is any technology, process, or software that helps the sales team increase their efficiency. This may vary from giving your sales team the right information to move the sales acceleration forward, tools to handle their leads better, tools that help the sales team reach the prospects in a better way, or even the tools that help in sales training. If you have been following the stock and crypto markets lately, you know that something unprecedented has been working its charm. Nobody in their right mind would have predicted that a global shutdown in the 21st Century would ignite an investment frenzy that would put the Tulip mania of 1637 to shame. Total global equity traded in 2020 alone stood a whopping $137.64 Trillion, a steep 54.8% rise when compared to 2019 (according to Statista). So what made investors jump onto the money wagon? It takes a keen eye to understand all the factors that contributed to this bullish growth: The pandemic caused massive behavioral changes due to lockdown and free time. People were spending way less due to no social life and saving more. Relief packages from governments left them with some extra cash. The proliferation of digital apps and devices has made trading child’s play Growth in support ecosystems, such as digital banking and online media, has contributed to superior accessibility. In other words, it takes an entire ecosystem working in tandem for any major market movement to flourish and sustain, a prerequisite that Key Account Managers should aim for in the context of Sales Enablement. There is no denying that if you create the right ecosystem for your sales reps to succeed, they will naturally close more deals and drive higher revenues. But where do you begin? How do you find the right sales tools that foster sales enablement to the point that you can have a revenue squeeze of your own? Today’s blog aims to answer all this, and more. What is Sales Enablement? Sales Enablement is a framework that provides the sales team of the business with the necessary tools and resources that they require to close more deals and, in turn, drive more revenue. Let’s start with the basics and understand what it is about and the importance of Sales Enablement. The tools and assets that are leveraged can include knowledge, key information, content, and anything and everything that makes the sales process more optimized and geared for better conversions. It is a great practice for Sales Enablement to be owned by both Sales and Marketing teams as a function. While the marketing team often contributes with collaterals such as blogs and product guides, sales teams leverage them to the maximum by driving more contextual conversations with prospects. What is Sales Enablement Strategy? A Sales Enablement Strategy is aimed at helping sales reps to add more value at every customer touchpoint by defining a framework through which they can acquire all the necessary resources they need to effectively sell. In practice, it defines and lays down the entire path of reaching the target sales figures with the best change management and process adoption strategies. 5 Ways to Track and Measure your Sales Enablement Efforts If you look at the Sales top down, you will see that things are pretty measurable. As you travel down the funnel, things don’t seem so clear. We talk about increasing the sales pipeline, about white space opportunities, traffic, leads, warm, hot, cold but once we get to those numbers, no one can tell how to prioritize the projects on hand. This is the Sales Enablement Measurement conundrum. Organizations are uncertain about how to measure sales enablement efforts. How do we measure the alignment between marketing and sales? We have tried to resolve your conundrum here to some extent, using both, qualitative and quantitative methods of measurement. These are at best taken as indicators but will help your sales enablement efforts stay on track. 1. Track the lead-to-deal rate or lead-to-conversion rate The Sales Enablement team should be more focused on the bottom end of the sales funnel. This means tracking the lead to conversion rate. This is what will indicate the impact of your sales enablement strategies. Although not entirely, because the conversion rate depends on the number and quality of the leads. Besides this, this can be a good measurement index that also helps to identify trends over a period. Ask yourself the question “Will this project help me close more deals?” If the answer is “yes”, put it on priority. The others can be taken up later or delegated. 2. Measure win/loss rates against key competitors Sales is a race to the finishing line for every lead to be cracked. Your sales team needs your help and support all the time as they face the toughest of competitors. Monitoring your wins and failures and comparing them with your competitors’ wins and losses, will help you identify the gaps and fill that in. It will help you even further to know where you need to put your energy. Your CRM system will help you with this metric. 3. Amplify your content so that it influences a decision to buy Content is a universal weapon in the sales arsenal; right from the top end of the funnel to the bottom end. Supply your sales team with the right documents and decks but also, leverage the online medium to publish content through visual media. Then monitor it to see which one is more influential as the buyer is in the last stages of his buying decision. Scaling up online with content is good as you can measure the results of what works and what doesn’t. A good CMS and an analytics tool will help you in this task. This will be a perfect time to go for a sales enablement tool. Also, keep a track of and measure your content production – how many pieces of videos, infographics, newsletters, blogs, etc. produced in what month.
