Following A Well Planned Account Development Strategy Will Earn This Right
Search for self-confident business leaders
and influencers whose personal response mode is either growth or trouble. Avoid even keel or euphoric buyers and people
who want to place you in a box where your value and ideas will be
squashed.
Recruit a coach within the
customer organization who will help you to tailor your value proposition to address the
business, application and political obstacles you’ll be facing.
Introduce
yourself early in their new application buying cycles as a valuable educator and problem
solver.
Display a willingness to share
account position with the incumbent. When
you confidently believe that you have consistently exceeded customer
expectations, you have earned the right to adjust your account plan from a
divisional strategy to an indirect strategy that changes the ground rules from
which customer value decisions are made.
This will set you on a new course to becoming the incumbent.
My
example: As a national account manager, I was responsible for a growth mode F500
customer where we shared a niche position with two other vendors. I recognized how far we had to go in order to
be considered a true competitor to their primary vendor who owned the account
relationship and $120 million in annual sales.
After eliminating the secondary competitors and owning the $1 million
niche, my next goal was to penetrate the core business.
My solid reputation for facilitating an
excellent customer experience [and for business acumen and product and industry
knowledge] that I had developed in the niche area established strong horizontal
and vertical relationships throughout their company. My internal customer coach guided me in the
right direction. I believed that I had earned the right to meet their chairman
of the board. I approached him directly to
let him know about the value we were providing to his company. I knew that he loved to play golf. He accepted my invitation to play on a nearby world
class golf course in an event that I organized where he’d play with my company
president and senior executives from my company were paired with his company’s
senior managers who were amazed that I was able to make this happen.
This set me apart from all other vendors who
would never think to go outside their comfort zones to this degree. VP level decision makers felt more comfortable
allowing my company to share business with their long-time incumbent since their
chairman opened the door to a reduced risk decision. This set the stage for my company being awarded
a $15 million contract that in the past would have been a natural add-on for
the competition. From that point
forward, the incumbent considered my company as a legitimate foe to be dealt
with in this account. [They even tried to hire me.]
