The Software is Just the Start: How to Kick your B2B Customer Engagement into High Gear
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January 21, 2019/by Lesley PoladskyCategories
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Account Managers: Did You Hit Your Q1 Goals?
/in Key Account Management /by Alex RaymondIt’s the first day of Q2, so it’s a good time to look back at Q1 and see what happened with your key accounts. To give yourself a Key Account Management (KAM) checkup, ask a few questions about what happened with your company in Q1.
You had goals that you set at the beginning of last year. By the end of March, did you manage to reach those goals? How did you do on a monthly or quarterly basis? Were there any quarters that outperformed or underperformed compared to expectations?
Beyond the over-arching goals, how did your team perform on quotas? Did you attain the quotas you had set for yourself? On a quarterly or monthly basis, did you keep up with the quotas?
Evaluating Your Efforts
Based on your responses to the questions above, you’ll have a few different ways to proceed. You need to ask yourself why you succeeded, or why you didn’t manage to reach goals or attain quotas.
Why You Succeeded
Congratulations on reaching your goals or quotas! Now, prepare yourself to do better. Set yourself up for success. Don’t try to increase your expectations to unattainable highs, but set a reasonable new goal to hit in 2019. Look at what you did that led to your good performance last year and try to emulate it again or enhance it to do even more.
Make sure you didn’t set the bar too low for you and your team. If you outperformed your goals or quotas by a substantial amount, you should reconsider whatever made you set those particular goals. Don’t underestimate a strong team. If they can blow your goals out of the water in one year, make sure you’re giving them a suitable challenge to live up to next year.
Why Didn’t You Succeed?
If you’re on the opposite end of the equation and you didn’t manage to reach your goals or quotas for the year, why not? What got in your way that kept you from meeting your expectations? Was it a problem with the goal you set or did you run into trouble doing all the necessary steps to make sure you succeeded in Q1?
Break down your performance to monthly and quarterly snapshots. Where did the problems occur? Were they chronic failures throughout the year, or was there a specific area that stood out as your worst performing time that dragged the rest of the year down? Knowing where you went wrong is an important part of turning it around next year.
Meeting Your Goals
Make sure you’re putting yourself on the right path to get to where you want to be at the end of the year. Here are a few things to focus on that will help you get better results this quarter than you did last quarter:
Be strategic and proactive
Wherever possible, improve your strategic actions and proactivity. Think about every possible outcome, potential challenges ahead, and opportunities that exist in your industry or that of your customers. Look ahead to create a detailed plan that will help you reach your success.
Proactively tackle problems and approach challenges. Don’t put off anything until later. If you can prepare to cross the bridge before you come to it, you’ll be more likely to reach your goals at the end of the year. It’s better to be ready to act than to be surprised by something and to throw together a response in limited time.
Build trusted partnerships
Part of the responsibility of the KAM department is advancing relationships with the most strategic customer accounts. If you don’t have these accounts in your sites already, determine them now and get ready to step up your game.
You want to work towards being a strategic partner whenever possible. Stronger relationships with key account customers can only lead to better and more consistent results. Keep your team focused on providing the highest level of value possible to get you into your customers’ inner circles.
Work your KAM process [Put in the effort, you will see results]
KAM is a process. You can’t get immediate results. There is no instant gratification. Make sure you have a fantastic process, then follow that process until it brings you closer to success. Refine your process as needed, but learn to trust that your hard work is going to pay off.
KAM always requires effort. It will likely feel disproportionate to the benefits at first because you won’t be able to see the success until later. Put in the work now and trust that if you’ve got a good process, you’ll get good results. You will see the fruit of your efforts, but only if you keep at it and don’t give up!
Knowing this, what else can you do to make Q2 more successful than Q1? Even if you had a great year, there’s always room for improvement.
Let’s take a look at the data and insights available from Q1 to see what mattered most in B2B sales and how it may affect your Q2 performance.
CSO Insights Sales Performance Survey Highlights
Miller Heiman Group released the 2018-2019 CSO Insights report on sales performance. It sums up changing market conditions and talks about the state of sales in the current market, including what successful companies did better than unsuccessful companies. We have a short summary here.