Powering Sales Intelligence in KAM to Drive More Leads
“There was once a factory that was run by a large engine at its core. One fine day the engine broke, shutting down the entire operation. After several engineers failed to solve the problem, the factory owner approached a veteran engine expert as a last-ditch effort. The expert inspected the engine for a whole hour, pulled out a hammer from his toolkit, placed it above a specific spot, and tapped once with panache. The engine roared and started working again at once. The owner, ecstatic at the result, thanked him and inquired about the fees. The expert handed him an invoice for $10,000. Angry at the ‘atrocious’ amount, the owner exclaimed, “You hardly did anything! $10,000 for a single tap? I want to see an itemized bill.” Without saying anything, the expert simply made another invoice that read: Tapping with a hammer: $2 Knowing where to tap: $9,998” Every time I think or read about Automated Sales Intelligence, it reminds me of this story. As sales leaders, we come across such scenarios every day. Whether it is about finding qualified leads, pushing customers through their buyer journeys, or boosting the conversion with landing pages, every information about the customer helps to ‘place the hammer’ at the right spot for the ‘decisive tap’. Today’s blog delves into what automated sales intelligence is, how to gather sales intelligence effectively, and how integrating CRM with sales prospecting intelligence can transform your sales engine. What is Automated Sales Intelligence? Automated sales intelligence refers to the technology and processes that empower sales teams to gather, analyze, and leverage substantial amounts of data about prospects and existing customers. This intelligent approach allows sales professionals to derive actionable sales intelligence that enhances their decision-making capabilities. This helps sales leaders and teams to: Track key changes and information bytes of existing accounts Map key stakeholders in prospective organizations Understand the needs and wants of prospects Collate and index real-time company information And much more… Sales Intelligence = Intelligent Prospecting When done right, Sales Intelligence is all about selling hard and more in the least possible time. Naturally, the benefits extend to a crucial arm of the new-age sales process – Prospecting. By overhauling prospecting and equipping it with ‘Intelligence Data’, Sales Intelligence tells salespeople who they should be talking to, the precise conversations that they should be driving, ideal times at which they should be reaching out to prospects, and more. Ideal Sales Intelligence tools also go to the extent of eliminating manual processes of scraping for critical insights, verifying for their authenticity, and providing a 360-degree view of the prospect. Such benefits have been driving the adoption of Sales Excellence to the point of no return. As per a report from GrandViewResearch, this has witnessed the global market to be valued at $2.29 Billion in 2019 with the expected CAGR to be 10.5% from 2020 to 2027. For instance, consider a scenario where a salesperson is in charge of generating new leads. She is armed with a list of ‘potential’ prospects and the blueprint criteria of what the company’s ideal customer profile stands as. By feeding such data into a Sales Intelligence tool, she can be instantly notified when any new company falls under the purview of the ideal customer profile. And all this without the customary stalking behavior that we usually exhibit as salespeople! Importance of Data in Sales Intelligence As you may have caught up by now, data naturally plays a central role here. But long and complex sales cycles often need much more than numbers and addresses. And as reported by Salespanel, most sales intelligence platforms focus on providing intent data. This usually includes key behavioral information about the prospect’s digital activities. Sales are all about making the right decisions at the most ideal times, a natural habitat for data to thrive in. But while the quantity of data matters here, so does the accuracy. With hyper-contextual marketing and sales data, sales intelligence can drive successful relationship-building that focuses on the correct conversion or engagement parameters. And that’s not all. Sales Intelligence also seeps into the foundation by transforming how customer profiles are shaped. Hunches, feelings, and opinions are categorically eliminated and all intelligence is driven by a consistent profile that does not deviate from one leader or department to another. Such a stable approach keeps every stakeholder on the same page and channels sales and marketing efforts in the right direction. How Sales Intelligence Affects: Data Quality and Management Poor sales data is one of the foremost challenges that salespeople face. Sales Intelligence places immense focus on assessing data quality and improving it with a data quality strategy that brings positive ROI. Key metrics that are usually leveraged here include: Email Bounce Rates: The number of emails that go undelivered due to bounce backs directly correlates with the health of your sales data. The ratio of Data to Errors: Tracking