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Differentiation Technique: Effective Account Management

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Introduction

Effective account management encompasses many functions within, including, on top of a comprehensive list, three essential skills: Customer Relationship Management, Sales, Negotiation and Back-office/HQ Support Management.  In order to manage your account, you need to be strategic in all these four areas because they represent different goals and very often at different occasions, although not necessarily a set rule.  Therefore, planning every customer encounter becomes the key in developing your account with that customer in order to match your timely targets – Be Strategic!

Good account management also finds its way to market your value you’re adding to your customer in a timely manner, automatically reminding and adding credit to your ‘good deeds’ in your customers’ list of preferred provider and hopefully working you up their ladder of being a trusted partner instead of just a vendor (or price discounter).

Why is providing value so important? Think of it this way, your competition always gets the deals despite the fact that you both do not have a massive portfolio differentiation, you don’t have a huge price difference and neither of you are exceptionally dominating the market trends.  It could just very well be that your competition knows how to differentiate themselves through value-adding!  I define value to the customer as: (a) providing what the customer finds it important, and (b) the customer wants what you’re providing.

Why all this?  Because this is going to bring you, your strategic accounts (your customers) and your company to profitability.  Let’s talk about how:

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Customer Relationship Management

You are most likely the single interface of your customer for your company and for the product or service you’re selling.  You have a main responsibility to grow the account and to sustain high customer satisfaction.  Have you thought about how to pursue the growth of your relationship with your customers?  Do you have a plan?  Who are the resources that you would typically involve internally to ascertain both the customer satisfaction rating high as well as the order rate from your customers?  How are you making sure that your internal colleagues supporting you on this account proactively support you so that you do not have to run after them and be the last one to know about a problem happening at your customers’ site, so as to minimize dissatisfaction and customer complaints?

In fact, when you have a customer (those that purchase your products and services, let’s call them external customers), you automatically have inherited a set of internal customers (those that do the back-office support so you can sell – your colleagues).  How do you satisfy both?  Do you know what both need in order to be happy and get your job done?  If not, then you need to get onto an account management planning process, specifically focused on customer relationships.

Note that if your strategy is to become a vendor to certain customers (for example because you are selling a one-time offering to some and you may hold a portfolio that could be of high turn-over, etc.), then this activity of customer relationship management is best be focused on accounts that you want to develop over a longer term perspective.  Why?  Since this is a strategic function, you’ll need to invest time, budget and effort both on your side and on collaborating with others including internal and external stakeholders of your company.

Valued Goal: Move up the customer relationship ladder from vendor to partner

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Sales Management

Sales is divided into multiple modalities, amongst most common are direct sales (front line), distribution (via partner distributors), e-commerce.  To make them successful and to help them grow as more sales come in, you may want to be prepared to have people that provide you timely support specific to sales (sales support), customer service center, demand planning with supply chain and perhaps even category management from the marketing if you are a consumer oriented brand or into distribution.  In account management, you need to be able to know when to sell and when to ask for orders, you need to know your account inside out and understand not just the need and goals of your customer.  You need also to understand their market strategy and also understand their own customers.  Simply put, you need to plan sales activities!

In my past corporate experience, I had to specialize in selling business-to-business in my global account management position, but what really got me the right deals to close, was the fact that I knew more about my business customers’ customers, who were consumers of their products/services, than my direct customer did.  I would find my way to enable my customer on their strategy to market, and quickly became their most trusted advisor for the knowledge I could contribute that was accurate, my resourcefulness and how efficient I was in making them come up with solutions to their problems.

Most successful account managers spend at least 70% of their time knowing, understanding customer needs through the utilization of smart questioning and listening to their customers (new and existing ones), and doing very little back-office work, because as your accounts grow and develop in number, you will be in a position to build a team that functions synchronously for your accounts that you manage.

Valued Goal: Ascertain orders through providing the relevant benefits to your customers’ true needs relating to improvement of performance or increase of profitability.

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Negotiation Management

Many come to me for a negotiations course for their sales people.  And very often, organizational development training providers do offer sales and negotiations in the same module.  For me, sales and negotiations are absolutely different things.  Negotiating with a customer before attempting to sell properly only means that you’re up for giving up the whole shop before you make a return.