Three key characteristics were mentioned in connection to more successful selling. These are all three directly related to key account management:
Average Win Rates
Data suggests that out of forecasted opportunities, only an average of 47.3% became wins. However, this is the average of all companies participating in the survey. Within this statistic, there is a large variation between the best and worst performing companies.
Win Rates and Customer Relationships
Win rates varied dramatically based on the relationship a company had with its customers. Those who were at the earliest stages of customer relationship as approved vendors saw an average win rate of 39.5% while trusted partners saw an incredible win rate of 59.9% on average. Trusted partners experienced a sales win rate that was more than 50% higher than approved vendors.
There is a clear difference in win rates between approved vendors and every other higher level of customer relationship. Trusted partners also saw much higher win rates than the recorded average. This demonstrates a strong connection between the strength of customer relationships and success rates for B2B companies.
Win Rates and Account Planning
The same report shows another connection between win rates and the strength of account planning in each company. Quota attainment and win rates were consistently higher the better the account planning process was.
For those companies that recorded a need for a major redesign in their process, win rates were as low as 43.9% while quota attainment was at 47.4%. On the opposite end, those companies that said their account planning exceeded expectations recorded win rates of 58.8% and quota attainment of 62% on average. This means that stronger account planning led to 33% high win rates and 30% high quota attainment rates.
Win Rates and Confidence in Providing Clients with Insights and Perspectives
Those companies who exceeded their expectations in providing their clients with insights and perspectives experienced an average win rate of 55.2%. Companies who said they needed a major redesign in this area recorded win rates of only 40.2%.
Part of being a strategic partner is sharing data, observations, and information with your customers. If you’re unable to do this confidently, you’re unlikely to be able to grow your relationship past a certain point. This is a value-packed step in your KAM process.
Applying the Data to Your Organization
The data is clear. Companies with strong customer relationships, confidence in providing extra value to their customers, and a great account planning process experience more wins than companies without those qualities. If you want Q2 to be a better quarter than Q1 in terms of wins and quota attainment, refine your KAM process to put this new information into action.
Focus on building stronger relationships with your customers first. Companies who acted as trusted partners experienced a much higher win rate on average than those who did not. This was one of the single largest factors affecting win rates between different companies.
As you work to build relationships, step out and increase the value you’re providing to your customers. This should include building your confidence in giving insights and perspectives to your customers. Add this as a step in your account planning process, which should also be refined until it’s working like a well-oiled machine. Your team should be satisfied that your account planning method will lead to success.
Conclusion
It’s worth the effort to build strategic partnerships with your customers. The data supports this, and now your KAM process needs to reflect it too. Set yourself up for a successful quarter and year ahead by focusing on what actually matters to your bottom line.
How Do You Co-Create Customer Value?
/in Key Account Management /by Alex RaymondImagine a partnership with your customers where both of you are accomplishing your goals and getting what you want. Is it idealistic? Maybe. But it’s also the goal to strive for in every B2B key account relationship.
Creating a Win-Win
Set the bar high. Look for win-win scenarios with your customers by seeking out opportunities to create value for them. The holy grail of all business relationships is when both parties are benefitting from it. Through your negotiations, relationship building, and deal-making, that’s what you need to keep in mind.
It’s not enough to focus on the value the deal will create for you. If you focus too much energy on getting the best deal for your company, you may inadvertently drive your customers to other suppliers. By looking for solutions that bring as much value as possible to each party, you’ll be able to build a stronger partnership. Demonstrate your commitment to creating value for your customers.
How You Work Towards Mutual Benefit
Co-creation is a term that’s mostly used in a B2C context, but it’s got amazing potential for B2B companies as well. Through strong, strategic partnerships you can actually work directly with your customers to create value.
Instead of presenting them with a cookie-cutter solution, value co-creation involves bringing them into the value creation process to come up with unique solutions together with you. This way, they’re fully represented in the value creation process, so their goals and needs will be addressed at every step.
Co-creation gives you and your customer the opportunity to work together to find solutions that provide the most benefit for each of you. Rather than counting on your team to find solutions that are perfect for every customer, seek out the customer input from the beginning to make sure you get it right.
Because of the high level of collaboration needed to make this work, you should reserve it only for your key accounts. The benefits for both sides will be worth the effort put into making the collaboration happen.
