Building Relationships is Key to Successful Account Strategy
Posted by Ron Snyder in Account planning, Key Account Strategy, Sales Management | 0 comments
We have identified how to use relationships to implement 7 key account strategies that will maximize your results.
Account Strategies
- Defend and Grow
- Land and Expand
- Direct Attack
- Niche
- Change the Game
- Maintain and Support
- Develop Over Time
- Defend and Grow
When you’re established in an account, it’s important to defend your position so you don’t lose account share or future revenue.
By promoting the impact you’ve had on your customer’s business and by demonstrating how your products and services help them achieve their strategic initiatives, you will establish strong supporters among those who influence purchasing decisions.
As you are getting to know the key players, as well as the external influencers in each account, evaluate how much control they have and how supportive they are of you versus your competitors. Identify the results they need to achieve and show them how you can support their efforts. Focus on creating great relationships with the people who defend the value you deliver. Check in with them regularly to identify opportunities and competitive concerns and provide value with each of your interactions.
Be on the lookout for new influencers who will enable you to either defend or grow your presence.
- Land and Expand
This strategy applies to new accounts with good potential. You want to find even small opportunities which can help you get your foot in the door to expand your presence from there. You need to impress the customer with the first transaction for this strategy to work.
After you’ve identified a sale or project that you can win, ask questions of a few key players so you can better understand their needs and objectives. Then use what you learned to rally your resources, demonstrate how you can help them achieve their objectives and win the business. Continue to work with that core group to ensure you produce measurable results, then build that into a success story.
Ask your supporters to share their success story with their colleagues and then show those new people how you can help them produce comparable results. By developing closer relationships with the organization’s influencers, you’ll be able to identify new opportunities in other teams or departments. With this process, you can maximize your sales across the account.
- Direct Attack
In this strategy, your objective is to face a competitor head-on and eliminate them by providing leveraging your competitive advantage into a strong value proposition. In order to win with this approach, you need good resources to support your attack – including very strong support from key decision influencers within the account.
Conduct a thorough analysis of your account’s needs and develop a highly-targeted value proposition. Demonstrate how well you understand their business needs, buying criteria and strategic initiatives. Show how your solution helps them achieve their goals. Focus on their most compelling business requirements early in the buying process that will drive them to purchase. Work with your internal advocates to refine and deliver your story to the decision makers.
Work diligently, yet carefully, to identify who supports your competitor so you can neutralize their assertions about the competitor’s strengths with one-on-one comparisons and technical discussions. You might go a step further by writing a white paper and citing third-party references. At the end of the day, you must convince the decision makers that going with your solution and organization provides the best value vs. risk. This may require delivering an analysis of ROI and/or risk.
- Niche
Your objective with this strategy is to provide clear solutions for a narrowly-focused problem, industry, or vertical market. You must have deep influence with the key players within this targeted area of the account and convince them that you are the best choice for solving their specific problems.
Take time to develop a deeper understanding of the challenges this niche faces so you can you’re your knowledge of their domain and propose the best solution. Engage the right people closest to the problem who know exactly how it is hurting the business and their ability to do their job. They will help you drive the sale- once you show them how you will solve their problems and help them produce their intended results.
- Change the Game
To change the game, you bring unique insight to one of your account’s business issues and, as a result, change the way they view that issue. By using your unique knowledge and expertise, you’ll build your credibility and become an advisor who helps them set the criteria to select the best solution. This dramatically improves your probability of sales success and weakens your competition’s position.
To use this strategy, you must have a new technology or an innovative approach to solving their problems. If the account is not yet aware of this new idea, you must find a visionary within the account who is close enough to the problem to see its impact on the business. You can tell if they are open to new ideas and technology by looking at their tools, their work environment and other solutions they have implemented.
Once you have found your supporter(s) who are willing to introduce your new idea to other key players in the decision process, show them how your new approach helps them achieve their objectives more quickly and cost effectively.
The account will have concerns about the difficulty of the transition and they will want to validate your claims. It is critical to have success stories and references ready to allay their fears. Further, you must have resources available to ensure successful implementation.
- Maintain and Support
This strategy is geared toward an existing account with minimal immediate growth potential and no known needs that promise a reasonable return on investment. Your goal is to maintain a reasonable level of business and still be cost-effective with the use of your resources.
Continue to check in with your advocates and key players and keep them apprised of new developments in the field or with your company. These quieter periods are great opportunities to gather success stories and to use them as references. Remind them of the benefit they get from the positive publicity- both for the company and for themselves.
Be on the lookout for new needs as they develop. Staying engaged with these accounts during their downtime will help you influence their future decision criteria early, which puts you in a position to win the next opportunity.
- Develop Over Time
This strategy applies to accounts that have good future potential, but there’s no compelling reason for them to buy now. It could be that they are waiting for your new product/technology that will be released soon. This account may not willing to be an early adopter, but may anxious to get on board once they see proven results.
Identify people who will be the first to see the future issue that you will address. Stay in touch with them; keep them posted on new developments and gather specific information from them that will help you create a strong value proposition for them and others with the same need. When appropriate, share your product development progress and gather their input as potential users. Look for opportunities for them to sponsor a pilot project or introduce you to others in the account that might be open to your offering.
By building this relationship, you’re more likely to become aware of purchasing activity that could compromise your future sales to them. Work with your advocates to create a compelling story that explains why they should wait for your soon-to-be-released capabilities.
In Conclusion
These relationship strategies enable account teams to improve their success rate with each of their key accounts by dramatically increasing their presence and influence in a trusted advisory role.
For more detail on the account strategies that these relationship strategies enable, see our article “Seven Strategies for Maximizing Account Success.”
