A recent blog post on Harvard Business Review titled, “I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore,” was unfortunately very relatable.  The core of the article explored how business conversations have evolved into bits of nonsense (e.g., “synergy”, ”value-add”) that make understanding each other much more of a challenge than anything else.

We all fall victim to the excessive use of acronyms from time to time.  And while I too find myself guilty of using a lot of acronyms, I also related to something else in the piece, because its description ties perfectly to research produced by both the SEC and our sister program, the Customer Contact Council:

“Another term that has lost its meaning is ‘Let’s exceed the customer’s expectations.’ …Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer’s expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? I was at a [hotel] a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, ‘Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation.’  The best way to start would be to take down that sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do…”

While this was a retail customer setting, the same principle holds true for sales and service organizations.  Attempting to exceed customer expectations is a losing battle. You’ll unnecessarily spend resources trying to delight your customers, when research shows that doing so has only a marginal impact on customer loyalty.   Read More »

Buyers are outpacing supplier capabilities and becoming more efficient at pressuring on price—at least that’s the recurring theme the SEC is hearing in our recent conversations with members. But what’s enabling this behavior today’s buyers, and more importantly, what does it mean for your sales strategy?

The recent member conversations we’ve had suggest that customers have become more sophisticated at buying over the last several years due to:

• Economic pressures that have forced buyers to become increasingly risk averse and focused on cost—In response to the economic  uncertainty in the marketplace, customer organizations are relying more heavily on group buying, professionalized, process-driven procurement teams, and third-party consultants to help mitigate risk through well vetted purchases with higher levels of savings .
• Increased access to information— Internet access and vast technological advances over the past decade have created a much more transparent buying environment than what existed in the past. Customers can now easily find and access information about their industry, the competition, your product/solution, and your competitors’ products/solutions without spending a lot of time or money.

So what are the implications for sellers? Read More »

I often hear from sales leaders that it is more important than ever to drive account planning across the sales force to help allocate scarce resources, identify the right opportunities, and build deeper customer relationships. But what does good account planning actually look like? It starts with choosing the right preposition.

Fundamentally, account planning is setting and executing your strategy for engaging the customer. Here at the Council, we believe a successful account plan should do three things:

1) Create long-term customer and firm value– Map selling strategies to customer needs and manage the complexity of solutions-selling

2) Streamline internal processes– Focus account teams on defined objectives and coordinate cross-silo communication

3) Create stakeholder accountability– Create accountability for achieving goals and set metrics to evaluate rep and internal stakeholder performance

Account planning is most effective when it simultaneously works to achieve the strategic objectives of both the supplier organization and its customers. We want to make sure that we’re embarking on a commercial journey that is right for our firm and for the customer

And the first step you need to take?… Read More »

Sales organizations are looking to improve key account performance, and many are focused on developing the skills of their Key Account Managers (KAMs) as the answer.

But that’s not the best place to start. In fact, when we looked at the drivers of KAM effectiveness, a KAM’s skill level came in last place.

Why? Because the complexity of the customer relationships your KAMs manage relies upon more than just an individual’s skill level.

Instead, the two drivers of a KAM’s effectiveness that matter more are:   Read More »

Growing your largest accounts isn’t a simple, one-step task. Most organizations spend a great deal of effort agonizing over which customers should be considered key accounts in the first place—but this is only the first hurdle to get over.

Just because you’ve picked a customer to elevate to key account status, it doesn’t necessarily mean that customer has picked you. The customer might not want to engage in that level of partnership, or even understand why they were selected as a key account in the first place…which means you end up wasting valuable time and resources.

This doesn’t always have to be the case, though. Leading companies ensure that new key accounts:

1) Fully understand WHY they were selected as a key account

2) Know that they have access to your scarcest resources, and

3) Understand that they are expected to help you grow your business

And the way that you make sure a new key account knows and understands these three things?   Read More »

Sales organizations know that account planning is important, yet their efforts at it are often sporadic and unfocused. There are many steps in the account planning process and though they all are important, there are a select few that reps and their organizations perennially get wrong.

