Strategic Account Leaders

This is an exciting time to be a Strategic Account Leader.  Strategic Account Management (SAM), which was in its infancy not long ago, is now a discipline headed for what we believe is a second stage.

As SAM has grown more robust, a number of tactics have emerged as critical to success. Today a conventional strategic account team consists of carefully selected high performers who are not only trained in consultative sales, but also supported by sales scripts and deep libraries of continuously updated client organization insights and intel.  Complete account plans include the customer’s mission and financials, operating metrics, revenue forecasts and opportunity-specific action plans.  Of course Customer Relationship Management (CRM) plays a key role as well, although mainly for opportunity forecasting purposes only.

However, Strategic Account Leaders, who are career sales executives themselves, turn to us because SAM is not yet perfected, and they know it can get better.  The fact is, much of this traditional discipline was invented by marketers and consultants, and not from an efficient merger of strategy and an instinct for what really turns a B2B key account sale. 

Simply stated, we think the real opportunity in the second stage is to re-organize with strategic account teams at the center.  That means shifting from a focus on opportunity state to relationship state, from asking questions and heavily monitoring the sales force to providing real answers as to how to advance influential relationships. It also means breaking down corporate marketing into direct support of personal brands that generously engage decision-makers. And finally, it requires re-engineering the account-planning process, so that there’s less paperwork that is disregarded and a lot more innovation and fresh ideas that are fun to put into action for the entire account’s success. 

Our solutions are customized to meet your individual challenges, but the solutions Strategic Account Leaders find most helpful include:

Relationship Account Strategy to improve the strategic account team’s awareness of, and strategy to advance, the key decision-making relationships needed to become a strategic partner with your accounts.

Strategic Partner Audit to assess your sales force and measure team members’ relational acumen to operate as strategic partners. 

Relationship Account Map to help plot a visualized strategy with your strategic account team that focuses them on the most important relationships to their success, and then what to do about it.  The map provides not just the “what,” but the critical “whom” and what each individual can do about it.