After frequent needs analysis from companies commissioning a negotiations training, I realized that what these sales people need is often a proper sales course, instead!  We often see that sales people give in too easily to the customers’ demands and sometimes such demands do not even represent the highest priority of their needs, so sales people end up providing a lot for free just to get a deal closed, loosing altogether their bargaining power and respect from the customer.  Once this cycle begins with one customer, it will be quite challenging to reverse it as many of the customers are quite proficient also in ‘reading’ sales people’s behavior.

Note that negotiation should only happen when a sale is confirmed (or a purchase intention confirmed by the customer)!  Negotiations take into account the right time, the right purpose and the right mindset.  Again, try planning your negotiations and analyze the true benefits of giving any and multiple concessions to your customer, would it still be a win-win for both: yourself, your company and your customer?  If all of you are not on the same level of win, do you think you can truly develop a partnership?  Be honest to yourself!  Chances are that your customer also wants to deal with someone they can build a longer term trusted partnership with, so the sooner you activate your plan in stepping up to be a partner by behaving like one, the better off all parties concerned will also work towards it.

Valued Goal: Providing planned concession(s) that ascertains you and your customer Win-wins.

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Head Quarters/Back-office Management

Value to your HQ?  When locally you succeed in the account management of your customer, your HQ will provide you the special flexibilities you need, provided you show them your value (results) you have been able to achieve locally with your accounts.  If results take time, then be transparent in your strategic plan in managing your local customer, so you gain valued support you need from the HQ as well as building relationships that have direct resourceful input in developing your accounts.

These internal relationships need to be built based on benefits you provide to the HQ colleagues: information, transparency, collaboration, etc.; i.e. Something that motivates them in supporting you, so this basically means you need to also manage your HQ relationships (your internal customer) as much as you manage your external customer, locally.

I have seen many HQ’s beginning to doubt a local office’s capabilities when it comes back frequently to them with special pricing requests to achieve a single sale.  HQ’s purpose of sustaining a local office is to generate local presence that is seemingly the expert of the local market and (therefore) also an advisor to the foreign HQ office in terms of strategies in dealing with the local market.   A local office’s value depends very much on its sales/account management team’s success and providing creative solutions to the local problems.  So showing the HQ that locally you’re managing your accounts smartly, is the way to differentiate yourself vis-à-vis the other country-subsidiaries.  Why do you care about that?  Because then your HQ will prioritize help for you and your accounts!

Valued Goal: Treat your colleagues as internal customers and build reciprocity.

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Conclusion

We have spoken about external customers (those that purchase your offerings) and internal customer (your colleagues that support you in closing the deals).  In order for strategic accounts to flourish in profits you need to work closely together with both types of customers.  Your value is shown by doing all of the above, but don’t forget one thing: tell them (both internal and external customers) what you have done for them!  If you do not remind them that you have provided value, some customers may not notice and take it for granted.   But before you do that, just make sure that the value you’re giving them is important to them!

Good luck with building a successful account!

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Contact us for a free introductory session or for inquiries.

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New Year, New Goal … Really?

It is year-end and all the organizations are trying to fit in the last deal for this year and securing new customers for next year.  It is also the time to rethink what we did well and what we can do better next year.

Many of my clients come to me and tell me they wish to double, triple and quadruple their sales and revenues.  This is usually the beginning of a journey of uncovering a plan because, as their business coach and strategist, I simply ask:  “How do you plan to do that?”

The dialogue continues and we discover that a plan to achieve that desire of increased revenues has not yet been branched into specifics on essential elements that need to be assessed, for example: staffing, processes, pricing, resource allocation, budget revision, new products/existing products, what the customer is complaining about, and many more.  One of the key factors is to reflect on the rate of customer satisfaction so far and what is (if at all) stopping organizations from gaining repeat business from existing customers and new ones.  In addition, it is absolutely important that we look at the organization’s stakeholder satisfaction so we may also come up with strategic objectives, operating plans for processes, identify the missing capabilities and stakeholder contribution that we will need in order to achieve those desires of increased sales and revenues – The Goal!

So the conversation continues and I am told often times that the sales people are over-commiting or negotiating too early with their customers.  Yes, it’s possible, but the question is: “What is leading them to behave this way, especially when you have just confirmed that they are very capable, have been working in the company for many years and know the products very well?”