redundant, missing, or incomplete data entities that are depleting data quality. Improved data health here translates to fewer errors with constant or growing data size. The number of Empty Values: Corresponds to missing information or data that has been entered incorrectly into a field. Keeping a track of empty fields and how this number changes over time is a characteristic of sales intelligence. Data Transformation Error Rates: Converting existing data into a different format can introduce another class of errors. As a sales intelligence metric, it becomes important to keep track of data transformation tasks that fail. Quantity of Dark Data: Dark data refers to complicated data quality issues that may not be resolved easily. They are best resolved with elimination and require close monitoring. Data Storage Costs: If the amount of data that you are leveraging in sales remains constant but the storage costs are rising, it can be a sign of poor quality issues. Data Time-to-Value: Another way to measure quality is the time it takes for salespeople to derive actionable value from a given data set.
Sales Transformation in Key Account Management
It was the year 2015 and Coca-Cola was sitting on a goldmine of an ever-growing customer database. The roadmap ahead was clear – to boost the consumption of their existing line of products through sales transformation. Because we are talking about one of the most recognizable brands in the world, this was no easy feat. With a thirst-quenching range of 500+ beverages, over 1.9 billion servings of Coca-Cola products are consumed every day! As expected of any global brand, they led a graceful response. They placed data at the heart of their sales transformation journey by listening to customer opinions over the phone, email, and social media. The next step was to curate targeted content for different audiences that aligned with their passions. The result? Consumers are 4 times more likely to click on their digital adverts (according to Bernard Marr & Co.). If there is one idiom that can accurately sum up the entire digital age, it is this – using data to learn about customer behaviors and point them towards relevant conversions. That’s what every innovation on the planet is about – to be a relevant building block towards making the ultimate sale. And as it turns out, data has always been the missing ingredient when it comes to Sales Transformation in the digital era. What is Sales Transformation? Sales transformation is the process of aligning every cog in the wheel of driving the growth of an organization. At its core, sales transformation is about implementing big ideas and the shift in sales focus that is required to deliver the target results. It is as much about the “change” in sales techniques and skills as it is about making that change stick. With that being said, the end goal of sales transformation is to make the change in behavior, skills, and results measurable. For instance, let’s say that a business is targeting to close more deals this quarter than the last. As the leader, your goal would be to revamp the current operations and processes of the sales team and provide them with the required tools and frameworks to meet the new sales targets. Importance of Strategic Sales in Key Account Management There is no denying the fact that growth in Key Account Management is closely tied to the ability to drive the execution of sales strategies. This is a deciding factor that can make or break the reputation of organizations, and even sales leaders. Richardson reports that the average tenure of a sales leader lies between just 18 to 24 months! This is an alarming statistic and only accentuates the importance of a coherent sales transformation strategy. In Key Account Management, the criticality is at another level altogether. Not only do sales leaders need to meet short-term business objectives, but they also need to ensure the long-term viability of the entire business development vertical. For instance, if an organization is launching a line of key services to capture a bigger piece of the market share from their competitors, the value of stakeholders can only be driven in the long term if the sales strategy is updated and redefined according to the new targets. Looking Past Traditional Account Management Strategies As a sales leader, being adept at new-age account management strategies would make you realize that traditional account management can cause more harm than good. To meet the growth targets in today’s digital landscape, account teams need to pinpoint, hand-hold, develop, execute, and deliver on every growth opportunity. This is especially the case if such opportunities are the side-effect of a well-defined Land and Expand ideology. With a traditional backdrop, account management channels tend to perform much below their full potential with cross-selling and upselling initiatives falling short of the intended growth targets. This is backed by key reports from Gartner. Source – Gartner.com Therefore, there is direct and clear potential for cross-selling and portfolio expansion. This is primarily due to the evolving nature of the job of account managers who are now expected, more than ever, to deliver services, resolve