Defining Value Co-Creation
Every customer has their own problems, opportunities, wants, and needs (POWNs). When these are addressed individually, you can help them to reach their goals more effectively. Co-creation is the process of working together with your customers to come up with a solution that takes into account their POWNs along with what you can feasibly offer.
Instead of giving out set solutions, work with your key account customers to create the solutions. What you end up with will be a product or service that’s tailored to fit your customers’ individual circumstances more easily. Your co-created solution will be:
Unique
Working alongside your customers will produce a unique product or service. It can vary a lot from what you regularly offer, though you do need to stick to your core competency and should not stray into something you can’t do well.
Use your strengths to compensate for the challenges and weaknesses your customers face. Complement your customer’s strengths with the right mix to help them get all the value they can from your solution. Take what they give you and make it work with what you already have, to produce a result that you didn’t have before and you don’t normally offer. It should be custom made for that customer and tailored to their specific needs.
Attentive
Co-creation involves you working closely with your customer. Don’t wait until they tell you all the things they need. Bring your data into the equation too. Your customers may not have all the pieces of the puzzle, and they may not know exactly what they need from you to get closer to their goals.
Paying closer attention makes your co-created solution better. This is something you should be doing for your key account customers even if you’re not co-creating with them. But, when you’re working closely with your customers in this context, your solution will end up being well-suited to both their open needs and their hidden needs.
Goal-Focused
The end result of co-creating is a product or service that’s made specifically to help your customers achieve their goals. It’s custom-fitted to help them solve problems, tailored to enhance their strengths, and laser-focused on getting the right results.
From the beginning of the process, customer goals should be clearly known by everyone involved in the project. To produce something that’s going to make it easier for your customer to achieve their goal, you need to know that goal inside and out. Break down the goal and understand what’s needed to make it happen, then work your solution around that.
Mutually Beneficial
There would be no reason to approach co-creation unless it would benefit both parties. Research suggests that co-creation does just that, despite concerns from many B2B companies that the process takes away some of the benefit for them. Companies more familiar with collaboration, and those who have strong trusted partnerships with clients, will probably be more inclined to co-creation from the beginning.
Co-creation has been shown to give better success rates for services provided by B2B companies to their customers. When the customer is directly involved in building the solution, it’s only natural that they would create something that’s mroe likely to work for them. That means better solutions for your customers without making you go through a long trial and error process.
You benefit from having insight into everything about your customer before crafting their unique solution. They benefit by having a solution that’s focused on fulfilling their needs. The process of co-creation can take a little longer, but it’s generally worth the extra time to get it right.
Goal #1: Help Your Customers Succeed
It’s not an intuitive goal for you, but it works out to your benefit. Your customers are your source of revenue. If you work towards their success, you will also succeed as a result. Help them to succeed first, then your account growth will follow.
By providing a high level of value that helps your customers succeed, you’re actively showing them how important you are. They are likely to continue working with you, and to grow the account where possible, if you can continually demonstrate your commitment to their success.
Communicating Your Mission
To involve your customer in your process, you need to define clear parameters for them. Be open and transparent with them about what success and failure looks like, and how they can be involved. While they’re taking part in the process, you’re the one who needs to follow through and make it happen at the end of the day.
For that reason, you need to keep an open line of communication. Be honest about mistakes and issues along the way while keeping track of the positive progress as well. From the very beginning, the customer needs to know how the scenario is a win-win, including what your goals are and how they’re wrapped up in your customer’s success.
Why Customer Value Matters
The bottom line is that helping your customers grow gives you a larger revenue source to tap into for your own benefit. It’s cheaper and easier to retain existing customers than to seek out new ones. And, growing your existing account is both easier and generally more profitable than trying to increase your revenues through new customer acquisition.
Key account management is all about customer value. Co-creation is just another way to place the emphasis on customer value and to get as much as possible out of your partnerships. Co-creating with your customers is a strategic move that will help you build stronger partnerships.
More value means more incentive for customers to not only continue working with you, but to grow their account with you. Shoot for the long-term benefits and focus on customer value now. You’ll see the returns in coming years when you have larger key account customers who are strongly invested in their relationship with you.