Assess your organization and make sure that your sales force isn’t falling prey to these five major account planning pitfalls.

Pitfall #1. Reps prioritize their accounts incorrectly

There are two ways your account prioritization can fall short. First, your sales force approaches each account with equal enthusiasm. What’s the problem here? Well for starters, your reps will under-invest in some first-rate accounts and then waste time on others that will fail to generate returns in the long run.

Next, the revenue criteria you use to prioritize accounts may not be robust enough. Using overly simplistic criteria to weight accounts will lead to wasted resources on accounts who never intended, nor had the capability, to do business with you in the long run.

What to do: See how Square D by Schneider Electric prioritizes accounts.

Read More »

Q1 is the time of year when I get an influx of requests to chat about account planning. Most members want to know how to tweak their account planning process to make it more effective. 

I was meeting with an energy company a couple weeks back, when that same question came up.  We had some extra time so we started white boarding some ideas about their account planning process.  The exercise ended up being so valuable, I’ve used it a couple times since with great success, and wanted to share it with you today. 

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why would a customer want to account plan with you? 
2. What are all the ways account planning can go wrong? 

I’ll  handle each question in order:

1) Why would a customer want to account plan with you?  Answering this one can be tricky – the key is to list out the benefits of account planning from the CUSTOMER’s perspective.

Putting this list together will help you build a value proposition that gets your customers excited about account planning with you.  And in case you missed that subtle point – the key word in that sentence was with.   Read More »

Remember the Seinfeld episode where George worried about having “hand” in a relationship?  George felt that he lacked any control in the relationship with a woman he was seeing.  To Kramer he exclaimed, “I have no power. Do you understand? I need hand. I have no hand.”

Well, we often hear Key Account Managers sounding like George.  In our case, Key Account Managers are concerned that the balance of power with key accounts is skewed too heavily to the customer.  Especially nowadays with customers more and more entrenched in a “status quo” mindset, many of us are frustrated by the lack of revenue growth coming from our key accounts.

A typical response is to focus on the individual – hire or promote or train the best people to manage your most important customers.  And while talent and skill level are important, we actually found that the quality of support you provide your key account managers matters more than their skill level in determining the account manager’s effectiveness.

So, how can we best enable our key account managers to identify and take advantage of commercial opportunities with our key accounts? 

It’s a matter of developing the right tools and processes and putting them to use.  The Council has captured a number of best practice examples, and here are some of my favorites:  Read More »

By Andrew Kent

As heavy-handed as this may sound, no matter how hard companies preach the value of planning, sales reps still don’t do it.  According to one of our members, reps’ natural talent at persuasion may be exactly what’s getting in the way.

We all know that the best salespeople spend more time doing pre-call prep: account planning and researching customers—in fact, SEC research quantitatively proved this a full seven years ago.  And yet after all these years of trying to get reps to plan, members still tell us that sales planning is one of the top 1-2 areas in which reps struggle most consistently.

This has always boggled my mind somewhat.  Personally, I would be terrified to go into a sales call without having done my homework.

But that terror at unpreparedness doesn’t seem to be felt by many sales reps, and a sales executive at an Australian telecoms firm recently told me something that I think explains why.  He called it the “paradox of gift”:

Salespeople are naturally gifted at persuading others and thinking on their feet.  They just have a natural ability to wiggle out of dicey situations, or at least they think they do.  And stories of when they do are the stuff of legend around the office.

But while this confidence may help them pull a sale out of a seemingly impossible situation, it also leads them to over-rely on their natural abilities and under-prepare for calls.  The attitude is, “I’m so good that I don’t need to plan—I’ll just go with what the prospect gives me and get them to bite on something.”

And that’s the paradox of gift: ironically, the more you believe in your ability to get out of any sticky situation, the more likely you are to get into those sticky situations in the first place. Read More »