Strategic Account Management Archives

Tips for Getting Off to a Good Start with Your New Strategic Accounts

For better or worse accounts get shaken up at the beginning of the new year. You might be left to build new relationships at important companies that you don’t have a relationship with or even worse, customers that didn’t have a strong relationship with their previous account manager. How can you get off on the right foot with your POC and build engagement with your new accounts?

Meeting Existing Customers for the First Time

Many key account managers will jump on the phone for the first time with a new account and put the ownness on their customers to update them on the account status and history. While open-ended questions are an important part of the sales process, doing this with a transitioning contact or account can make you look unprepared and unknowledgeable. Not a great place to start. In a perfect world, the previous account manager would have left detailed notes in salesforce, formally transitioned the account to you, and been on great terms with the customer. However, as any account manager knows – this isn’t always the case.

Whether your account is disengaged, unhappy, or excited to meet you, properly preparing for your first meeting with thoughtful questions can make all the difference in starting out on the right foot or even be the first step to turning around an account headed towards churn.

When the Account Notes are Bare Bones…

Meeting an account for the first time without solid account notes is a difficult situation to be in. Unfortunately, most account managers will find themselves here on more than one occasion. That doesn’t mean that your first meeting can’t be productive or thoughtful. Account managers in this predicament should do their homework to show their customers they are committed to their success.

Suggestions for Research	Talk Track with Customers
Go to the original win/loss opportunity. Why did they buy from you in the first place?	I see your company originally purchased X product from us 5 years ago to accomplish Y. How has that going in your mind? Are we meeting those goals or have the goals changed? How do you see that goal changing next year?
Check Sales Navigator, LinkedIn, or the company website to notice any org changes. Your new contact may not be as informed about your solution or the goals set out by the original POC.	I noticed that Sam and Gil are new to the team or I noticed you are new to the team, how can I be a resource to help you understand the goals and the solution in place? Does this org change affect your business unit?
Read the annual report	I read that X is an area your company is going into, do you see that affecting our work together? I read that X is an area your company is going into, is our project a part of accomplishing that goal?
Read the original contract and research the original executive sponsor or champion	Reach out to the original executive and request a meeting to discuss any questions or concerns they have about the current solution.

Start, Stop, Continue

Have a frank start, stop, continue conversation with your customer. This is a quick, sometimes delicate, 15-minute conversation – no need to belabor anything or talk bad about a past account manager who worked with your account last year. These conversations can be great discovery calls that can drive engagement and help you figure out where things might be falling off track, or where conversations should pivot down the road.

Start:

What topics were missing from meetings that the customer wants to include? What actions were missing that they want you to do for them? This conversation should have a value-driven lens and can help you understand where the customer’s priorities are and how they like to work with their account manager.

Stop:

What did they dislike about the partnership that they wanted to stop? Make sure to ask discovery questions to get to the real root of the problem with these. For instance, let’s say your customer tells you they want to stop having weekly check-in calls and only meet once a month because they are busy, and the calls aren’t helpful. Dig into that further! Are the topics covered not relevant? What would make those calls more valuable to them?

Continue:

What did they like about working with their last account manager that they would like you to continue to do? You can dig into these suggestions further by asking goal-oriented questions. For example, if a customer said that quarterly product roadmap meetings are something, they want to continue you can ask them how roadmap meetings help them accomplish their goal of X?

These questions are a great way to spark account management discovery and give you some thoughtful fodder to drive account plans and your communication strategy.

Conclusion:

Customers are easier to lose and harder to engage than ever. Starting off on the right foot with your accounts and demonstrating you are a thoughtful, trusted advisor can make all the difference in keeping your customers happy and successful.

Want to learn more account management best practices? Take our online account management training course.

How Strategic Account Managers Should Approach Value Co-creation with Top Customers

April 15, 2019/in Strategic Account Management /by Lesley Poladsky

Value co-creation with your client is the ultimate goal and is a part of the job description for a key account manager. You can’t rely on your product to speak for itself as there are likely anywhere from dozens to hundreds of competing service providers out there all vying for your client’s business. When features alone can’t sell a product, your relationship with the customer is the main differentiator.

While bringing value through a product is a must, to keep your clients happy and signed up for the long-haul along with the ability to sell them premium services, building co-value and a win-win relationship is the first step.

To do this, you need to talk to your clients and have a co-value conversation with them to establish this trust, reliance, and win-win benefit. Some key account managers might feel lost in this stage, but we’re here to help. As you prepare for your first co-value conversation with an existing or potential key account, here are some things to consider.

Learn Their Story

Before you can start providing value for your customers, you need to know not only more about their company but more about the environment they operate. Every industry has unique factors that can change the way your customers work and how they sell their products or services.

For example, companies that work in the advertising and marketing world face growing competition where new companies pop up left and right promising better rates or faster results. How can your customer keep up with that? With changing technologies too, the industry is in flex also. Does your customer know this? You hope they do, but understanding these types of factors and providing insight is an excellent way to start the co-value conversation off on the right foot.

Taking the time and making the effort to separate yourself from other vendors and researching the perils of what’s going on in your customer’s industry can build co-value like nothing else. It shows that you care about what their company is up against and it also shows that you understand how they’ll use your product to overcome these obstacles. Approach the discussion from their point of view, and you’ll begin to understand what they require and what your solution is.

Ask The Question

It sounds simple enough, right? To get to the bottom of what your accounts truly value and the aspects that they are looking for in a successful account manager, you need to actually talk to them. You can try your best to surmise what they might value or appreciate based on non-verbal cues, but in the KAM world, we can’t make judgment calls based on our intuition or thoughts; we need directions, strategies, and actions.

So, how often are you talking to your key account contacts? If your answer is less than a weekly basis at the bare minimum, then you are leaving your accounts out to sea without any co-value that they can depend on. We often recommend that account managers speak to their most important clients on a weekly basis at the minimum but often times, quick chats or emails during the week are common.

Frequent communication is just the vehicle for building co-value. To make some real progress, you need to better understand their situation through highly-target, specific questions that show you are not only doing your homework, but you care about the challenges and opportunities that face their business.

