We hope you’ll read this and share this.

It’s a unique occasion when we get to step back from the day-to-day of supporting our members’ decisions and reflect on where we believe the world of sales is headed. In 2011, the SEC had thousands of interactions with sales executives around the globe, held dozens of conferences and intimate roundtable discussions with leading CSOs, and examined hundreds of thousands data points.

Given this, we’d like to share the fundamental shifts we expect to play out in increasingly significant ways in 2012.

Granted, it’s not a MECE list – there is overlap and implications shared throughout these trends, but we hope you’ll take a minute and reflect on how these trends are manifesting in your own organization, disagree if appropriate, and highlight trends you expect to see that we missed. It’s meant to be a reflective, but fun list. We look forward to your input! Read More »

There’s no disputing the importance of developing a key accounts program, but getting it right from the get go, and then maintaining it, is easier said than done. In a recent member poll, 41% of companies indicated they were in the process of restructuring their key account programs.

With that in mind, one of the key drivers of overall key account program performance is making sure the right customers are in the program in the first place.

But, all too often, companies weigh their programs down with customers who don’t quite warrant the time or resources given to a key account.

Why? The traditional mechanisms companies use to select accounts are often unreliable due to internal biases and external factors. Some pitfalls that cause them to focus on the wrong accounts are: 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 »

It’s the classic paradox of account management – once a customer becomes important enough to demand a single point of contact (generally a Key Account Manager or KAM), the complexity of that customer relationship is too much for one person to manage by themselves!

Success here is determined by your company’s ability to support your account managers with a team-based selling approach.  We analyzed ~ 300 Key Account Managers (defined as having at least national scope and less than three accounts under management) and found that the single biggest factor to their success – beyond their skill level – was the level and quality of support the KAM was receiving from their organization in their efforts to serve the account.

In other words, you can have the best KAMs in the world – but if they don’t have a team (either direct reports or dedicated cross-functional liaisons) effectively supporting them, you’re harming the KAM’s ability to serve and grow the account.

For many organizations, this presents a significant challenge.  If the notion of an account “team” is nothing more than a group of people across your business who are loosely coordinated to serve an account, then it’s like trying to control chaos.  Your KAMs will spend most of their time on internal coordination, rather than customer value-generating activities.

In our study Deepening Customer Relationships, we looked at best-in-class account management programs and found that there are three key attributes to a well-running team-based selling model:   Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

It’s hard to get key account programs right. First, companies must figure out which customers to elevate to key account status (a challenging task in and of itself)—but most organizations stop there. Key account selection is often a ‘once-and-done’ event, and customers that have been designated as key accounts remain in that position for years.

Despite changing markets and performance, most companies treat key accounts as tenured positions. There are a variety of reasons for this—a fear of jeopardizing relationships and revenue. Account Manager loyalty that skews their relationship assessment. The feeling that they just can’t “give up.”

The reality is that keeping low-performing customers in your key account program wastes more time and profit than it brings in.

What’s the solution? Firing, or deselecting key accounts.

Though it sounds like a risky strategy, there are ways to accomplish key account deselection without putting revenue at risk. 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 »

How many key accounts can one person handle?  It’s a hard question to answer and it depends on a number of variables: deal complexity, sales cycle time, team size, specific customer attributes…the list goes on. 

Here’s some quick data that will at least give you some perspective on how other SEC members have structured around this question.      

As background, the Council recently hosted a webinar aimed at helping members reinvigorate their key account management programs.  During the session we were able to do some surveying and found:

• Nearly half of the members that joined us described the state of their key account programs as in the process of restructuring.

And this isn’t just restructuring to maintain the status quo, it’s restructuring to create growth in the near term: 

• 47% of members polled are expecting a 5+% growth rate from their key accounts in 2010 alone (and 28% are expecting 10+% growth), compared to core accounts.

So, what tweaks can you make to your key account programs to achieve those kinds of growth numbers this year?     Read More »

By Todd Burner

If you asked 10 of your best customers why they would want to be in your key account program, would you get the same answer from each customer?

And would you get an answer that included any reason other than “access to a bigger discount?”

What seems like a question that should produce a single, consistent, non-discount-focused answer can, in reality, generate a wide range of answers from customers (this helps explain why key account programs get torn down and rebuilt every 3 to 5 years due to underperformance).

The problem with most key account programs comes down to this: suppliers can’t say what’s in it for their customers beyond a bigger discount, and therefore neither can their customers.

When building a key account program, most companies make the mistake of thinking about what they want to get out of the key account program as opposed to thinking about what’s in it for the customer. 

The benefit for the sales organization is clear: more revenue.  Organizations then go looking for customers where “we should be able to sell them a lot more stuff,” and leave it to the customer to figure out what’s in it for them.

The key to building a successful key account program is communicating to the customer a clear and compelling value proposition as to why they would want to be in your key account program. Read More »