Strategic Account Management Blog

Preview: IBM-Issues and Challenges in Managing Global Accounts from SAMA on Vimeo.

This video is a preview of the information covered in Session 25 at SAMA’s 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago.

Description:
Management systems for global accounts help account managers and their teams fulfill coverage requirements and find new customer opportunities. This session will share IBM’s use of account management processes to work across a vast enterprise of competing priorities and address the challenges inherent in managing a global client across a country-focused organization.

Preview: Organizational Challenges in Managing Large Global Projects

Lee Pryor, President of ESSAYONS! Consulting, Inc. delivers a preview of his session at SAMA’s Pan European Conference, February 28-March 2, 2010.

The session highlights the challenges strategic account organizations face in managing large programs and projects for their key customers, with emphasis on how to organize strategic account programs and projects. Teaming issues also will be addressed along with options for funding methods. Case studies and examples will be used.

SAM-level negotiations are often some of the most complex deals, and therefore some of the most frustrating. How do you demonstrate solutions against price? Whether it is reacting to irrational competitive offers, or addressing demands to lower price, the pressure is on the SAM and his or her team to come back with the best deal for the company and the client.

At SAMA University Atlanta February 1-3, Carrie Welles, Vice President of Think! Inc. will be leading a session at SAMA University (Session #4, Strategic Negotiation: Claiming Value in a Negotiation & Turning in a More Profitable Deal) that allows individuals to bring in an account negotiation they are working on to create the best possible deal.

Q - In your session, you talk about determining and acquiring power during a negotiation. How important is this to negotiating the deal?

A - Hugely important. Determining who has the power in a negotiation will help illuminate how probable the deal is. In addition, it can be the difference in winning not just a good deal, but winning a great deal. We’ll review in our session how you determine that power, and subsequently build your courage.

Q - You ask participants to bring in real-world negotiations to audit during the session. Is there a particular type of deal that SAMs should bring into the class?

A - Our session reflects our real world, so any deal that has not closed yet is appropriate. To be most effective, I would suggest bringing a deal that is not set to close right after you finish the session, but rather one where you have room to ‘try on’ the concepts you learn and better your opportunity.

Q - Is there a common structure to strategic negotiation?

A - Absolutely. Research that we’ve done in the past two years suggests 97% of the time you can anticipate reactions of your buyer and use a structured ‘negotiation blueprint’ to help you prepare for a negotiation that previously you may have thought was ‘unpreparable’. 97%! That is a compelling number. AND, the negotiation blueprint encompasses only (3) concepts.

Q - Price is always an issue, no matter how close of a relationship a SAM has with a client. How do you avoid getting stuck on price during the negotiation process?

A - Often, and in this economy especially, price certainly has a way of headlining a negotiation and our buyers & procurement executives are seasoned at keeping it that way. Price is part of the negotiation, no doubt, however a negotiation is never just about price. It really can’t be given all the other intrinsic pieces that make up our solutions, and subsequently, our offer(s). Our job as SAMs is to do a better job of putting value on all those intrinsic pieces and then making them known in our offers(s) so we begin to get credit for all of them. We’ll also learn how to do this in our session.

Q - Irrational competitive offers can often derail negotiation. Is there a way to prepare and protect against this?

A - Without question, however it does take the will to do the work and prepare appropriately, earlier on and in conjunction with your consultative sales process, so you can devise your negotiation strategy & stick to it. We offer a tool called “Multiple Equal Offers” that will allow a SAM to take pressure off price, competitive offers and all the while giving customer’s a few solutions, not just one. These solutions, or offers, encompass business relationships that you can have with your customer that will get titled - generally a departure of what we do - and are reflective of the business issues you will solve for them. This concept allows for a ton of flexibility and responsiveness to our customer!

The history of mergers and acquisitions is filled with the best laid plans that — oops — left out one tiny detail: the sales force.  A new article in the McKinsey Quarterly online newsletter tackles the issue of sales force integration, a topic that SAMA has addressed often in the strategic account management context. The McKinsey article begins:

Make no mistake: mergers are challenging. Even so, they can provide organizations with transformative possibilities. One of the biggest—the integration of sales forces—is central to ensuring revenue growth and driving the value that mergers promise but often fail to realize.

Read the full article here (membership required).

Johnson Controls, a SAMA Corporate Member, shared its story of successful sale integration after its merger with York Internation. Link to order article here

A column in this week’s Economist magazine lists several companies taking new directions in the middle of this recession. This is recommended reading for strategic account managers and SAM executives! Cisco, a SAMA corporate member, is among those mentioned. Here.