Here are a few basic questions you should ask your clients before delving deeper:

1) Where do they struggle now?

What is the most significant operational challenge that your account struggles with? It could be an internal challenge such as remaining competitive in their industry. It could be providing high-quality customer service to their customers. Or it could be as simple as lacking an efficient way to track project costs.

Whatever their case may be, start by identifying the biggest struggles of their company as a whole, so you have a broader view of not only their organization but their competitors, customers, and industry as a whole. This insight will allow you to form a frame for where their company stands now along with a jumping off point.

Additionally, they should be able to provide you with quick answers right off the top of their head. Since we’re focused on the current situation, their struggle might very well be an emergency. Be ready with solutions and suggest how your products or services could make the current situation easier for them.

2) Where will they struggle soon?

Along with where they struggle in the current market situation, you also want to see where they will struggle in the near future. Have they thought that far ahead? You would hope so, and if you have done your industry analysis correctly, you already have seen into your KAM crystal ball and have identified areas that they could improve.

Look for struggles that they foresee in the next six months or so but nothing way too out on the horizon. The competitive field can change drastically in only a matter of months so if you are proposing solutions that they might need in five years, by the time that comes they could be in an entirely different situation. Get down to the things that keep them up at night and provide them with tools they can use to conquer these obstacles before they ever become a problem.

Examples of a struggle on the horizon could be the start of a slow season in their business, a new product launch, a merger, or something else that can change the way they conduct their day-to-day operations. Find new ways to ease these worries, and you’re already well ahead of the pack in building co-value with your clients.

3) What about individual struggles?

Finally, on the topic of struggles, where does your contact struggle? What keeps them up at night? Why are they talking to you and not another member of their company? While your plans for an account should be at the macro level, you can’t forget about the human on the other end of the line. After all, because we’re focusing on relationships here, you should care about their individual struggles.

Getting to the bottom of this might be challenging being that you aren’t a psychologist, and it can really take some time. Essentially, we want to better understand what they want out of their relationship with your company.

Sure, they’re using your products because their boss wants them to, but you need to communicate why they should fall in love with your products or services. They need to understand why you’re worth the cost every month and how you’re helping them in their own individual goals.

Likely, they’re looking for a way to make themselves look like the hero to their company and the person that gets the most results, but they’re struggling to make it happen. Or, they could struggle to connect with their clients and are facing a detrimental churn rate.

Whatever the case, you can’t provide them with the help and solutions they need if you first don’t know the struggle.

How can we win?

Once you’ve identified the specific company-wide and individual struggles of your key account it’s time to start putting points on the scoreboard for them. When you can help them win, they’ll have a hard time trading you for draft picks (i.e., a different vendor).

While you’re strategizing with your client, you need to dream big. What is the end game here? What would they consider the ultimate win? For many, it’s likely revenue growth, reduced churn, and increased market share. Other items are likely small victories along the way or icing on the cake.

As you’re better understanding how we can win, you’ll start identifying areas that you could provide not only guidance but also strategic help all while building their trust with every win along the way. Plug this information into your account plans on Kapta, and you’ll have a new roadmap and clear lists of actions to help them reach the ultimate goal.

Value for Their Customers

If your client is like most, they want the same thing that you do – to provide value for their customers. The entire business world revolves around the idea that we do better when our customers value our services and products. Providing value for your customers relates to the relationships and support, guidance, and expertise that you provide.

For your client, it’s likely the same thing but in a different industry or market place. Even so, your services should enable them to focus more on their customers and less on putting out fires or stressing about the great unknown. If you’ve done your homework and gotten to know them during the time they’ve been a client, you should already have the crystal ball and are shining the light that leads them out of uncertainty.

The Customer’s Customer

With all of this information in mind, it’s time to consider how the value chain moves forward from you providing co-value to your clients providing co-value for your customer’s customers.

Consider the questions from earlier:

Where do they struggle now?
Where will they struggle soon?
What are their individual (or personal) struggles?
How can we win?

How might their customers answer these questions? Thinking this far down the value chain serves a few purposes.

First, it helps you gain greater insight into the account so you can see where your solutions make the most difference. When you’re focusing on the bigger picture and focusing on revenue, profits, and other company-wide figures, it’s easy to lose sight of what the ultimate end goal is – providing value. Consider how these solutions are going to make your client more valuable to their customers, and the other wins will follow.

Second, it shows your client that you’re thinking post-sale – you’re not just looking for ways to sell them more stuff; that’s not what you’re here for. One of the most significant pain points of key accounts is that they feel like their vendor doesn’t care about anything more than the sale. Let the sales reps get the leads and land the small wins – we’re focused on growing this relationship and bringing greater bottom line driven results.

Finally, considering the struggles and aspirations of your customer’s customers just makes you look good. Showing this type of foresight and attention to detail is what separates key account managers from the rest of the pack and without it, you’re just another vendor or sales rep to your clients. Think all the way through and discuss your customer’s customer with the client.

While you should do your research beforehand and come into the discussion with a general knowledge base, your customer will likely reveal new details and information. Track their responses, put them in the account plan, and work towards solutions that affect their organization from the very top to the end user.

Summary

Providing co-value for your clients can make or break the relationship but you shouldn’t stress too much. It all starts by having the co-value conversation and getting down to the nitty-gritty details of their struggles today, in the near future, and their idea of success. Once you understand what they want to get out of the relationship, you can start providing the guidance and support needed to nourish and grow the account, making you their Trusted Advisor and Partner in their success.

How Kapta Can Help

Kapta is a key account management platform designed specifically with the relationship in mind. Rather than bogging you down with more spreadsheets and complicated tables, Kapta offers an intuitive user interface that KAMs can use to easily track and manage important data related to their most important client. Easily create and edit Account Plans with the built-in templates, improve engagement through VOC Insights, and even track the account’s Overall Health Score all in one platform. To see how Kapta can help your KAM program, request your free demo today.