issues, and maximize ROI while also driving the exposure and conversions of new services or products. Driving sales growth now requires a rather fundamental shift in skill sets and on-the-job attitude. And this is exactly where the need to explore new models of account growth comes into the picture with ‘customer improvement’ at the helm. Source – Gartner.com Such a shift would involve leaving behind product success and service and instead implement tactics such as: Finding and simplifying the process of identifying opportunities for customer improvement within key accounts. Measuring the effectiveness of sales strategies and tracking the potential of key account growth. Delivering customer improvement via growth-oriented account teams. Clearly defining the roles and responsibilities of every team member. Key Elements of Sales Transformation To drive effective sales transformation, you need to relook at your key accounts as solutions, rather than mere transactions. To implement this, 6 key ingredients can function as perfect fodder: Employee engagement: Focusing on boosting employee engagement and retention to create a strong internal team and culture that is hell-bent on driving customer success. With a team of better-motivated employees, the path to sales excellence becomes easier and shorter to achieve. Cross-functional collaboration: Key account management teams that work closely together even when assigned to different roles or cases. With dedicated cross-functional Account Management KPIs that are tied to each other, personalized support can be driven for every use case of cross-selling/up-selling. Capability building: Regularly helping the sales teams to up-skill themselves to create employees that are highly engaged and in-tune with experiential and war-room sales strategies can be a trigger for sales acceleration. The end goal is to create a motivated sales team that can deliver impeccable and memorable customer experiences. Digital transformation: With the ever-changing digital landscape, customer expectations are constantly evolving with a never-ending work of bridging the gap between their wants and the ground reality of implementation. Effectively managing such expectations with a bull’s eye digital transformation
Customer Success and Key Account Management: 2 Intricate Cogs of the Same Wheel
When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, he did so with the mission of becoming “Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company. ”Fast-forward to 2020 and one can argue that customer success, and rather customer obsession is the sole pillar that Bezos’ entire $1.7 Trillion empire rests upon. But while the vision during the early days was in place, the definition was nowhere in sight. As Bill Price, former Global VP of Customer Service Amazon explains, Bezos interestingly (and maybe even purposely) resisted accurately define his vision for several years. Eventually, things took shape and Bezos took the first major decision that would drive his point home – allowing customers to review the products – a decision that attracted strong initial backlash owing to possible sales detraction. But Bezos was firm in this belief – “We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions. “Over the decades, this vision has transformed into a near maniacal culture of customer success, one in which Bezos leaves a chair empty at conference tables as a reflection that it has been occupied by the customer – “the most important person in the room”. Today’s blog is a journey into customer success, the benefits that it can reap for your organization, and what it looks like in practice! What is Customer Success All About? In essence, customer success is about making your organization’s culture, philosophy, department, or role all about the customer. And especially in a manner that your customers can easily find ‘success’ with your products and services. When customers interact with a brand, they expect a specific desired outcome via an experience that can be tagged as ‘meaningful’. Customer success is about meeting such expectations time and again. As Jeff Gardner puts it – “The fastest you can help customers understand and extract value from your product that is in line with their business goals, the stickier and more successful they’ll be.” Misconceptions About Customer Success Since customer success is a rather newer concept in the management world, a lot of misconceptions exist, especially when managers deploy customer success programs for the first time. Myth 1: Customer Success Always Translates to Hands-on Service Customer success might translate to being obsessed with customers. But this does not necessarily mean that CSMs are engaging with customers round-the-clock. Customers prefer minimal interactions and the fewest possible touchpoints for their queries to be addressed. Hence, customer success, in this case, would mean optimizing such touchpoints for smoother onboarding, documentation, automation, etc. Myth 2: Customer success is a single department drive This cannot be farther from the truth. While it is true that customer success cannot thrive without ownership, it has to be a pan-organization effort. Assigning customer success to specialists