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Top accounts come with a double edged sword – while they contribute a sizeable portion to your company’s bottom line, they become the target of competition that constantly tempt them with better offering and price discounts.
In addition to the competitive attacks, key accounts often exercise their heavyweight pressures by demanding more for less as they know their bargaining power with the strategic vendors. It is quite common that account teams while managing the key accounts become too operational in the day-to-day and lose sight of the need to be proactive, nurturing and developing the account more strategically.
Sophisticated buyers today have access to a borderless market and more information through the power of the internet. As the business environment becomes more competitive, vendors are now seen as a critical extension to helping the client achieve their goals. With an effective key account plan, vendors unwittingly corner themselves into accepting price discounts as a retention strategy without realizing that they could be booted out by the next vendor who can provide a better price or a better value proposition.
As we have already entered into a turbulent economy of wobbly fundamentals and a shaky economic outlook, we need to adopt a proactive approach to handling our core assets, our top customer base by systematically crafting a clear plan of action to achieve the competitive edge for your customers’ needs and their business outcomes.
Transform your organization from a vendor to a trusted advisor
When your organization takes a pro-active, opportunity-driven approach to managing their account, you feel empowered that the organization is customer-centric and strive to develop a long-term customer relationship with your key customers. As such, even the usual pains of limited resources and fire-fight problems will be viewed more positively because a mission and strategy has been structured.
Collaborative teams with a clear vision are in a stronger position to spot new opportunities and expand their accounts with profitable and value-led offerings the customers want.
As such, the initial step in aligning your account team’s efforts is to create a consistent account methodology to size up your knowledge of every key account. This is different from the monthly sales management reports that monitors the progress of ongoing opportunities in the sales pipeline.
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