Nailing 4 Critical Strategic Account Management Handoffs

February 14, 2019/in Strategic Account Management /by Lesley Poladsky

As mentioned in the last post about building a balanced Strategic Account Management team, you can’t expect to achieve strategic success with your accounts by working alone. As the quarterback of the SAM team, you’re going to deal with handoffs throughout the lifecycle of the account.

Think of the account as the ball that gets passed from one player to the next depending on the situation. 3rd and one at the goal line? You’re probably handing it off to the tailback. 2nd and 15 at the 30? Probably need to pass the ball to a receiver.

Do you expect to be the only person that ever interacts with your clients? Hopefully not. The truth is, there are dozens of touchpoints within your organization. We like to call these “handoffs.”

With this football analogy in mind, let’s take a look at some key SAM handoffs that you’ll find in your workflow.

1) New Customer Onboarding

When a customer first fills out the contact form on your company website, they’ll be pushed to a sales rep where they’ll determine what they want to use the product for, their problems, and ultimately make the sale or provide them with a demo.

After the clients have gotten comfortable with the tools, the sale rep will hand them off to you to onboard them. This is where the long-term relationship truly is. The sales rep got them in the door, so it’s your job to make sure they take their coat off and stay a while (years) with your company.

This handoff is crucial, and you shouldn’t fast forward or rush through the onboarding stage. This is your chance to give them an excellent first impression of your tools, and if you can pull it off, you might have netted millions of dollars for your company in the long run.

2) Escalation of Use or Technical Issues

Now that you have the ball, you can either hold it and go for a QB rush, or you might have to pass the client off to another part of your SAM team.

One example of this handoff would be if your client runs into a technical issue or starts to use the product more but has technical questions about expanding the product use throughout their organization.

As a Strategic Account Manager, you’re a relationship expert, but you’re probably not a tech wizard. That’s why it’s crucial that you have a well-balanced SAM team. So, for this next handoff, you’ll most likely pass them along to technical support.

By working directly with technical support, your client can ask them specific questions that you might not know off the top of your head. In addition, tech support will offer quick and easy solutions that could have taken you days to figure out.

When your client has a tech question or problem, don’t bang your head against a wall trying to troubleshoot for them. Rather, pass the ball off to tech support, and they’ll provide a quick and easy solution, making your client see your organization as a place that gets things done.

3) Renewals and Upsells

Renewals and upsells are a little bit different than the other essential handoffs on this list, but they are still an integral part of the SAM workflow.

In fact, it might not even involve a handoff at all and could be more like the QB sneak of SAM handoffs.

When it comes time to renew, it’s all hand on deck, and you need to bring your A-Game to keep them from churning. Most skilled SAMs will be able to convert them to long-term customers, but you might also need help. Whatever the case may be, consult your playbook and take a look at your depth chart to see which players can help you.

Depending on the specific situation, you might need the help of one, two, or all players on the SAM team to keep the client happy and with your company.

4) Customer Reference Call

The final handoff we want to cover today involves bringing in more customers via referrals from your existing clients. Conducting an effective and winning customer reference call takes time, skill, and precision, and you should call for backup to make sure you’re speaking the customer’s language.

The best team to bring in for the customer reference call would be marketing. They know the hard numbers behind recent campaigns and are professionals at speaking the customer’s language. Chances are, they are also working on a referral marketing campaign for your organization, so they are familiar with these customer reference calls.

When it feels like the right time to get a reference from your customer, call an audible and bring in the marketing team to make sure the call goes off without a hitch.

Final Thoughts

Behind this football, team analogy is the core idea that your strategic accounts interact with more than just the SAM. There are dozens of potential touchpoints with your customers within your organization and the more you know about them, the more that you can control the customer journey and experience.

Remember, as the SAM, you’re the QB, and it’s your responsibility to ensure every interaction with customers is professional and smooth. You call the plays so you must own the entire client relationship to ensure you’re achieving mutual success.

How Kapta Can Help

Kapta is the strategic account management platform that packs every element of the best programs into one convenient package. It’s essentially your playbook for SAM and contains powerful tools to help you track your customers as they go through the purchasing journey.

If you’re tired of living inside of spreadsheets and want to have more time to focus on building strong relationships, get in touch with us today and discover what’s possible with Kapta.

Four Basics To Starting Off On The Right Foot With Your Strategic Accounts

February 11, 2019/in Strategic Account Management /by Alex Raymond

Making the best first impression is everything in a relationship. You only have one chance, so you need to make sure that you’re kicking the relationship off to a good start.

The same is true for your strategic accounts. If you want to have a long, mutually successful relationship with your strategic accounts, you should do everything that you can to start off on the right foot.

As the new year quickly approaches, your organization might be expecting a new influx of clients so now is the best time to recap the principles that will help make sure that you’re moving into the new year with a solid foundation to build upon. Here are our four fundamental basics of starting off on the right foot with your new strategic accounts.

1) Be Up Front With Them

Every strong relationship is built on open communication and trust. You shouldn’t wait to establish this open communication with your strategic accounts and instead, from day one, you should show them that you’re willing to always tell them the truth and are all ears whenever they have a question or issue.

A crucial part of kicking off the account on the right foot is to discuss the goals on the project openly. Talk to the client not only about their long-term goals but also their short-term objectives as well. By getting clear, direct information about their expectations and what they expect you to do for them, you can create a more accurate account plan and will know where this account will go in the future.

You should also discuss the risks of their project as well. Some people might be tempted to sweep some things under the rug or leave risks unacknowledged, but this won’t help in the end. Tell them to reveal all of their dirty account-related secrets, so you know what to expect and can start planning around them.

2) Establish the Process

Everyone works differently, and if your client is coming from a different vendor, you need to take the time to establish the way that you’ll do things along with reasons why.

This can take some time, and some account managers would instead brush over this step, but we’ve found in our experience that is a crucial component to starting the strategic account off right.

Tell your contact how you like to work with accounts such as when you communicate with them, the information that you’ll need from them, etc.

You should also ask about any areas they have struggled in the past. Specifically, ask about their past dealings with other vendors and what they wish the account manager would have done differently to help them reach their goals sooner. It’s all about learning their expectations and finding ways to exceed them throughout the life of the project consistently.

3) Anticipate the Unexpected

With all of this talk about building a positive relationship with your strategic account, it can be easy to expect that everything will move along smoothly throughout the project. The thing is, things happen.

One of the leading reasons that SAMs can struggle is because they fail to look at the bigger picture. Sure, you’re a friendly person, and your contact likes you, but that won’t change the fact that your product or service can have a bad rep in the marketplace.

Don’t worry – you can fix this. You just need to plan ahead and anticipate anything that could cause your clients to see your company, products, or services in a negative light. You might have had to deal with this in the past, so you’re ahead of the curve, but if not, it’s time to hit the books.

Research your company online and read what other people are saying. Take these negative thoughts into consideration and anticipate how your customer might view your products with these ideas and thoughts in mind. Once you’ve found areas that your customer might have a problem, you need a contingency plan to overcome their objections.

If you have a solid plan and have thought ahead, if the customer ends up bringing these concerns to you later down the line, you won’t need to think quick and hatch a half-baked solution.

Instead, you can point to your account plan for that strategic account and show them how you have already thought ahead. This will show that you not only care about providing the best products and services to the client, but you’re also proactive, a core component of being a successful strategic account manager.

4) Be Transparent in Success and Failure

When we do something right, we’re excited to share the news with anyone and everyone willing to hear it. While you should share with your client when you reach a new milestone, you should also be transparent in other areas as well.

As an addition to the first point, you must be as transparent as possible in the relationship not only when trying to establish trust with the strategic account, but also throughout the duration of the project.

So, don’t try and hide your mistakes or tell the client that everything is okay when you know it isn’t. Be as upfront with them about everything, and it will not only make you look better but will also improve the relationship and make it stronger than ever.

How Kapta Can Help

Throughout the life of the relationship, you’ll find that balancing the technical aspects of the project with the personal communication and relationship-building process can be a challenge. This is mostly because too many organizations rely on CRM technology from the 90’s.

Kapta is the natural evolution of your prehistoric CRM. It’s a platform made by Strategic Account Managers for Strategic Account Managers and features powerful account planning tools and relationship health scores to help you not only start off on the right foot but keep your clients consistently impressed with your work.

If you want to see how Kapta can take your SAM program to the next level, request your free demo today.

Level-Setting When Things Go Off Course With A Strategic Account

February 7, 2019/in Strategic Account Management /by Lesley Poladsky

Let’s face it – things don’t always go according to the account plan. Something can come up, unforeseen risks appear, and all of a sudden, the strategic account plan goes off course.

What are you supposed to do? Well, you can’t just give up on the account – they bring in a considerable portion of your company’s revenues and drive most of the results.

You can’t just continue doing the same thing that you’ve always done either as it’s clear it’s time for a new game plan. Luckily, account plans aren’t meant to remain stagnant, and nothing should be set in stone except for your commitment to your strategic accounts.

So, with your customer calling and the phone ringing off the hook, it’s time to think fast and come up with some creative solutions, a process we know as level-setting. Today, we want to cover a few tips to help you get the account back on track with minimal disruption while achieving even better results in the end.

Refresh Their Memory

While things might seem like they are way off track in the present, you should take time to discuss the original reason they chose to work with your company.

What problem were you helping them solve? What was the original goal of the account plan? What is the pain point that only you and you alone could help them with?

By reminding your strategic account about these points, it not only helps to put everything back in perspective for them, but it also shows your commitment to their success. You didn’t create the account plan for them out of thin air – you spent countless hours talking with them and working through their problems to create a plan you hoped would work.

Refresh their memory and explain how you plan to continue helping them solve these challenges moving forward. You just need to update the account plan.

Re-Establish Accountability

Now that things have gone off course and you’re showing that you’re committed to their success, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Simply saying that you care about their success isn’t enough. That’s what you said last time, and now the account has gone off course.

Instead, you need to re-establish accountability points. Specifically, you want to put these accountability points in the areas that had the most trouble recently as they have the greatest potential of causing more problems down the line.

Being more accountable can be easier said than done in many cases, but we dedicated an entire article in the past to it. To learn more about being accountable as a strategic account manager, check out our blog post here.

Be Up Front with Them

An essential part of strategic account management is being responsible and honest with your strategic accounts. You can’t be their trusted advisor and partner in their success if you aren’t forthcoming with crucial information related to their account.

Although it can seem tempting to sweep some things under the rug as “non-issues,” these non-issues are likely the cause of the current account struggles. Although it might not be what your client wants to hear after the account plan has gone off-course, you should tell them everything that they need to know and then maybe a little bit more.

In most cases, we like to leave some things in the dark so we can easily exceed the client’s expectations, but in this case, you need to be as open and honest as possible in hopes to win them back on your side and earn their trust back if it has been lost.

Let your strategic account know about anything that might be slipping through the cracks along with the measures that you’ve put in place to be more accountable and ensure that the correct information goes to the right person the first time without any disruption to the account and the client’s ultimate goals.

Has anything changed?

In many cases, the root cause of an account plan going off the rails is because of changes. Objectives change, the people working on the account change, and other issues can mean you need to update the game plan.

Remember, your account plans should never be concrete and set in stone. Instead, you should be able to take a digital eraser to the plan and make adjustments as needed. You can’t be expected to know of these changes the second that they happen, so it’s up to you to have the client communicate these changes to you.

So, at the moment, you’ll need to ask the client about any changes you need to know about. No matter if the changes are big or small, just as it’s essential that you’re open and honest with your clients, it’s crucial that they are sharing valuable information with you as well.

Find out if these changes require an account plan update, and make sure that the changes are still leading to the ultimate goal you set at the start of the account, so you’re not going off course even more.

Get a New Plan

Now that you’ve set the levels for this account and have gone through every possible angle that caused the disruption, it’s time to get back in the game with a new plan to help overcome the current struggles of the account.

Now, you shouldn’t have to start entirely from scratch in most cases, but you want to update your account plan to reflect any and all changes that have occurred. Keep the ultimate goal the same (unless that changed also) and start from there. You don’t need to go back to square one, but you might need to go to square six or seven.

Don’t be discouraged and get to work! Make sure that you also set accountability measures for both sides of the relationship and put dates on specific milestones as well. From there, continue working diligently, as usual, to ensure both of your organizations reach the end goal.

Fundamentals of Leading a Strategic Account Management Team to Success

February 4, 2019/in Strategic Account Management /by Lesley Poladsky

Leading a team comes naturally to some, while other future leaders need some coaching. No matter which camp you fall in, becoming an effective leader and achieving success with your team can be a challenge.

No matter if you’re Bill Belichick or Erik Spoelstra, all coaches follow a set of fundamentals to get their team motivated, skilled, and ready to win a championship.

Today, we want to cover some of the basic fundamentals to help you lead a team to Strategic Account success. Remember, there are multiple players on the Strategic Account Management team, each with their own position and role within the account. Coordinating with these different players to make them work together is typically the first step, and what follows are these fundamentals.

Practice Makes Perfect

Before you can start winning championships, you need to make sure that everyone is good at their role. As the leader of the SAM team, you should be more than familiar with the duties and responsibilities of each player and should know the essential skills each person should have.

Education and training are essential to ensure that your team members are the best that they can be. Education and practice are ongoing exercises. You can’t teach someone something once and then call it good. Things change, and the world of SAM is a fast-moving industry. You need to make sure that your team is up to date on the latest trends and changes within your organization.

Also, education and training are more than just building skills. You should also prime their mindset. You want a team that is excited to work and ready to win. If your team is fine being mediocre and doesn’t have genuine excitement to create value and conquer the clients’ goals and expectations, you’ll have a hard time achieving much success.

You don’t need to give locker room pep talks, but you should still encourage each person to grow and incentivize them to become better.

Eyes on the Prize

Having a good team is one thing, but your role as the leader is the lead them. You can’t be happy just being good, but you should have a clear vision of what success looks like for your organization with clear goals that the team needs to reach.

You need to have a focused direction for the team to follow. Otherwise, you might waste time, energy, and resources pursuing the wrong goals, or, even worse, you won’t move anywhere. Make sure that you clearly dictate this path and direction to your team rather than keeping it as a secret plan only you can know.

Make a Game Plan

Moving on from the last point, with your clear direction and goal, it’s now to put pen to paper (or curser to spreadsheet) and create a roadmap to success. This roadmap should feature clear, detailed milestones, so you know that the team is on the right path and making progress towards the ultimate win.

Each plan will look different depending on how many people are on the team and what your SAM strategy is. Either way, make sure that your plan tells a clear story and is easy to understand for all of the team members. The clearer it is, the easier the small steps to reach the goal will be.

If you struggle to put your ideas down, using a tool like Kapta, you can access predetermined roadmaps and account templates, so you don’t have to start from scratch. Instead, you can just fill in the blanks and get moving.

Assemble the Team and Gather Your Gear

Now that you’ve motivated your team members and created a clear, detailed roadmap towards success, the next step is to evaluate and determine the necessary resources to make your goals a reality.

Every organization will have different resources. While one company will have a tech support team of 20 people, another might just have two dedicated support technicians. This varies across the board, so you’ll need to take a look at all of the people and resources you have at your disposal and find a way to maximize efficiency and improve the effectiveness of every department.

The critical thing to note here is that you don’t want to stretch any department too thin. Instead, you want everyone to have just enough responsibilities that they’re helping the team move forward as fast as possible, while also not overloading them, leading to avoidable mistakes and bottlenecks.

Work closely with every team to determine their capabilities and skillset, so you’re putting everyone in the right place. Think of your team like a well-oiled machine working in beautiful harmony to smash through goals rather than a group of individuals doing their own thing.

Create Momentum

SAM is a long-term game that lasts longer than four quarters or three periods. Reaching your goals could take years depending on how large they are. Even so, the most important thing to help you achieve these goals is to create momentum for the entire team.

A crucial part of creating momentum means that you celebrate every win, no matter how big or small it is. In fact, we’ve found that celebrating the small victories can help more in the long-run.

Small wins are more frequent, and by celebrating and acknowledging them, you’re showing the team that you care about their day to day work, and showing them that they are making a difference. Any game will have ups and downs, so building this momentum during a slow period of growth is crucial to keep the team and individual morale high.

Fill in the Gaps

Finally, you should continue to coach and build the skill set of your team members. Be proactive as a leader and look for small areas of improvement. Even just changing a little thing can have a significant impact on the bigger picture of your team and their progress. Coach around the gaps, and pretty soon you’ll have a water-tight team that is 100% lean, mean, and efficient.

How Kapta Can Help

Keeping everyone organized and maintaining focus on the goals and milestones of your account can be tricky when using basic software. Choose a SAM platform designed specifically for SAM and request a free demo of Kapta today.

How Mature Are Your Strategic Account Management Processes?

January 31, 2019/in Strategic Account Management /by Alex Raymond

Strategic account management (SAM) is a complex topic. Although it can feel intuitive to many people and to smaller teams, there is need for an established, mature SAM process. If you don’t regularly check up on your progress, it’s easy to get too confident in a process that cold actually use improvement.

From our experience at Kapta, many SAM team leaders tend to be overconfident in how good they are at SAM. Some of this comes from seeing success in the existing framework. However, successful results don’t prove that your process is mature. Having a strong Strategic account management process help you achieve your full potential as a team, beyond the initial success you may experience already.

Diagnosing Your SAM Process

You can ask yourself a number of questions to get a better handle on how well you’re doing at strategic account management. Use these questions to help diagnose the reality of your SAM situation.

Is the process formal?

When you’re just starting out, or if you’re a small team that’s very comfortable together, it’s easy to operate without a formal process. However, the process must be formalized as you mature in practicing strategic account management.

Formal processes lay out the entire process in a recognizable pattern. As you formalize it, the process should be written out from start to finish. You should be able to define each part of the process and in what general order you go through it. Having your SAM process written down is a good sign of process maturity, because it shows a high level of operational consistency and accountability.