Transforming Your Client Management is About More than just Software
/in Customer Engagement /by Lesley PoladskyToo often in the client management space, organizations will think that once they get the right software platforms, then and only then will their relationships spring to life with results across the board. The truth is, just like the new driver you’ve been eyeing for a few months, the tool alone won’t improve your results — it’s how you use that tool that will make all of the difference.
So, while you might get the best client management software platform, that’s just the start. If you want to really start driving results and improving the engagement your customers have, you need to implement a few practices, behaviors, and programs into the client management program.
Today, let’s take a look at a few distinct ways that you and your team can take your key account management program up to the next level and really kick your B2B customer engagement into high gear.
Start with a Plan
Just like any great initiative, you need a plan of action that covers all of the bases from the very beginning. Before you even install a new software platform on the office computers, you need to create a plan that covers a few distinct areas.
First, your plan should include software. Having a cutting-edge platform to manage and track your B2B customers is crucial, but it shouldn’t be the only component of your key account management. To make sure you’re doing the right things with your key account management, you should clearly plan for specific actions that account managers will take.
These actions can be situation-specific or just general. Along with these actions, you should set behaviors too, which are the automatic actions your account managers will take such as contacting clients on a semi-weekly basis, tracking their account progress, etc. Along with actions and behaviors, you need to plan for change management.
Implementing new policies and procedures is bound to disrupt some existing company actions, so managing the transition is a must. Finally, once you have your client management program in place and have established the actions, and behaviors of your account managers, reinforcing these principles will help the program stay consistent and deliver real results through customer engagement.
How Will Your Business Transform?
When you put this new plan into place, you should focus not only on the end goal and what this software and key account management program will deliver but you should also focus on the “how” in the equation as well. How do you think that your business will transform? What is the best case scenario and what are some mistakes that you should avoid at all costs?
By planning not only for the success of the platform but also any inadvertent failures, you have a better chance of getting the results you desire. Think specifically about your goals with the program and the metrics that you want to track. Essentially, you want to define success as a specific idea for your organization and your organization alone.
If you’re trying to achieve more connection with your customers, then your emphasis should be on how often your account managers reach out to customers, and the software platform that you select should enable seamless communication across the board. Look for platforms with built-in tools like Voice of customer Insights so you can track how often you speak to customers along with account management features that track every contact in the account, so you know who to speak to for specific questions.
If you want to improve engagement with your customers, your new platform should track the health of the relationship. See when you last spoke to them along with the solutions that you can provide that will enable you to become their Trusted Advisor by delivering real results for their company.
If you want better business results on your end, you should foster a Customer Success program where your account managers are trained to become the Trusted Advisors of their clients, improving not only their results but driving revenue growth for your business as well.
Whatever your goals are, think about how they will transform your business and shift your company culture. Once you have the how nailed down, then you can start going after the what.
Assemble Your Team
Once you have an idea for how your business will adapt, it’s time to assemble your team and coach them to success. Every successful key account management program is made up of highly-skilled individuals that follow specific actions every day to make their customers more successful.
These actions can be voluntary, but more times than not, some of the most important daily tasks are behaviors and automatic in a sense. You can’t install a software platform and expect the program to take care of itself, so having a highly-adept team trained in the art of key account management will ensure that they’re using the tool to achieve results rather than relying on it to show them the way.
Software Does Matter, but It Isn’t Everything
Keep in mind that software is important. Without Word, we’d still be using typewriters to write blog posts. Without Excel, drafting spreadsheets would be a tedious task. Technology isn’t the problem here; it’s how you use it that can be the problem.
You should think of your technology like a screwdriver or a hammer. It’s simply a tool to make the job easier, but it isn’t going to do it all by itself. In essence, it’s just a piece of your client management program, but you should not treat it as the end-all-be-all. Focus on your team and their skills and competencies first, and then how you can better serve your customers. With those things in perspective and at the forefront of the client management program, you’ll have a better chance and driving real results.
How Kapta Can Help
Kapta is a client management software platform that works like the Swiss Army knife of your client management program. It’s an intuitive application that helps your account managers stay on top of their customers without getting in the way or hindering your work. If you want to see how Kapta can elevate your client management efforts, request your free demo today.