is just the tip of the iceberg and would amount to nothing if the rest of the organization does not follow suit and work collaboratively towards a single objective. Myth 3. Customer success translates to feedback collection and analysis Don’t get me wrong. Feedback is one of the most crucial building blocks of customer success. But assuming that customer success is only about customer satisfaction surveys and Net Promoter Scores is highly erroneous. Surveys might be good for specific queries, but they lack in-depth insights about products, customer behaviors, trends, correlations, and more. Why Does Every Business Need Customer Success? “Until you know what it takes to achieve success from your customers’ perspective you will just waste valuable time.” – Jason Whitehead, Tri Tons Your business’s success closely depends on the success of your customers. That is the crux of this blog. There is no point in selling a product or service if your customers are not “winning” (constantly) after making their purchase decisions. Jeff Bezos is a billionaire NOT because he has created an automated sales ecosystem. It’s because he has created thousands of millionaires around the world through Amazon in the form of star sellers. It is also because Amazon helps end customers to make the best purchase decisions for their available budgets. If that’s not convincing enough, here’s why customer success should be at the helm of your business strategy in 2021: Reduces Churn: When you listen to your customers and accordingly iterate your service or product, it’s only natural for their satisfaction graph to rise and for them to stick around longer. At a proactive level, this also translates to solving issues of customers even before they can spot them! Drives Revenue: It should not come as a surprise that the majority of your revenue comes from (or should) post-sales relationship building. That’s simply because it is much easier and economical to up-sell and cross-sell instead of acquiring new ones! Improves the Renewal Process: For businesses functioning on SaaS and subscription models, renewal conversations and decision-making on the part of their customers are fairly common. With customer success, users are more likely to keep renewing and stop questioning their decisions time and again. Customer Success in Key Account Management If customer success is all about aligning the definition of success of clients with your organization, then how does Key Account Management (KAM) come into the picture? In essence, KAM is a subset of Customer Success. Think about it. If 80% of your revenues come from 20% of your clientele, customer success would translate to successful KAM for these accounts simply because they matter the most. To achieve the best results, you must merge the two management styles to ensure the most optimal outcomes for your business. During implementation, this is not a complex feat to achieve since KAM and CS are two sides of the same coin. This also brings us to their key differences: Client Focus: In a typical Customer Success scenario, you would not want any client to be left behind. The idea is to help each one of them succeed to the point of no return. On the other hand, KAM expects you to cherry-pick the clients that add the most to your
Driving Sales Excellence in 2025: What, Why, and How?
Our story begins in 2003, a time of great distress in British Cycling. The national cycling team of Great Britain was the epitome of mediocrity at the time, having won just one medal in a century of existence. Fast-forward to 2008 and the squad took home 7 out of the 10 available medals in the Beijing Olympics – a remarkable feat that they would repeat in the 2012 London Olympics. In fact, by 2015, the squad had even won three Tour de France – the holy grail of competitive cycling. Make no mistake. This is much more than your average rags to riches story. But a natural question begs – how did the worst cycling team in the world suddenly turn into world champions? Our answer lies in the strategy of “the aggregation of marginal gains”. It was Introduced by Dave Brailsford in 2003 when he was appointed the new performance director of British Cycling. The idea was simple yet hauntingly effective – to think small and not big. This involved breaking the entire process of competing into its constituent elements and then improving each of them by 1%. In practice, this meant painting the floor of the team truck white to spot impurities that undermine bike maintenance, hiring a surgeon to educate team members on ideal hand-washing techniques to avoid illnesses, making athletes sleep in the same postures every night, and other such countless initiatives. Why does this work? How can such small improvements accumulate into such head-turning results? And most importantly, what can we learn here that can be implemented in sales and account management? Sales Excellence: Getting Ready for 2024 The What and Why of Sales Excellence As reported by Salesforce, organizations spend anywhere between 5 – 15% of their entire revenue on sales. Revenue. Not profits. This is as significant as an investment can get in a single organizational department. Naturally, it makes sense to have a well-defined framework that