As we move along the discussion, I am told that since there was just a decree from the foreign headquarters to increase sales targets, they have no choice but to just work harder and try their best.  What is missing in this picture? – I ask you, the audience!

As a result of the foreign headquarters’ decree, the sales people go out and try to do their best to close deals by building more relationships and also to shorten their sales cycles.  Guess what, they will negotiate more intensively and earlier, often giving up the whole “store” before they can cover their cost of operations; or they begin to intensify on promises they cannot commit to, in order to speed up the velocity of sales, and therefore the closure rate.

This does not stop here!  As a result of frustration with forced negotiations and unlawful promises, most of these sales people are running around with a disbelief that any sales will close soon and the pressure continues, relationships with potential customers deteriorate and sales are decreasing as a result.

Some sales people do not want to continue working in disbelief and will take the next opportunity elsewhere, others continue but with a poor performance and may get to be sent home by the organization.  Friends and colleagues within the organization are watching this and living in uncertainty: some talk to the sales people and wonder if there is a chance to really to succeed in more sales, others are forming informal groups of discussions in their pantries, cigarette breaks and lunch time chatting about the direction of the company, wondering whose fault it is that things are not going as well as before.  Morale is low!  What next?  Even if the salary was good, it is not enough to sustain the personnel that were once a high performing team.

So what was missing apart from the ‘how’ in the foreign headquarters’ goal of targets increase?  Let’s take a step back and see how that same goal could have been communicated differently:

1. Who are the important stakeholders in the local organization and what do they want and need? – Employees, Customers, Government/Authorities, Partners
2. What are the strategies we require to ensure the wants and needs of our stakeholders are satisfied? – Strategic Objectives from All Divisions (Not Just Sales!!!)
3. Are the organization’s demand-fulfillment processes working efficiently and effectively?  And, if not how will we know which sub-components of it are the cause of its inefficiency? – Back Office Support
4. What are the capabilities we require to operate our processes? – Knowledge, Resources, Technologies, Infrastructure

So you see, before rushing to the goal, it is important to take a step back and reflect how well we have been doing first, measure the gap to the new goal and see what else needs to be achieved before committing to a goal or a specific time-line that may be unreasonable.

On the other hand, if an organization is experiencing crisis, then stepping up to a very ambitious goal is unrealistic… this is a situation where a resetting of the corporate status-quo against the market environment needs to be done.

Every year is a new beginning, how well the organizations are prepared to move forward depends on how well you are set up to look into yourselves vis-à-vis your aspirations in your goal setting.  Remember, new goals require new strategies, which means you will also require a certain amount of change in the organization.  In order to prevent chaos, it is important to reflect well on how and who will help you perform the changes in order to experience a less distressful transition and a successful migration to the implementation of attaining the new goal.

Remember, if you are going through major goal revision and changes, a simple training program for your sales people, or for the entire organization, is not enough!  Let alone that it should even not be the first step to take!  If your intuition tells you that you need more than training, listen to it and act on it… people that can help are people that know how to deal with the entire value-chain of the organization, whether internal-employees or external-consultants, this needs a huge team effort and lots’ of senior management buy-in, for starters!… and if you really mean to run a sustainable business then you need a thorough strategic plan with pertinent performance measures that help you look at your organizations’ critical success factors against the status quo and your new goals.

Merry Christmas & Happy 2011 !

This article, by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller, presents food for thought especially for leaders that need to implement change, despite its size.  It discusses nine insights as to how human behavior may get in the way of applying Lawson & Price’s (McKinsey, June 2003) “The Psychology of Change Management” four conditions that bring behavioral change to success: 1) Compelling Sotry; 2) Role Modelling; 3) Reinforcing Mechanisms; 4) Capability Building.  

In short, it is a question of appropriately applying governance and communication in the right time with the right energy without missing the mark.

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_irrational_side_of_change_management_2335

This article, by Robert Sutton, provides an excellent example of organizational behaviors being observed and replayed to their leaders.  There is a general misconception and gap of perception between how leaders look at themselves and how their subordinates perceive them by experiencing their behaviors.  Realizing that organizational pressures in a more competitive environment help to condition leaders’ behaviors and their capacity to be resilient, this article just about sums up some facts in organizations.

