Selling: We need Account Managers…do you really?

We all have conversations or moments in our careers that stay with us. One of mine was with a new manager after a number of years in my role, who simply asked me what I did as a Global Account Manager. As he so eloquently summarized my response, I spent most of my time doing someone else’s job be it firefighting, or covering for others. In fact, anything but “managing” my account. Herein lies the first dilemma; what actually should I have been doing to “manage” the account that represented a unique contribution? The answer: nobody knew! This is far from an exceptional story and poses the question whether companies really “manage” their accounts commercially.

When a company decides they need to pay particular attention to a single or select group of customers it is with a very clear aim, namely, to generate repeat business with them. As Jason Jordan states in his book Cracking the Sales Management Code, “Account Management activities essentially tailor a company’s go-to-market strategy to each chosen customer through careful analysis, planning and execution at the individual account level”. It sounds so obvious! and maybe it is if we simplify it a bit.

In practice,” tailor a company’s go-to-market strategy to each chosen customer” has massive implications which may not even be possible for you if you don’t have the resources or technical flexibility to customize your offerings to a specific customer’s needs. Combining this reality with “careful analysis” of your customer’s future spend trends in terms of needs and geographies, to produce a realistic evaluation of your ability to satisfy these needs, may make you change your mind about this particular customer’s potential towards your business growth. If you decide to continue, “Planning and execution” from a commercial standpoint can be interpreted as knowing how buying decisions are made and how you can influence them for the opportunities you have identified, as well as avoiding over-selling something you cannot deliver. We should acknowledge at this stage that this is not a customer whose business simply represents a large part of our revenue stream.

So to summarize, I need to assess whether a particular customer has future activities that are aligned with my own ability to satisfy them, and if they do, in order for me to generate repeat business with them, I need to know which opportunities I can realistically satisfy their needs and engage early enough to influence the buying decisions. Why didn’t someone tell me earlier!

Let’s try to simplify this even further especially if you feel unable to” customize” your offerings as a way to increase your share of this customer’s future spend-wallet. For many companies it may be sufficient to know that this customer is aligned with what they can supply. In order to differentiate from the customized approach, I will call this Aligned Repeat Business (ARB), with customers who don’t need to be as big as a conventional “Account“ customer, but who still represent a great way to generate repeat business for you and drive your growth. This should appeal above all to small and medium companies hesitant to embark on Account management, and all of its implied resource needs.

So what are the fundamental requirements to achieve ARB? Let’s look at the top 3.

Firstly and foremost is the need to validate whether a particular customer has plans to conduct activities that will require your products and services in geographical locations and within a time span that will contribute to your company growth. If their activity requires significant investment and /or is too soon or too late to help you grow, despite the attractiveness of their spend, it may not be for you. Similarly, without this activity knowledge it will be impossible to understand their technical needs and any solutions you may be able to offer. Such an exercise does not have to overly complicated and much of the source data is publicly available awaiting your interpretation. This knowledge will help you engage earlier and more effectively.

The impact of early-stage engagement cannot be over-emphasised, and this represents the second requirement. Innovative or proprietary technology included in an investment-decision basecase will almost certainly be used, and if not, your acknowledged ability to de-risk the basecase can generate competitive differentiation. A common barrier to developing early-stage opportunities is the lack of available technical resources to help the often iterative discussions as the customer’s needs are clarified. The availability of what we can consider as Technical Sales support is critical and could easily be a shared resource. The more comprehensive your solutions are at this stage, the lower the perceived risk will be associated with it.

Such interactions rarely happen at the same time and place, and often a specific challenge may be passed to a central technical team to address. This brings us to our third fundamental requirement: to know how the buying process works within this customer’s organization. Who does what, when and where. Remember this is a customer with whom you want to generate repeat business and so any investment of effort now will pay out for a considerable time to come, and knowing when, where and with whom you need to engage will bring efficiency and avoid saturation of any one person. Bombarding your local contact with progress requests when the dossier has been passed to a central team for example will serve only to alienate this person and bring you no benefit.

This also allows you to identify and leverage your supporters. Any organization will contain people who are more receptive to your proposals just as they will have people who are less receptive or overtly negative. Knowing who are receptive and making sure that they are fully informed of your technology, successes, and yes, failures, is critical if you are to allow them to support your proposals should they wish to do so whilst you are not in the room. The reality is that this will be the majority of the time in a typical buying cycle.

So here we have an alternative approach to conventional Account Management, that I have called Aligned Repeat Business focused very clearly on just that. Imagine the scenario. You undertake a validation of a potential target customer looking at their assets and spend and technical needs over the next 3-5 years, and whether you can realistically satisfy some or all of their needs.

You map how decisions get made and who is involved in technical assessment as well as the core team, noting at what stage procurement become involved, and when are plans are reviewed with partners and regulators, all of whom will influence any award decision. The good news is that these buying processes rarely change significantly.

You secure technical support from your shared Technical Sales team that will allow you to provide professional responses to questions during the early stages of any opportunity. This may also develop direct communications between technical experts to help future opportunities and relieve your sales team time pressure.

In parallel you will have identified supporters at all levels of the customer organization to whom you will provide regular updates and if need be, how you have mitigated the repetition of failures. Beware that you are not too generous in your definition of a supporter. You will be passing potentially sensitive information to these people so you must be sure of your assessment. Don’t be surprised if you only identify a handful of people. This is about right.

Combined together, we are confident that this customer has needs that are aligned with what we can deliver, we understand how they buy, and we can identify opportunities early on so as that we can try to improve our competitive advantage as early on as possible.

Such an approach can be applied to any size of customer, and does not require dedicated Account managers. So now, do you really need an Account manager?