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“ Key or “Strategic” accounts have now become a company's most important asset, in some cases supplying in excess of 80 percent of a firm’s revenue. ”
- Dr. Noel Capon, Key Account Management & Planning
Companies are not realizing the desired revenue and margin goals set forth in key account plans. Developing and growing strategic or key accounts can be challenging, inefficient and complex. In order to preserve and increase revenue, strengthen loyalty, and expand the relationship strategic account management requires effective cross-functional collaboration between sales, marketing, client services, customer support, finance, executive management and other areas of the organization. Dedicated customer-facing account teams are usually managing several independent opportunities with a large customer, across geographies, in different business units, while managing critical relationships with key decision makers and exchanging timely and complex information internally and externally. This is the critical success factor in strategic account management.
PowerSkills' Strategic Account Management (SAM) solution provides the critical dynamic account planning, execution, and relationship management capabilities missing in traditional sales management applications and methodologies. This powerful and collaborative solution is also pre-integrated with leading on-demand CRM systems, such as salesforce.com, to leverage your existing CRM investment, increase adoption, and enhance business value. It allows you to drive accountability for your most important accounts and to collaborate and manage these accounts conveniently and effectively.
Client Case Study
Client:
Our client is a venture-backed Internet security company growing both the size of the organization and top-line revenue. They have recently introduced new products and services targeted at a different buyer than they have dealt with in the past.
Issues:
The Company was introducing new products and services that were no longer targeted at the IT department, had more of a business-line impact, and were designed for the enterprise. In order to do this, they needed to transform from a territory coverage model to a strategic account management (SAM) model in order to penetrate these accounts more deeply and build stronger relationships. Cross-functional team selling would be critical to their success and the account managers would have to move from selling products to selling solutions and solving business problems.
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Solution:
PowerSkills Solutions trained a cross-functional group of SAMs, sales engineers, client services managers, and key executives on the PowerSkills Relationship Management framework and integrated it with their current selling methodology. Metrics around key relationship management were developed and integrated into the SAMs MBOs. The PowerSkills on-demand application, VIP Relationship Manager ®, was implemented to help reinforce behavior, provide an easy-to-use add-on to CRM for managing strategic accounts and contacts, and provide visibility for executive sponsors.
The Results :
Almost immediately, with the use of the Agenda ManagerTM feature in VIP Relationship Manager, more effective meetings with decision makers at Fortune 500 prospects were occurring leading to larger opportunities. Executives have visibility into key accounts, critical relationships, and meeting objectives and outcomes, and cross-functional alignment is occurring providing a total organizational response to the customer.
Additionally, the PowerSkills Competency-based approach helped the client identify the critical success factors for new account managers and has included them as qualifiers in the hiring process.
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