Selling to the executive level is often the most important stop a Strategic Account Manager has in closing the deal, and it is also the most difficult. How should you change your message? What metrics are important to them? How are their needs different from the other levels in the organization?

At SAMA University Chicago, October 19-22, Jim Melillo, President of Executive Conversation, and a CFO for more than a decade of public and privately help companies will lead a workshop (Session #2, Creating and Communicating Value at the CxO Level) that demonstrates the tools and thought processes needed to successfully communicate to top-level executives.

Q - At SAMA University Chicago, you’ll be leading a session on creating and communicating value to C-level Officers. A question we hear a lot at SAMA is do executives see a lot of strategic account managers struggling to demonstrate value at the executive level?

A - My impression was that 80-90% of the presentations that I have seen were bad or did not address me and my concerns. My view is based on what I saw in sales people as they presented to us either in my office or at the final review phase. I always assumed because I was a finance guy from New York I was being hard on the sales professionals. What I have come to find out working with the 20 or so former CXOs at Executive Conversation is that the results were the same for Randall the former Under Secretary of Defense or Brian the former Managing Director of DHL shipping.
Continue reading…

Many SAMs and SAM teams struggle to connect with their customers. If done right, the account planning process should be a win-win for you and your customers, addressing you and your client’s goals. So why are so many people struggling with this? What if your client’s long-term goals are at odds with your short-term goals. How do you measure success?
Continue reading…

Bravo to co-authors Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin and Geoffrey Moore for encouraging suppliers to agitate their customers as a way to add value and beat the current economic crisis (“In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers,” Harvard Business Review, March 2009). In the article, they beautifully describe the process by which organizations can provoke their customers.

But we think that a lot of companies will find their greatest challenge – and reward – in implementing the right corporate structure to support provocation selling. While we all agree that mere consultative selling is not enough, the burden of provocation selling too often falls on the sales team alone. But sales people can only do so much. Provocation selling really pays dividends when it is deployed as a company-wide initiative. Our term for this is Strategic Account Management (SAM).

In reality, SAM initiatives are quite rare.  A 2008 survey conducted by our organization showed that 80 percent of SAM programs were younger than 7 years old, and only 12 percent of respondents reported that their SAM programs were “fully functional and effective,” and they identified “organizational structure” as their greatest challenge. Only when provocative selling becomes a corporate initiative will CEOs, senior executives and other departments (marketing, finance, engineering, etc.) work together to realize the benefits. Otherwise, sales people seeking to provoke their customers will have to confront the inevitable barriers existing within their own organizations.

View a synopsis of the original article or purchase it here: http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/03/in-a-downturn-provoke-your-customers/ar/1

Today SAMA President Bernard Quancard kicked off the annual (and well attended!) “Elements of Strategic Account Management” webinar with a nod to Rolls-Royce, which is profiled in the January 10th - 16th issue of The Economist. The article charts the triumph of Rolls-Royce as it bounced back from nationalisation and near bankruptcy in 1971 to its status as the world’s number two maker of jumbo jet engines in 2009. The turnaround came from a deft blend of products and services. Airlines that buy Rolls-Royce engines pay a fee for every hour that planes powered by the engines are operational. In turn Rolls-Royce take care of maintenance, creating powerful incentives — on both the customer and supplier sides — to collect and jointly assess new information about how to make the engines and airplanes operate more efficiently while anticipating problems. At its plant in Derby, UK, Roll-Royce has assembled a sophisticated, 24-7 assessment and operations center, continually montoring data from thousands of its customers’ airplanes and jet engines. The information collected from the center has proven to be invaluable to both Rolls-Royce and its customers.”It’s actually a very powerful example of strategic account management,” Quancard says. A hat tip to The Economist. View the article, which might be under a subscriber-only firewall, here:  http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12887368   If you have trouble accessing the article, then either subscribe to The Economist or buy a hardcopy of the issue. If you are in strategic account management, then this article alone is worth it!

TechRepublic has selected Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy as one of its 10 most influential technology leaders of 2008 (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=892) for leading Xerox through an astonishing business turnaround during the past five years. TechRepublic recognized Mulcahy and her colleagues for having the perspective to do more than simply control costs during the dark times of near bankruptcy. They also did it by “ramping up Xerox’s services business, pushing innovation with expanded  research and development efforts, and growing its footprint in emerging markets.” Mulcahy will be the keynote speaker at the 2009 SAMA Annual Conference on May 18.