milks the maximum possible ROI from the equation. And this is where Sales Excellence comes in. In Key Account Management, Sales Excellence is an amalgamation and progression of all possible sales functions. Drawing parallels from the management philosophy of Dave Brailsford, this would mean constant improvement in all key initiatives that go into sales – sales training, sales culture, sales tools, sales technology, and more. From a 360-degree point of view, Sales Excellence model translates to stepping into the world of British Cycling. It cares about everything – the number of deals that are closed, deals closure times, deals won rate, the support level extended to salespeople, and much more. What Ideal Sales Excellence Looks Like For Sales Excellence and Sales acceleration to function at its ideal capacity, leaders and the organization at large need to live and breathe the practice. For a concept that involves attention to detail at unprecedented capacity, anything less than 100% buy-in would be a shame. What does such dedication look like in practice? At the foundational level, Sales Excellence strategy begins with staunch onboarding, training, and up-skilling support for salespeople in a manner that grows into the shoes of a pan-organization culture. Sales Excellence means that salespeople are not only attuned to the best practices of sales but also work closely with other departments (such as marketing) to better understand the personalized needs of every buyer. Key ingredients to formulate an ideal Sales Excellence framework includes: Sales Strategy: Scoping, understanding, and implementing ideal sales targets and budgets by taking into account both current and potential customer segments. Market Penetration and Development: Defining the best mix of digital channels that promotes market penetration at maximum capacity. Sales Processes: Defining the end-to-end sales structure and making crucial decisions related to key account management, customer classification, customer acquisition, and more. Pricing Strategy: Increasing profitability with the right pricing strategy in place. This includes closing the right number of deals, defining key accounts, order management, and more. Impact of Sales Excellence on Deal Closures In a traditional capacity, sales are driven by taking into account how effective the entire organization or sales department is in executing their roles and responsibilities. But such monitoring is often undertaken at a bird’s eye level with KPIs catering to teams or entire sales functions. Sales Excellence goes way beyond this and brings a fundamental shift in this practice. Sales Excellence questions not just the leaders or the sales functions but every individual salesperson. This means monitoring metrics such as the deal closure time, deal win rate, the training and proficiency levels of salespeople with the tools, organizational support, and the like. What does this mean? When the spotlight is on every individual salesperson, improved deal closure is nothing more than a natural byproduct of the practice. Revisiting the story of the British Cycling team, focusing on every detail in the small picture ultimately has a significant cumulative impact on the big picture. How to Measure Sales Excellence Now that you know what Sales Excellence is all about, the next step is figuring how to measure it. The age of Sales Enablement and Sales Transformation has paved the way for many key metrics and frameworks that need to be put to ideal use to measure success in Sales Excellence. Here is a round-up of the key metrics that you should be focusing on: Time to Full-Ramp: How much time does a salesperson spend to put up his/her shop? The quicker they are set up and running (in both individual and organizational capacity), the better the results. Collateral Engagement: So you have provided every salesperson with the ideal content and sales collateral. But are they putting them to good use to move prospects through their buying journey? Communication Analytics: Are salespeople eager to up-skill and keep up to date with organizational and product updates? Monitoring communications (at a high level) can be indicative of their eagerness to be prepared. Sales Performance: This is a direct measure of the effectiveness of all sales efforts and includes monitoring KPIs such as
Everything You Should Know About Account Management KPIs
Jose Mourinho is quite a peculiar figure in the world of football. Our story unfolds in the Champions League semi-final match between Inter Milan and Barcelona in 2010, arguably the biggest competition in football. Inter Milan, managed by Jose at the time, was set to host Barcelona, a team that was (and is) known for its quick and accurate ball-passing prowess. To make things worse for their opponents, Barcelona also has the most lethal football player today – Lionel Messi. With a much weaker squad on paper, Jose had to pull off an audacious stunt to win. And, rather unexpectedly, he did. One of his primary tactics was to not cut or water the grass at the Inter Milan ground for weeks (a screwed tactic that he used again while at Real Madrid). This took the Barcelona players by surprise and affected one key metric that dictates their signature