Selling: I’m a Key Account Manager. What do you want me to do exactly?

Why do so many companies feel the need to create Key Account teams and produce Account Plans that no-one ever looks at? Does this sound familiar?...

In their excellent book “Cracking the sales Management code” Jordan and Vazzana present a definition of Account Management that challenges many practices today. “The ultimate goal of Account management is to maximize the long-term value of a select group of customers. Whether these customers are the biggest, most profitable, or otherwise strategically important, they warrant additional attention from the seller’s company IN ORDER TO INCREASE LOYALTY AND PROFITS (our capitals)…..

So this should answer our question. An Account Manager’s role is to bring the additional attention needed to increase loyalty and profitability, to the extent of modifying their company’s services and products to achieve this…QED

Now, what do you want me to do exactly?.. The answer “Write an Account Plan and implement it”. In this blog we will look at what form an account plan should be in, and what you as an Account manager will do when you go to work.

Jordan and Vazzana’s definition contains some key-words. “Maximize the long-term value” can be interpreted as saying “Understand this client’s COMPELLING NEEDS in order for us to meet them more often and widely, without having to sacrifice profitability”.

The second key message is “to the extent of modifying their company’s services and products to achieve this”

The role of the account manager can be argued to be to identify Compelling Needs within the customer’s portfolio, that you can satisfy either now or through a modified offering safe in the knowledge that the customer’s spend is big enough to justify the changes.

So why do so many Account managers pass their time fire-fighting, resolving technical issues, and sitting in Quality service meetings, none of which helps them deliver their otherwise unique contribution to growing their company’s business?

One probable reason is simply that the contribution of a key account has never been articulated in these simple terms. If a customer does not have the current or future spend capacity to warrant adapting your products and services, nor have a buying centre complex enough to require dedicated resources, in order to uncover the compelling needs, it probably should not be considered as a Key Account.

All too often the title of key account is given to customer’s that do not merit this level of attention, however they have an influential Headquarters or technical centre. In this instance it may merit building a centrally located technical team that can respond to inquiries from these support functions; however this should not be assumed to be account management.

Now let’s focus on the unique insight a Key Account Manager should bring to her or his organization, and by extension what should go into an Account Plan.

Earlier we referred to the fact that even at a local level there will always be multiple nuances of the compelling need, and this includes the corporate strategy, and the mission statements it makes to the wider marketplace. These play a role in shaping a Compelling proposal that has to be aligned to some degree to these values. For example, a Business Unit has a technical need to which you have a viable and competitive solution. However the country management team has a commitment to local employment, which you would not normally be able to respect. The corporate organization has also made public statements about CO2 reduction through logistics efficiencies. Your products would need to be air-freighted. These commitments would render your proposal “problematic” unless you anticipate them. The buying approach and such macro constraints need to captured in the Account Plan. The good news is that most of these are publicly available on customer websites, and it remains only to assess the consequences for your business.

This leads naturally to articulating the buying process within the Account organization. If technology needs to be qualified following a specific procedure this needs to be made available to any of your colleagues to use.

If you are to modify your offerings to this customer’s needs, a condition is that they will buy/acquire enough of your products and services to make the cost acceptable. To do this you need to estimate their spend for your services. Whilst top-line expenditure is often shared by the customer, understanding the potential spend for a specific service or product will take additional work. The size of each defined market along with accessible and potential spend is a critical element of a useful Account Plan. It is unlikely that any rolled-up revenue forecasting will provide this insight.

It is most likely that local teams will have a better understanding of their market(s) than an Account manager. However if you are to grow the long term value from an Account, a unique contribution is to map and identify commonalities across the Account’s portfolio and geographies. For instance, a technology that works well in one country, may have great potential for another, but organizational barriers often prevent this knowledge from being passed internally.

Some Business units or countries are so big that it serves to provide a deeper dive by asset or subsidiary. Such an analysis needs to be able to contribute to the cross-portfolio analysis, but as an Account Manager your wider view of the market allows you to bring clearer insight into the trends as seen from HQ

Finally the plan must capture offering modifications that will make your services more attractive to the customer, and that have been validated by HQ or technical teams. This acts as an internal service to your local sales teams for them to use and leverage in their individual opportunity development.

Most Account plans are written in MS Word. It makes a nice document for visiting VIPs and is otherwise worthless to you. Use a tool such as Excel that will allow you make calculations and generate worthwhile outputs. Make the Account Plan a working tool!. (see the “Mbrace Account planning” tool.)

If you want to avoid visitors asking you “So what do you really do?”, make sure your contribution is unique, useful and focused on business. Build an Account Plan that helps you achieve these objectives and you will be well on the way to growing your Account business.