The Keys to Key Account Management

A Reflection on What Really Matters in Selling to Key Accounts

Sales and key account management are practiced, often talked and written about, trained and coached in every organisation of any size and business. After my 25 years in sales management, sales leadership and key account management roles, I can say that I still learn and can be better at it. When driving people to reach their sales targets or while discussing new business strategies with key accounts, I believe it is important to be serious about the way your firm grows the business and expands the partnership with key accounts. As a reflection, let me try to picture what is — in my view — key to key account management.

Connectivity

In key account management, it is all about building connections. It is important to build these connections across your customers’ organisation, throughout many functions such as sales, finance, procurement, HR, product management, strategy or innovation. That in itself is not different comparing it to pure sales. In sales, it is about finding the customer need and offering a product, service or solution that meets this need. However, is there really one need and one customer? Your customer is a complex organisation with its own culture, politics, hierarchies, unwritten rules and performance drivers. How great would it be, if someone selling you a product would be able to see and understand those connections, and how they impact the buying decision that is at hand? Key account managers find joy in exploring these connections, which is really hard work! It means asking many open questions. Listening actively to your contacts at your customer helps you understand their personal and their organisational challenges and goals, as well as the complex system in which she or he operates on a daily basis. A key account manager might not instantly bring home a deal from every meeting, but will create inroads for future and more strategic selling by really listening to what is said, verbally, in body language and also between the lines.

Furthermore, connectivity needs to be seen not only from an external and customer point of view, but also internally within your organisation servicing that customer. When asking my most loyal key accounts what matters most in giving a mandate to our firm, I often hear that it is important that we display a team-play, whereby every team member contributes to serving that customer with her or his specific set of expertise, competencies and personality. A key account manager is not the most important person serving that customer, it is the team that surrounds her or him that makes a difference to the customer.

Finding Value Drivers

Closely linked to the above point, you might find this next point of great help in building strategic and long-lasting key account relationships. A key account manager is constantly looking for triggers that drive value to the customer. Value could be expressed in cost savings, financial benefits, security, efficiency, risk minimisation, employee satisfaction, or any other metric that matters to your customer. It is all about finding those KPIs and drivers, which shift the needle to creating value in your customers’ lives. By finding those drivers, you will have created yourself a hook. A hook to position and sell your proposition. Do you actually know which performance and reward targets your customer contacts, all being decision makers or influencers, have? If not, you will find a wealth of information by just asking them. Personally, I enjoy finding a lot of parallels between this exploration process in key account management with my other professional passion, which is coaching. As a coach, it is important to help your customers understand a problem, find perspectives and determine options and choices.

Proposition

Having understood the connectivity and dynamics in your customers’ organisation, and having found the value drivers, a third and in my view critical factor in managing key accounts effectively is about designing the right (value) proposition for them. A proposition is a set of products and/or services, which together create value by addressing one or more important pain points of your customer. The combination of the products and services makes the solution unique to the customer and can address even multiple pain points of multiple decision makers or stakeholders at the same time.

What makes a proposition even more appealing is bringing in a time component: After having implemented the first proposition, new opportunities are available which enable further selling and which create even deeper values to the customer in the future.

The End? Never!

I like to see key accounts as novels. Characters develop as you get to know them. Chapter after chapter, you learn more, and the book starts to grow on you. It creates ideas and visions in your mind. You are starting to picture what is happening, start to feel what the characters are feeling and what drives them. You might want to pick up the story where you left if when you fell asleep with the book in your lap. And take it from there the next time you continue reading. Not starting all over again from the beginning, but getting deeper into the story and understanding even better. A key account is like a good novel. You will never want the story to be ending. And you are part of it. Enjoy!