Protecting and retaining your Strategic Accounts
As per an HBR article, depending on which study you believe, and what industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. It makes sense: you don’t have to spend time and resources going out and finding a new client — you just have to keep the one you have happy. If you’re not convinced that retaining customers is so valuable, consider research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company that shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.
The bottom line: Keeping the Right Customers is Valuable
For companies to achieve rapid growth, winning and expanding their solution footprint in large and strategic accounts is critical. Given the complex nature of buying process with multiple decision-making levels, finding and working with key influencers, supporters, approvers and decision makers can be a challenging task, which the sales person has constantly grapples with.
Do you know about the famous Pareto Principle? Do you know how it applies to Sales?
- 80% of your Sales come from only 20% of your Customers. These are typically your enterprise accounts
- 20% of your Sales team generates 80% of the Company’s overall Sales. These are your Top Performers
- If you can work and identify such Potential Customers who can give you 80% of your Business, you are more likely to meet your Revenue Goals as an organisation
It becomes important for companies to build right strategies and practices for covering and managing their strategic accounts. It is imperative that the sales person managing these accounts, has right skills to manage complex and long sales engagement, build relationship with the customer and nurture them to have a long-lasting strategic relationship with your organisation.
If your team members are new to strategic account selling, they will require right training and guidance to learn the required skill sets for managing your strategic accounts. Someone coming from a product selling background may find it overwhelming and certainly lost in trying to find ways to engage with these customers.What are the keys to develop yourself into a High Performing Strategic Account Manager?
Do you know about the famous Pareto Principle? Do you know how it applies to Sales?
- Becoming a Trusted Advisor
- Increasing Customer Loyalty
- Work together with Customer to define and plan to reach Goals
- Manage CXO Level Relationship
- Work with multiple teams internally and on customer side
Strategic Account Management requires your organisational and operational commitment
Your strategic accounts would typically be large and complex. Developing relationships and working on a well-defined sales process as a strategic account manager can deliver outstanding results, but only with a structured approach. You will need to build a separate strategy and a dedicated team of cross-functional team to engage into your strategic accounts
Key Learning Objectives of this Program
In this 2-day training program from TransformzU Consulting on Strategic Account Management, will give you the knowledge, skills and process plan that you will need to grow your Strategic Accounts. The program will walk you through a proven planning process and provide you methods and know-how to succeed in your engagements. Some of the topics that are covered in this program are given below :
- Account Planning: Discovery sessions with internal teams
- Value Discovery Workshops with customer
- Building a cross functional team for success
- Selling with Purpose to Grow
- Maximize motivation, energy, and execution for growing your business
- Value Selling