playing style – pass success rate. The result? Barcelona lost the match 3-1, and Inter Milan went on to win the competition. An obsessive focus on just one key performance metric was enough to stifle the best team in the world at the time. That is the power of KPIs. If understood well, they can be shrewdly used in any field, including key account management, to turn the tide from a bird’s eye perspective. This blog takes a look at how you can do the same for your key accounts and scale them by encouraging the right management behaviors. Account Management KPIs What are Account Management KPIs? Account management KPIs, or key performance indicators, are metrics monitored by account management teams for both internal assessment and external performance evaluations. They serve as benchmarks to gauge effectiveness within specific areas of the company, similar to how marketing KPIs analyze the efficacy of various marketing campaign components. Setting Powerful Key Account Management Objectives Starting any business is easier than scaling it. That’s the first axiom in the corporate world. However, with key account management, challenges can be particularly complex. With a lot of strategic moving parts, such as Land and Expand, it is important to clearly define and lay the foundations of powerful account management objectives to steer the ship in the right direction and deliver the desired results. More often than not, establishing the right mindset is a precursor, and the biggest challenge, to selecting ideal account management KPIs. And this also brings us to a major pitfall in this domain – focusing on too much too soon. This reminds me of an Aphorism by Nassim Taleb from The Bed of Procrustes- “They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant; in a complex world, intelligence consists of ignoring things that are irrelevant.” The best account management growth strategies are the ones that are the most simple. Most accounts should consist of only a few impactful components that set you apart from your competitors. And by natural extension, this means focusing on only a handful of impactful KPIs rather than the opposite. KAM Glossary: Crucial Account Management Terms Explained The Importance of Generic KPIs Our notion of simplistic account management philosophy also extends to selecting generic KPIs to determine the performance of departments. Surprisingly, most leaders often focus on specific KPIs while making decisions, failing to realize that the specificity of the KPI itself takes them away from the big picture! For instance, imagine a Key account manager focusing on the expansion rate of a couple of accounts to assess his performance, failing to make note of the high churn rate of his entire portfolio. Any decision made in such a scenario would be biased and would overlook the true picture. Aligning Key Performance Indicators for KAM Okay, so you have your account management objectives in place and are ready to dig into some quality generic KPIs to build a solid foundation for account expansion. But another challenge crops up – an account management KPI that is fit for one department may not be so for another. It might also be the case that the incentives of your account managers depend on multiple KPIs. How do you then align various KPIs together to reach the desired results? By constantly iterating your account plans, as explained by Calin Muresan, Business Manager at Netguru. More than a blueprint for your teams, account plans should be looked at as frameworks to deliver results for your clients. By constantly finding KPIs that are dependent on each other and iterating account plans accordingly, leaders can keep the roles and responsibilities of account managers and ensure that KPIs are aligned in terms of: Strategic Direction Business Processes Business Units For example, consider that an account plan has the objective “Increase customer satisfaction”. To measure this, the management might have the option of two KPIs – %age Customers satisfied or Customer satisfaction index. Now if ‘Expenses incurred in account operations’ is another KPI to be minimized, selecting the correct option of the two would consider the budget allotted for KPI activation. As a general rule, it should also be noted here that the efforts or expenses that go into measuring the KPI for key account management should not be greater than the benefits that are realized as a result. 11 Crucial Account Management KPIs that dictate Success With the foundational jargon and mindset in place, let’s now take a look at the top Account Management KPIs (generic or otherwise) that account managers must focus on for long-term success. 1. Unlocking Key Account Success: Understanding Customer Lifetime Value and Its Strategic Impact Customer Lifetime Value is a metric that can single-handedly dictate the success of any key account, which denotes the total revenue that a business can generate from a single account in the entire course of the arrangement. It is calculated by: Customer Lifetime Value = (Customer Value) x (Average Customer Lifespan) Why is it important? Because it instantly tells you about your most revenue-generating buyer personas. Other key applications of CLV by extension include: