Key Account Sales and Management

As businesses grow and take on bigger customers and bigger accounts, there is often internal tension and frustration in delivering everything you promised, once the sale is made.  A business cannot grow unless it can both sell and deliver increasingly valuable accounts.  The Whale Hunters Process™ approaches Key Account Management from four perspectives:

• How to involve your entire team in the business development process
• How to make a seamless and smooth hand-off from sales to operations
• How to build trust with the new customer at every point in your intake and delivery promise
• How to grow your business with each of your new accounts over time

About two years ago I was a guest on Diane Helbig’s Talk Radio Network show Accelerate Your Business Growth on this topic. Today’s newsletter is an outline of the questions and brief answers, followed by a link to the audio file of the broadcast. If you do a lot of large account selling, if you manage key accounts, and if you’d like to sell more large accounts and manage them well, I think you’ll find the recording useful and detailed. 

Questions 

Let’s start with a problem you written about and talked about for a long time—the problem of the operations team struggling to deliver whatever the sales team has sold.  You’ve described this as a key issue on a company’s growth, and I suspect that many of my audience have struggled with this a little or maybe a lot.

This problem occurs whenever there isn’t clarity between what is standard and what is “customized.” If your company has just released a new software product, the sales team may be touting all its flashy features that can be part of a custom installation, while the project management team may be struggling just to implement the standard version because the bells and whistles aren’t even functional yet!  Another example is a professional service team that makes a good margin with standard modules of delivery, but once they’ve been promised a “custom version” your costs increase and margin drops dramatically.

As the leader, how can you improve your team’s cooperation on selling  and delivering?

• Train for it, hire for it, promote it, support it, and insist on it.
• Bring them together with leadership to talk about it.
• Clarify each side’s understanding

What kind of methods do you advocate to improve the hand-off from sales to operations?

• Involve subject matter experts in the sales process
• Create a detailed step-by-step handoff process with ownership of each step
• Keep the process in front of the customer and modify when necessary

What are some of the pitfalls if this handoff is uneven or poorly explained to the customer?

• You scare them and disappoint them
• They don’t ramp up as you expected
• It’s hard to get paid
• Your team can’t deliver what your company promised
• You lose your margin (and maybe a lot more) on the sale

In your book, [Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company] you write about making and keeping promises as one of the earliest ways to establish a relationship of trust with a new customer.  Can you tell us more about that? 

• Don’t rely only on your big, long term promises
• Make small promises and keep them
• Involve multiple people in making and keeping promises 
  

What are some examples that you’ve encountered of companies that were inadvertently damaging the trust relationship with their customers? 

• I offer several examples of employees “commiserating” with someone at the customer’s place of business about the lack of professionalism in some part of your company. You won’t believe it, but I guarantee it’s happening! 
  
  

 Of course if you can’t properly deliver what you’ve sold, that’s worse than never selling it in the first place.  How can a company strike that right balance between selling and delivering? 

• Whale Hunting is a strategy to manage it
• Invest what you can afford
• Have contingency plans
• Work with your banker
• Debrief and learn
• And more . . . . 
  
  

When is the right time to begin proposing that your customer renew the contract or purchase additional products or services? 

• When they give you signals
• When they need help
• When you have new knowledge or services that would add value for them
• When you’ve delivered most of your current contract to their delight

In a small company, who should be responsible for selling new business to current key accounts? 

• Management needs to direct it
• Account managers need to learn
• Sales team should be engaged with operations team 
  

Are there some pitfalls in trying to sell more business to key accounts that our audience should avoid? 

• Small companies can get pigeonholed in a niche that’s hard to break out of
• It’s hard to move from a subsidiary to an owner company
• Hard to move laterally if departments are compartmentalized
• Hard to move if your relationship is too low in the corporate hierarchy
• You are doing business that is smaller or priced cheaper than usual or than you desire

Click this link to listen to the entire interview.