Is the process repeatable?

Part of maturity in a process is the ability to pass through it over and over again. Your SAM process should be easily repeatable with every key account customer. It will be difficult for you to keep track of analytics, measure your success, or fully understand your customers if you don’t have a mature process that you can follow through with consistently.

Repeatable processes establish a more definite customer lifecycle. You’ll have a better understanding of where a customer account is in comparison to another, and you’ll be able to monitor their progress more easily.

Does your team accurately use the process?

The strength of the process will have an effect on how strongly your team follows through with it. An immature process can be difficult for your team to follow properly. If the process is in any way unclear, is not straightforward, or is inaccurate to the true lifecycle of your key account customers, your team will have a difficult time going through it without tweaking it each time.

Another problem that an immature process has for teams is the tendency for people within the team to interpret steps differently. If each person is doing things a little differently, there can be dramatic differences in the customer experience and the overall results. That’s not to say that every client is treated the same way, because KAM demands a high level of customization. However, your SAM process does not need to be included in that customization. It should be a solid, understood process with wiggle room at each step for every individual client.

How easy is it to train a new team member?

It’s hard to say that something is really understood unless you’re able to teach it to others. New team members must be taught how things should go. When it come time for them to learn your SAM process, having difficulty teaching them is a problem. It should be relatively easy to teach the process. Whether the process is complex or not doesn’t have much impact on how easy it is to teach someone how to follow it.

Complexity is okay, as long as you thoroughly understand what’s going on and you’re fully capable of training new team members on how it goes. No one should be left confused after they finish learning about your process.

Can you quickly tell where a customer is in the process?

When you have a matured SAM process, you should be able to fit your customers comfortably into some part of it. Ideally, you should be able to look at your customer profiles and understand where they belong in the process based on that information. It shouldn’t take you a long time to figure out where they belong, because your process should be clearly defined and easy to apply.

Some processes suffer from unnecessary ambiguity and confusing overlap. As you mature the process, these errors should be ironed out and everything should become more straightforward and settled. If you can’t figure out which part of the SAM process your customer is in based on their customer profile information, your process may not be as mature as you think.

Technology Can’t Fix a Broken Process

It’s not uncommon to hear key account managers blaming an immature process on insufficient tech. The argument revolves around the heavy reliance many KAM teams have on software to keep track of what’s happening with and around customers. However, your process is unrelated to the software you’re using. Having a topnotch KAM software will not mature your process for you.

You have to get your process right before you can expect a software to help you out. Whether you’re using Excel spreadsheets or a hardcover notebook, refining your process needs to come before you can fully utilize your tech. No software will help you mature your process. The role of KAM software like Kapta is to make your process more efficient, not to mature it for you.

Establishing Your Process

If you’ve learned today that your strategic account management process isn’t as mature as you thought, or that you still have some room to grow in it, don’t give up hope. You’ll have to put in the work to mature your process. The results will be worth the effort!

Kapta offers a lot of resources for someone in your position. We have learning resources to help you improve your SAM process through greater knowledge and the experience of others. You can also hire a consultant to give you a pair outside eyes that will look at your unique situation and help you figure out how to move forward with your process. SAM groups can also be a valuable asset to you. Groups like SAMA are useful for this particular need.

Maturing your SAM process is up to you and your team. Now that you’ve gotten a “check-up” and you have a better idea how close you are to maturity, it’s time to work at getting your process firmly established.

Creating Alignment with your Biggest Customers

January 27, 2019/in Strategic Account Management /by Lesley Poladsky

When it comes to any relationship in your life, no matter how big or small it is or who the relationship is with, you always want to be on the same page.

Being on the same page with someone means that you understand where they’re coming from, and you share the same ideas and values. By being on the same page, you can accomplish more, and strengthen the relationship by accomplishing things together.

When working in strategic account management, the relationship is everything, and being on the same page is basically the same things as creating alignment with your customers. This alignment shows that your two organizations are connected in more ways than one and that you’re both ready to accomplish the same goals to reach mutual success.

Creating this type of alignment can be a challenge for some, and when working with your biggest clients, creating alignment becomes even more critical to the success of the account.

Today, we want to take a look at a few of the ways that you can create alignment with your biggest customers. Every case will be different, and your clients are bound to be different than other vendors’. These same principles ring true, so make sure to take notes.

Match Your Needs

The first step to creating alignment with your most significant accounts is to find ways to relate.

The best way to match your needs with theirs is to relate them to the unique solutions, products, and services that you have to offer.

The needs that you meet should be unique to the client and directly relate to a problem that they face as an organization. Sure, your products and services are probably relatively universal, but to align with your most significant strategic accounts, you need to speak directly to them.

Finding out these needs can be a challenge if you don’t know where to start, but we’ve found that conducting a Voice of Customer interview works well. Also, because we’re talking about your biggest, baddest, most significant strategic account, you should already have a good idea of the challenges their organization is facing.

Find ways to fit your products to the specific and identifiable needs of your client, and you’re already getting closer to alignment.

What’s the advantage of working with you?

Every company, no matter if they’re selling moving trucks, sandwich bags, SAM software, or gold-plated watch bands, has a unique advantage. This advantage is the reason that customer chooses to work with them over competitors, and this unique value proposition is what keeps their customers around.

Do you know what the advantages of your organization are? Why do strategic accounts choose to work with you over the other guys?

Is it because you offer products and services at an affordable price? Is it because you provide premium services that are worth the extra cost? Is it because you have a great tech support team?

Whatever the case may be, you want to communicate and reinforce this competitive advantage to your customers to remind them why they chose to work with you in the first place.

This isn’t to say that you’re forceful, but instead, you talk about their current goals, needs, and problems and then relate how your organization is the perfect match to help solve their current challenges and reach mutual success.

Your competitive advantage can also be your client’s competitive advantage. After all, the point of aligning with your customer is to create common ground. Show them how both of your organizations make the ultimate super team, ready to defeat all of your respective competitors.

