What is Strategic Account Management and Why It Matters
Strategic Account Management (SAM) manages and grows relationships with an organization’s most critical and high-value customers. It involves deploying specialized resources, processes, and technologies to identify, develop, and execute account-specific growth strategies.
SAM is vital for organizations looking to drive sustainable revenue growth and maximize customer lifetime value. However, many companies struggle to implement effective SAM practices, leading to missed growth opportunities and stagnant revenue streams.
To address this challenge, this blog presents the best practices for strategic account management and an overview of how a purpose-built SAM platform like Revegy can unlock account growth by enabling Challenger® selling.
The Necessity of Smarter Account Management
According to research presented at the Gartner (formerly CEB) Sales and Marketing Summit, only 28% of sales leaders reported that their “account management channels regularly meet cross-selling and account growth targets.” By implementing best practices in account management, sales leaders can address this challenge.
One key finding revealed that servicing accounts alone doesn’t drive more value from existing customers. Instead, account managers must have access to more advanced customer intelligence to understand how they can help customers achieve their unique business objectives.
Strategic Account Management Relies on Customer Intelligence
The importance of customer intelligence cannot be underestimated. The success of any enterprise sales team, whether expanding key accounts, increasing win rates, or improving forecast accuracy, is directly correlated to how well the team knows their buyers and how effectively they can translate that knowledge into a plan and execute it effectively.
However, most traditional enterprise sales organizations lack a common framework to document, organize, and analyze their customer’s business. Companies miss opportunities to deliver value at every life cycle stage without an intuitive, consistent way to consume and leverage customer intelligence.
To succeed in today’s modern sales enterprise, sales teams need strategies that empower them to articulate the value of their products and/or services to the customer more accurately.
Revegy Enables Challenger® Selling
Revegy offers a purpose-built, enterprise-class platform that integrates with any CRM to deliver a deeper understanding of the customer’s business, a roadmap to coordinate the sales approach, and an executable plan for maximizing account revenue in key account landscapes.
Revegy puts the power of visualization to work in account planning to expose what matters to your most strategic customers. Put simply; we translate customer intelligence into value for your client and revenue for you.
CRMs weren’t designed to address the complexity and depth of analysis, planning, or governance required from large, global, matrixed accounts. Revegy’s sales enablement platform is a game-changer for sales organizations looking to unlock account growth and drive customer value.
Identify Customer Improvement Opportunities with Relationship Maps
Revegy’s relationship maps clearly illustrate the customer’s organizational and political structure, showing connections between influencers and decision-makers, the status of your relationship, and their preference level for your solutions.
The map also reveals stakeholders’ unique goals and priorities, enabling you to focus your strategy and solutions on what matters most to build value and trust with the people driving the business.
White space maps enable you to uncover new revenue and expansion opportunities by charting the product landscape and highlighting where it intersects with opportunities to meet your customers’ near-term and long-term needs.
By visualizing the footprint of your solutions, including where your competitors’ products are in place, you can identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. These tools help sales reps identify customer improvement opportunities and drive growth.
Build Growth-Oriented Account Teams with Strategy Maps
Revegy’s strategy map lets you document the company’s overarching goals, challenges, and priorities across the corporate landscape so you can align your solutions and help the client achieve their business objectives.
By understanding and mapping your client’s issues, challenges, and departmental initiatives, you can easily identify and position potential expansion opportunities based on what is top of mind for key decision-makers.
Strategic Account Manager Best Practices
Effective SAM is a multi-faceted process that requires cross-functional collaboration, customer-centric strategies, and advanced customer intelligence. Here are some best practices for driving growth, maximizing account value, and strategic account management processes:
Identify Strategic Accounts: SAM begins by identifying high-value accounts critical to you organization’s growth and profitability. This requires a comprehensive analysis of the account’s revenue potential, strategic fit, and relationship strength.
Develop a Customer-Centric Strategy: SAM is about aligning your solutions to your customer’s unique business objectives. Therefore, developing a customer-centric strategy is critical to unlocking account growth. This involves understanding the customer’s business, industry trends, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.
Deploy Specialized Resources: SAM requires specialized resources, including dedicated account managers, cross-functional teams, and customized solutions. These resources enable SAM teams to provide personalized attention and tailored solutions to each strategic account.
Leverage Customer Intelligence: SAM’s success relies on advanced customer intelligence to help account managers identify customer improvement opportunities and articulate the value of their solutions. This includes relationship, white space, and strategy maps that provide a comprehensive view of the customer’s business.
Monitor and Measure Performance: SAM is an iterative process that requires continuous monitoring and measurement of account performance against growth targets. SAM teams can identify gaps, course-correct, and optimize growth strategies.
Drive Growth Through Smarter Connections
Leveraging customer intelligence and developing an account growth strategy is critical for sales organizations to drive growth. Without an intuitive, consistent way to consume and leverage customer intelligence, companies miss the opportunity to deliver value at every stage of the life cycle. Schedule a demo below.
CHALLENGER® is a registered trademark of CEB, Inc. Revegy is not affiliated with or endorsed by CEB, Inc.