Its tips are worthwhile taking into account, simple, short but not necessarily easy to implement… if you are a boss, it’s a test on your ability to do introspection and begin change with yourself so you trigger change from others.

Enjoy the article and good luck!  http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Why_good_bosses_tune_in_to_their_people_2656

Thought Optimization© Defined

After studying numerous researches and literature on how our physiology is built and understanding the power we have in mastering and regulating our thoughts impacting others based on how we feel by the decisions we make and the mood we had when those decisions were made, I realized that all the literature written by such ‘star’ medics, scientists and very intelligent people had one common purpose: to teach us how we can best learn how to control ourselves.  This control is a positive one, in my perspective, out of the humility of what we have learned (through science and mindfulness) and having to accept how we are as human kind, yet understanding the advantages and the power of self-will, in order to execute upon us a process of growth, which brings about:

• Self-awareness
• Self-confidence
• Self-conduct

Only then, once this process is achieved, can we feel well within and aligned with how we see ourselves and how we see the world around us. The reason behind my interest in studying about the brain, the mind, decision making and to work with the corporate leaders is two fold:

• I wanted to make people feel good about themselves, because
• They impact everyone around them in the workplace and their homes.

Reason behind corporate?  I worked 15 years in the corporate arena, I know how tension and bad feelings can lead us out of self-conduct in disposition, making bad decisions and becoming unlikeable or unattractive personalities, only because of pressures of external metrics – metrics established by others, as opposed to our internal self-metrics of wanting to perform for ourselves in search for self-growth and excellence.  Being constructive when feeling bad is not always the easiest thing to do!  Ultimately, having had encountered so many clients and helped so many people achieving their goals and finding a new direction in life and in business (private individuals and corporate employees), I believe that:

• Everyone wants to perform and do their best, but
• Everyone is impacted by someone else, each they of their lives because we live and work in a social environment.

So what do we need to do to feel good about ourselves and impact others positively, so that we start performing for ourselves (internal metric) and for our organizations (external metric)?  The answer is simple, start listening to what makes you feel good.  Why?

• Because, as I define it:

Being aware of what makes you feel good makes you be in mastery and regulation of your thoughts, is how you reach Thought Optimization©; it makes you have self-belief and confidence vis-à-vis others; and, glow through a process of growth, heightened by strength, enjoy breakthroughs through a relaxed mind and enhancing the ability to find creative solutions to challenges, while multiplying that enlightened energy of yourself to the rest of those surrounding you.

- M. Pressentin, 2010

Thought Optimization© has this effect, if we understand how we are built, we can use the techniques to overcome challenges of our physiology and succeeding in strengthening our deep self (emotionally, mentally, physically in balance) in order to achieve the optimized state of wellbeing and positive self-heightency – mastery and regulation of thoughts which lead to emotional regulation and clear decision making.

Managing your thoughts to sustain performance!

Leaders are hired to think and to create a platform to nurture and allow the thinking process to flourish.  Hence, their role in organizations is to understand, scrutinize and strategize.  But you may ask two very pertinent follow up questions:

1. Who will help the leaders think?
2. What is the correct thinking process?

Conscious leaders that embark themselves in a path of constant curiosity, thereby always seeking to learn, to improving their skill-set and know-how, are more likely to be consistently challenging the thinking patterns around him/herself and others.  This is a very productive nurturing process in thinking as it also allows the generation of creativity in the team he/she is leading.

The bottom line of cultivating a thinking culture in the organization is to question compliance and assess opportunity cost of not doing something.

Thinking can be considered a skill that can be learnt, like a muscle that requires practice and exercise to perform better.  As thinking generates creativity, team members that think and share their thoughts with their leaders, provide the latter with additional ideas to take a step further in their thinking; sort of like “give me a good idea and I’ll make it better!”.  Thus, leaders will benefit from their teams and their own leaders when they proactively help others think in an open sharing platform.

How much attention you pay in your thoughts, the density of your thoughts and the quality of your thoughts (what you are thinking about) determines how you will make your decisions.  For example, if you are thinking about a conversation at your workplace that has upset you, you may dismiss that thought by quickly re-framing the perspective of your negative experience, e.g. by simply labeling the fact as another possible perspective: “I should not take it personally, John and I were just trying to be objective about the matter, I’m sure next meeting we will make it a point to be more constructive…”.  This re-framing mechanism will pull you away from developing negative emotions and keep you on track to your objectives of working with John.