Look for the Win-Win

Moving on from that last point, one of the core tenants of SAM and customer success is to create the ideal win-win situation for both sides of the relationship. You should always be on the lookout for new ways to benefit one another, and it starts with you helping your client.

We recommend that you sit down with your client and go over all of their goals and ideas for the future. Have them define their view of success for you, so you know exactly what they want in the long-run.

Discuss how you can create the ultimate winning partnership with their company, and align your goals accordingly. Remember, the point of all of this is to get on the same page with your biggest clients. Their wins are your wins and vice versa. If you can effectively communicate this, you can not only build value within the relationship, but they will also start to see as more of a trusted advisor rather than just another vendor pushing useless solutions onto them.

Take a Step Back

Once you’ve done all of the other things on this list, it’s important to remember to take a step back and look at the bigger picture every once in a while. You should reflect on the value that you’re delivering to your customer. How has this made their company more effective and capable of achieving their goals? How has it helped them differentiate themselves from their competitors?

Reflecting on this value is the opportunity to pat yourself on the back but don’t get too excited – you can always do more.

In fact, reflecting on the value that you’re not delivering your customers can be even more enlightening than focusing on what you’ve done. Complacency breeds mediocrity, so you should always strive to do more and keep the momentum moving forward.

Sometimes just taking a step back and looking at your significant accounts from a bird’s eye view can reveal weak spots and missing pieces. Make a note of these and come prepared to fix them during your next interview with the customer.

How Kapta Can Help

Delivering value and aligning yourself with your customers can practically be a full-time job. If you’re stuck in spreadsheets and doing tedious work for most of the day, you’re missing precious opportunities to build value within your strategic accounts!

Kapta is the SAM platform designed and used by SAMs. See how it can change your workflow and improve your relationships by requesting your free demo of the software today!

Getting to Know Your Customers

January 21, 2019/in Key Account Management, Strategic Account Management /by Lesley Poladsky

Getting to know someone is always the first step of a long and prosperous relationship. While it’s not always everyone’s favorite part, it’s a necessary component of kicking the relationship off to a good start and moving forward from there.

To be successful in the strategic account management game, you should know your accounts inside and out. By familiarizing yourself with your customers, you can find solutions for their problems, strengthen the relationship, and put yourself one step closer to becoming their Trusted Advisor and partner in their success.

Familiarizing yourself with your customers can seem tricky at first, and you definitely don’t want to ask nothing more than generic “getting to know you” questions.

Today, we’re going to cover some tips and tricks to help you get the ball rolling and become more familiar with your new (or old) strategic accounts.

Who do they know?

Frequently, we see that some account managers are more concerned with the account themselves rather than the other players in their circle. While it’s true that your work is for the strategic account, you should also expand your knowledge beyond.

They say that you can learn a lot about a person through their friends, and the same is true in the business world. To better familiarize yourself with your customers, you should learn more about their partners. What other businesses do they work with? Who are their industry friends?

By learning about the organization’s friends, you can then start to learn more about what makes their company tick. You can determine why they choose to work with certain brands and it will also reveal much about why they decided to work with you.

Also, you want to know more about their enemies as well. Who are their main competitors? If you’re going to create an account plan that puts them over the top and consistently exceeds their expectations, you should know who you’re up against.

Get to know their competition, and you’ll start to learn about the external struggles their organization is facing.

What do people think of them?

Much like you can tell a lot about a person by the people that they chose to hang out with, you can also learn a great deal from what other people are saying too.

While you’re in the first stages of the relationship, you should learn more about how their company is viewed within their respective industry. Learning more about this can go either way – either they’re universally loved, hated, kind of liked, or in between.

No matter what the result is, you’ll be able to develop a game plan to help achieve their goals with full knowledge of their perception within their industry.

You can ask the client directly, but we’ve found that doing some secondary research online can be a great way to learn more. You’ll get an unbiased opinion, and might even be able to tell your client information about their company’s perception they had not considered before.

How do they do business?

Every business will do things differently, and to ensure that you’re working with them in a way that helps them become more efficient, you should know more about their processes.

Specifically, you should learn more about their buying processes. How do they make decisions? What makes them purchase a product or service? Also, you need to learn about their cycles so you can know when they’re more likely to buy from your company and when they won’t.

This type of information isn’t usually readily available online, so make sure to ask them at some point while you’re establishing the account. As you work with multiple strategic accounts and become familiar with each’s buying process, you can better plan your proposed solutions around these cycles.

Their Definition of Success

Although “success” is a term that most people are familiar with, in the strategic account management world, the term is subjective. That’s a good thing for us because, with an accurate definition from the client, we can then tailor our account plan to help them reach their ultimate goal.

Some organizations might view success as a monetary achievement, while others can see it as reaching a service milestone. Whatever the case may be for your client, to better familiarize yourself with their organization, you should find out their definition of success.

There are two parts to this step. You want to know what success means for their organization as well as the personal definition for your contact. Keep in mind that SAM is about making your contact the Office Hero.

You want to provide them with solutions that they’re so excited about, that they tell everyone in the office because it can improve their image. Ask them what the best case scenario for this project would be and take notes for your account plan.

What can you teach them?

Although this blog post is focused on learning more about the account, it can go both ways. The more that your client can learn about their organization, the better. So, you should remain honest and open with the client about any new information that you learn about their organization or their industry as a whole.

This will help not only educate them and raise awareness for areas for improvement, but it also works to improve the relationship from the start.

What are their expectations? How can you exceed them?

Finally, you need to set expectations for the account. Ask them what they desire the most from this project and what they need from you. They can’t accomplish their goals on their own, after all, they wouldn’t be working with you, so you should be ready, willing, and able to not only meet their expectations but consistently exceed them.

Ask how you could “wow” them through your support, services, and products, and then make a note in your account plan.

How Kapta Can Help

Once you’ve done your preliminary research, it’s time to get start accomplishing their goals! Using Kapta, you can easily create an account plan using one of our templates or one of your own, and easily manage multiple accounts without getting bogged down in the technical details.

To see how Kapta can improve your accounts, request your free demo today.

