Account Management

"Maximizing Revenue From Large Strategic Accounts"

Account management is the strategic planning and associated activities focused on maximizing business revenues and relationships from a large, strategic or multi-national account. The purpose of account management is to build a strong business alliance between your two companies.

Companies who have relationships with large accounts strive to preserve those customers. They are of strategic importance to the financial future and health of the company.

• A complex buying process
• Decentralized coordinated purchasing organization with multiple location purchasing influences
• Large purchase orders
• Need for special services
• Multiple business and service units

Implementing a sales approach for a company often requires financial investment, long-term focus, and multi-functional support. It may even require the restructuring of the sales organization.

Your approach needs to be specific to the account for it to be effective. Your approach to these accounts should be tailored to best fit the attributes and requirements of each account. The types of things you and your company are willing to do for a truly large or global account , will be different for each account. The approach is generally the same, but the resources, business relationship, and engagement will be scaled appropriately.

Some factors critical to the success of your program are:

• Executive and management commitment
• Organizational alignment
• Processes and systems for communication and information
• Criteria for selecting accounts
• Account planning and reviews
• Program and relationship metrics
• Linkage of your business and service units with the account

The Key Account Manager is the steward of the strategic customer relationship. They orchestrate the development of corporate resources to provide products, services and solutions to the strategic account. Other support and team personnel may include company individuals with varying skills and capabilities across organizations.

Why Consider A Formal Program

The key challenge facing sales organizations today is you are being asked to do more with less or equal resources. Your areas of focus, as you manage key account managers , revolve around revenue growth, enhanced awareness and interest from your customers, and growth opportunities going.

Studies have shown that it is easier to sell to existing customers than to find net new businesses by a factor of about five to one. Proper account management helps take advantage of this efficiency. In addition, the size of one large account usually adds up to be the size of multiple smaller accounts. In reality, each small account requires the same volume and layers of contact and engagement that large accounts require.

So if you are going to put the time into managing accounts, prioritize your team's efforts. That is where you stand the best chance of winning continuing business over time.

Basic Elements Of Account Management

To engage in consistent top-level account management, a repeatable process is required. There are many processes in the marketplace but almost all of them contain the following key areas:

• Gather information and profile
• Segment your accounts into relevant groups
• Analyze current business
• Create objectives and strategies
• Build a plan for account sales and relationship building
• Execute, review and update your sales account plan

Three Key Revenue Aspects

There are many different aspects to account management, but the revenue aspects boil down to three basic areas of focus.

1. If you're already doing business with an account, the first goal of the key account manager is to maintain installed base and grow it wherever possible. Your competitors will constantly be trying to unseat the business you have won. Focus on making your relationships stronger and increase your value-add to your existing clients.


2. The second revenue aspect involves winning as many new opportunities as possible in your account. Since you already have a relationship, your goal is to leverage your knowledge and relationships to win as many new sales opportunities as possible.


3. Finally, your goal is to develop new business in the account. Everyone on your team should constantly be looking to identify new opportunities for your products and services.

Key Non-Revenue Aspects

In addition to trying to win as much business from your account is possible, it is important to position yourself properly so that when business is initiated, your account thinks of you and your solutions.

Account marketing is one key aspect of an account plan that gets your message out to the account. When you market to your account, consider what specific and targeted messaging gives you the best competitive position. Leverage your existing marketing collateral, develop new specific collateral, and think of the multiple ways of delivering your message.

Another key nonrevenue aspect is to manage customer relationships. Identify individuals in the account who are key to your success, and put together a set of planned activities to build the relationships with those individuals. Identify individuals from your company who have common titles, roles, and interests to key individuals in the account, and get them linked together.

If you use partners to help you win business in the account, it is also critical to manage partner relationships, so everyone is clear on their roles, objectives, and responsibilities.

Keys To Account Management Success

• Keep your team motivated so they want to do a good job
• Put proper resources in place; people, infrastructure, budget, tools, processes, and information, all require your attention
• Provide your team the training, processes, skills, knowledge, and experience to be successful
• Define the job of account manager and support them as necessary
• Account management software is required to track information

Recap

Great account management starts with research about your customer, and profiling the customer's organization, business, key individuals, and business challenges.

Armed with this information, segment the account into areas of the customer's business that are important to you and your company.

Next, look to create new business opportunities that support both your company's and your customer's business objectives. Then based upon your goal for the account, put together your objectives, create a strategy for engaging with the account, and put together your action items.

Then it is up to you and your team to execute and review your account plan. The strength is not in building the plan, the strength is in the planning. As you engage with your customer initially, it will be important to review your plan more frequently. As your team becomes comfortable working with a new customer, the review of the plan might decrease in frequency. Leverage your partners and other resources to help you succeed.

Conclusion

An account management program can have positive consequences for your company. It requires hard work and expenses, but it helps to differentiate you from the competition. Companies that do not provide special considerations to their key accounts eventually see the relationships deteriorate to the point where they are replaced.

Related Articles

• Key Accounts
• Account Management Software
• Key Account Manager
• Segment Accounts
• Global Account

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