Strategic Account Management Trends for 2019
As 2018 is closing, it’s time to reflect on your successes…
January 3, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyNew Year’s Resolutions for Strategic Account Managers
You may have your own personal resolutions set for the coming…
December 31, 2018/by Lesley PoladskyAre You Prepared for the 2019 Recession?
Surviving what might be the toughest year in living economic…
December 26, 2018/by Alex RaymondWhy Your CRM Isn’t Enough for Successful Key Account Management
A company can grow in one of two ways. It can add new customers…
December 19, 2018/by Alex RaymondWhat We Learned About Strategic Account Management In 2018
As 2019 fast approaches and 2018 starts to look like a distant…
December 17, 2018/by Alex Raymond4 Keys to Enhancing Relationships with Your SAM Contacts
In the strategic account management game, relationships are everything.…
December 13, 2018/by Lesley PoladskyQuick Summary of the CSO Insights 2018-2019 Sales Performance Survey
CSO Insights (part of Miller Heiman) just released their 2018-2019…
December 11, 2018/by Alex RaymondHow To Get Funding And Resources For Your Strategic Account Management Program In 2019
As we look ahead to 2019, you’re probably already making your…
December 10, 2018/by Alex RaymondInvesting Intelligently in your Strategic Account Organization
I had a wonderful experience connecting with everyone at KAMCon…
December 6, 2018/by Denise FreierThink You’re Ready for Strategic Account Management Software? Here’s how to find out.
As a culture, we're always going after the next shiny new thing.…
December 3, 2018/by Lesley PoladskyThe Balanced Strategic Account Team
In the age of big superhero blockbuster films coming out seemingly…
November 29, 2018/by Alex RaymondWhy Change Management Matters in Strategic Account Management Software Deployments
Strategic Account Management (SAM) software can help you up your…
November 26, 2018/by Lesley PoladskyCategories
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Kapta is an enterprise Key Account Management platform designed for the accounts that matter most. Kapta powers trusted relationships between key account managers and customers through the use of joint success plans and clear expectations.
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Fundamentals of Leading a Strategic Account Management Team to Success
/in Strategic Account Management /by Lesley PoladskyLeading 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?
/in Strategic Account Management /by Alex RaymondStrategic 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
/in Strategic Account Management /by Lesley PoladskyWhen 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!