If re-framing is not done, then possible consequences could be that you persistently are weary of John.  As a consequence, possible rushed or erroneous emotional based decisions might be made due to that single experience.

Thus, one of the processes of driving productive thoughts is to re-frame your bad experiences as soon as possible and move on.  The other would be to focus on solutions instead of the problem.  By focusing on solutions, we accept that there is an existing problem, but we choose to focus on what works and on the strengths of the people involved.

The mind is the energy that drives thoughts and the brain is the master key that drives the functionality, put in very simplistic layman terms.  So if this is the case, the brain needs help to focus our thoughts, since it is responsible for controlling our breathing, movement of the eyes, driving a car without too much concentration, etc.  My point is, when you consciously focus on a topic, make sure you are focusing on something that is rewarding, so that you keep your balance sustainable.

Exercise: At the end of each evening, have 5-10 minutes for yourself, undisturbed!  Think back and appreciate your day.  If anything less pleasant comes up, let yourself feel that emotion (but not for too long!), then the exercise is to put that incident into a ‘label’ and reframe it out loud in words.  Tips:

1. How can you view that less pleasant event objectively, if you were not part of the event?
2. If you were not part of the event can you still see everyone’s perspective?
3. When you do No.1 – 2, make sure you step back as an outsider of the event!
4. Take 3 deep breaths!  Slowly…
5. How do you feel now?
6. How much does the event still impact you?
7. How will you decide not to let it annoy you?  – Remember what you went through in No. 1 – 2.
8. Take a deep breath!  Congratulations!

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For more information and comments on your experiences contact Maria Pressentin.

Despite this absence, business continues. I just wanted to share that I have recently had 2 clients in these two quieter months that have come from a place of loss and fear to becoming entrepreneurs in less than 4 weeks, which is something they did not even thought of when we first began the sessions.

My point is simply that there is so much potential in everyone, sometimes it just takes an (outside professional) partner to help uncover and liberate that very specific potential for the human kind.

There is a serious value in what coaching can bring to people when it is done appropriately and I hope many of us around the World may benefit from this practice without fear and prejudices, but rather with an open mind to experiment. Afterall, what’s the worse that can happen? Just stay the way you are; but the best that can happen is to get to know yourself better and uncover what else you haven’t done in life or even to see how far your brilliance will reach you!

Coaching: What, Why, Who?

What…

The following quote is a definition of coaching delivered by the Global International Coach Federation:

“Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.  Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.  The coach’s responsibility is to:

• Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
• Encourage client self-discovery
• Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
• Hold the client responsible and accountable.”

Coaching is a professional relationship between two individuals (the coach and the client) that assists one individual (the client) in achieving personal and/or professional goals in an accelerated manner.  Coaches supports the client in manifesting his/her highest potential and in attaining agreed-upon goals. Coaches are hired to assist someone in changing jobs, clarifying a vision, improve communication skills, realize a dream, grow a small business, climb the corporate ladder, manage a team better, etc.  A coach encourages, confronts, challenges, questions, and above all, consistently honors, respects, and unconditionally supports a client in growing and achieving his/her goals. The coaching relationship is a transformational process that inevitably results in growth for the client.

Why…

This practice was generated to cater for emerging concerns which other practices such as counseling and consulting could not respond to.  It has been proven that coaching fosters learning by 88% compared to 28% in training, while supporting clients to focus on what is important, on themselves (strengths and aspirations), while being allied with a professionally trained partner that unconditionally believes in the ability of the clients, in a totally secure and confidential sessions (University of British Columbia, HR Department).

It is the practice that accommodates the nurturing of today’s modern emergent concerns from home to work and from dreams to real experiences and transitions.  Therefore, it is correct to say that everyone needs a coach, no matter if you’re a peak performer who will need to maintain your inner-outer balance to continue to perform, or whether

you’re going through transitions and adversities and could use a partner in confidence that truelly places 100% of attention to your best interest, while supporting you through such times and bringing you back up again.

Who…

…are typically coaching clients in corporations and why do they want to be coached?

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