5 Questions To Ask When Starting A Strategic Account Plan

January 10, 2019/in Strategic Account Management /by Lesley Poladsky

If you don’t have a plan, you plan to fail. This phrase is used a little too much in everyday life, but it’s a cliché for a reason. Planning means that you have looked at every corner of a situation and have figured out the correct path to take to victory.

In strategic account management, it’s crucial that you plan, and luckily, account plans are relatively easy to create when using a tool like Kapta.

The thing is, our templates can only help you organize the information, but it’s on you to ask the right questions to make sure that you’ve covered all of the bases. Miss a couple of steps or fail to identify specific risks and you can move the goal post even further down the line, upsetting your account and slowing down your progress.

Today, we’re going to take a look at the five questions you should ask at the start of a relationship with a client while you’re in the account-planning phase. If you can get clear, direct answers to these questions, you’re already a few steps ahead of the competition.

“What challenges, internally and externally, are threatening your success?”

Every organization faces their own set of unique challenges and issues, and as the SAM for their account, it’s on you to know them inside and out.

Whether the challenges are internal within the client’s organization or external market forces, you should know what they fear the most. You essentially want to know what keeps them up at night.

Some clients might be more reluctant to admit their company has challenges, hoping that if they ignore them, they’ll go away.

They won’t.

Luckily, they’re working with your organization, and you offer the perfect solution to solve their problems. The thing is, you can’t know which solution to provide them with if you don’t know the problem that you’re trying to solve.

Find out what scares your client, and you can be the hero that scares their boogeyman away.

“How are you perceived within your industry?”

Sometimes we can get caught up looking at everyone else, that we forget to look in the mirror. Before you start creating the account plan for your client, we recommend that you have them engage in a little bit of self-examination.

One of the most important things that you can learn about your client’s organization is how they are perceived within their own industry. Chances are you are not as much of an expert about their industry as they are, so they should be able to provide you with some more insight into their position.

Are they seen as the cheap company? Are they recognized as leaders of innovation? By understanding their unique position within their competitive landscape, you’ll be able to plan for unforeseen risks while also identifying new and exciting opportunities that they might not have considered. Tools like SWOT analysis are helpful here. And by providing solutions for both, you’ll be one step closer to becoming their Trusted Advisor.

“What is your organization’s history?”

As the saying goes, history repeats itself, and the more that you can learn about the past of your client’s organization, the more you can do to ensure their future is brighter.

We’ve found that you should start this as a broad general question, but then follow up with more targeted questions about their past.

Also, you’re not looking for basic answers that you could just find on the company website (i.e., when they were founded, who the CEO is, etc.). Instead, you want to know more about areas they have struggled in the past. How did they overcome these challenges? Are they afraid of making this same mistake again?

Also, you should also learn more about their past successes so you can provide repeat results. How did they succeed? What did they do to enable the result?

Once you learn more about the organization’s history, you can start to provide unique solutions to build their future.

“What is your definition of success?”

“Success” might seem like a universal term that means the same to everybody across the board, but we’ve found in our experience that different organizations will have a different definition. For this reason, before we create the account plan for any strategic account, we like to make sure that we’re on the same page.

For example, one client might think that reducing their churn rate by 20% is the ultimate success while another might be more concerned with the revenue growth for the year. Everyone will have a different metric, and it’s crucial that you know how you’ll ultimately be judged.

“What is your ultimate goal within the industry?”

Finally, you want to know what the end goal is. How will you know that you will provide them with a win within their organization, catapulting them to the top of the rankings above their competition?

Finding out your strategic account’s ultimate goal will give you an endpoint for the account plan. Keep in mind, that account plans are living, breathing documents that you should update on a semi-regular basis. The goal post will always move, but as you start tackling objectives and hitting milestones in the account, you’ll be one step closer towards reaching ultimate success for them.

Additionally, you should also ask to learn more about their value proposition. What makes them different? Why do customers choose them over the other guys? If you can determine their unique value proposition, then you can come up with solutions that will help them sell more and create more value for their customers.

How Kapta Can Help

Now that you’ve got the hard questions out of the way, you’re ready to create a thorough, winning account plan that you can follow for the rest of the life of the account. We hope you weren’t planning on starting from scratch, were you?

With Kapta, you can use one of our many account plan templates to simply fill in the blanks and get started. To see how Kapta can improve your account plans, request a free demo today.

Meeting Existing Customers for the First Time

When the Account Notes are Bare Bones…

Start, Stop, Continue

Start:

Stop:

Continue:

Conclusion:

Learn Their Story

Ask The Question

1) Where do they struggle now?

2) Where will they struggle soon?

3) What about individual struggles?

How can we win?

Value for Their Customers

The Customer’s Customer

Summary

How Kapta Can Help

1) New Customer Onboarding

2) Escalation of Use or Technical Issues

3) Renewals and Upsells

4) Customer Reference Call

Final Thoughts

How Kapta Can Help

1) Be Up Front With Them

2) Establish the Process

3) Anticipate the Unexpected

4) Be Transparent in Success and Failure

How Kapta Can Help

Refresh Their Memory

Re-Establish Accountability

Be Up Front with Them

Has anything changed?

Get a New Plan

Practice Makes Perfect

Eyes on the Prize

Make a Game Plan

Assemble the Team and Gather Your Gear

Create Momentum

Fill in the Gaps

How Kapta Can Help

Diagnosing Your SAM Process

Is the process formal?

Is the process repeatable?

Does your team accurately use the process?

How easy is it to train a new team member?

Can you quickly tell where a customer is in the process?

Technology Can’t Fix a Broken Process

Establishing Your Process

Match Your Needs

What’s the advantage of working with you?

Look for the Win-Win

Take a Step Back

How Kapta Can Help

Who do they know?

What do people think of them?

How do they do business?

Their Definition of Success

What can you teach them?

What are their expectations? How can you exceed them?

How Kapta Can Help

“What challenges, internally and externally, are threatening your success?”

“How are you perceived within your industry?”

“What is your organization’s history?”

“What is your definition of success?”

“What is your ultimate goal within the industry?”

How Kapta Can Help

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