Strategic Account Management Blog

Hat tip to Walker:

http://ow.ly/16eWUj

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

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’s technology allows us to stay involved with several things at once, the process called “multitasking.” Is this good or bad for SAMs, whose value comes from deeply understanding the customer’s business? Maggie Jackson, author of  Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, defines multitasking as a pointless juggling of interruptions (not tasks).  “Multitasking is most often about ‘task-switching,’ hopping back and forth among several tasks in quick succession, never giving deep full attention to any of them. It’s characterized by frequent interruption, and that makes it highly inefficient. Each time we’re interrupted — or we interrupt ourselves — it takes time to get back to where we were on a project,” Jackson said in a recent interview with Harvard Management Update. This sounds fatal for the strategic account manager or executive. How can a SAM understand the customer deeply when she’s interrupted over and over again? Our guess is that most SAMs already are very good managers of their time, or else they would not be SAMs. Their job involves understanding complicated business situations in order to create value. The ones who are not good at managing their time might find that their careers in strategic account management are limited. If you are caught up in the faux-productive mindset of “multitasking,” take advantage of a powerful feature of your Blackberry and iPhone: the OFF button. Turn off all interrupting devices and think about nothing else but your customer for an extended period of time. The OFF button could help you to become your customer’s most valuable ally.

Most strategic account managers and program directors are players who love the game. But success in the field also owes a lot to appropriate compensation structures. Participate in the only survey on strategic account management compensation practices. For the second year, ZS Associates will analyze the data. Given the high level of analysis ZS delivered in 2008, this year’s study promises even deeper trend-spotting and analysis. More info on the survey here:

http://www.strategicaccounts.org/emails/compSurvey/2009/comp_survey1.html

Here’s why we are linking to a blog about IT networking: Because in this economic environment it is crucial for account managers to give increasing attention to the IT backbone supporting their customers. It’s time to review your IT approach and invest in ways to deliver more value to the customer. In his blog, “Networked Economy”, Bo Harald approaches IT from a broad business perspective. He is interested in ensuring that IT actually drives value for the customer. Back in August, this blog featured timely advice from Kaj Storbacka (a SAMA board member and chairman of Vectia) in the form of a step-by-step approach toward creating customer value in a down economy. See http://boharald.blogspot.com/2008/08/driving-growth.html