APRIL 21st
The SAMA Knowledge Series
Part 2: The Strategic Customer-Centric Organization
In case you missed it, check out Part 1: The SAM Process and Part 3: SAM Skills and Competencies (The SAMA Competency Model)
These are crazy times for everyone - for our companies, for our families
and for our customers. As we get accustomed to this “new normal,”
companies will increasingly look to their suppliers for guidance
on how to navigate what lies ahead. Those companies that make themselves
essential to their strategic customers during the present crisis
will be rewarded with increased market share and an unshakeable bond
with their customers.
What does it take to come out the other side of this on top?
Number one: An organization designed around enabling and encouraging
organizational alignment around strategic customers.
Number two: A repeatable process for partnering with customers to
discover and co-create value.
And number three: Strategic account managers expert at marshaling
their internal resources to discover, create and deliver customer
business value.
While you’re tethered to your home office for the time being, we
want to make sure we’re furnishing you with knowledge and resources
to help you meet and defeat the challenges of the day. Below you
will find some all-time great SAMA resources designed to equip you
with tools, knowledge and inspiration to show up for your customers
when they need you the most.
Engaging the C-level/ Executive sponsorship
Based on benchmarking SAMA has conducted with dozens of the world’s
foremost SAM-centric companies, we have concluded that the most critical
enabler of successful co-value creation is C-level support. While
the most visible example of C-level support is executive sponsorship,
it also includes:
● Setting the right expectations
for the strategic account initiative
● Defining the corporate strategic
goals of the initiative
● Ensuring the right positioning
and visibility of the strategic account organization within the enterprise
● Making it known that strategic
account management is a corporate strategy, rather than just a part
of the sales strategy
“Ensuring C-level support and engagement”
“Executive sponsorship: Establishing a consistent process for senior management”
Account selection and deselection
Companies all too often confuse large accounts, critical accounts and
strategic accounts. Large and critical accounts are very important
for the company because of the impact their size has on the supplier
business. But be very selective in choosing your strategic accounts,
and make sure to prioritize strategic fit when making your evaluations.
Just a few criteria to consider include:
●
Cultural fit between your organizations
●
Whether your customer is considered a leader/innovator in its market
●
Your customer’s willingness to invest in the relationship and innovative
projects.
“Selecting the right strategic accounts”
“Needs-based segmentation: Lessons from the field”
“Account segmentation and coverage at Siemens”
SAM talent selection, development and coaching
Research shows again and again that a superstar SAM delivers drastically
more value than an average SAM. The latest SAMA research offers six
key recommendations for those looking to find and select the right
talent:
●
Raise the level of importance within the company of strategic accounts
and with it the integral role of the strategic account manager in
effectively managing, growing, and retaining top corporate customers
●
Educate corporate HR and align their support, professionalism, and
policies to legitimize, standardize, and publicize the SAM role
●
Categorize job profiles for different types of SAMs and global SAM
positions
●
Where it makes sense, add more stakeholders to the recruitment and
selection process
●
Formalize internal processes for both sourcing and selecting SAM
talent
●
Consider screening first for desired personality traits and softer
skills believed to be the most difficult to train or teach. Too many
companies attempt to teach or train traits and softer skills instead
of using them as a filter to select the highest-potential candidates.
“Organizing for efficient talent management”
“Upskilling GAMs at Schneider Electric”
Organization design and structure
There has been a huge body of work on organizing around customers,
and the research is unanimous: Organizational structure follows strategy.
In other words, you need to put the customer at the center and organize
around them. Indeed, organizing around strategic customers
is essential in today’s business climate of online purchasing, empowered
procurement functions, and supplier reductions.
“Deciding on the optimal organizational model”
“Five ways to create a meaningful strategic accounts program”
“Building a successful SAM program from scratch at Adobe”
SAM process for optimal co-value creation with the strategic customer
Each strategic account and each strategic account manager must be held
accountable for specific business outcomes. The importance of sketching
out the SAM process and showing it as an integral part of the organizational
enablers is that, like in all business processes, it has to be integrated
into the entire organization, and the organization has to enable
the most efficient process. If you want your SAM program to succeed,
your company must be aligned to support and drive both the SAM and
the strategic value-creation process.
“Structuring the SAM process for optimal co-value creation with the strategic customer”
“Creating joint solutions: Part 1”
“Creating joint solutions: Part 2”
“Creating joint solutions: Part 3”
Account plan structure and process across the matrixed organization
This is a highly structured process by which the SAM can communicate
with his core and extended account team, as well as management and
all other stakeholders involved in the design and delivery of customer
value. It is an invaluable tool for internal selling—to align people
and resources, to secure executive buy-in, to push for technical
expertise, and to hold people accountable.
To be effective, the account plan must include:
●
Customer strategy
●
Key decision makers map
●
Past and future value opportunities and the monetization thereof
●
Current and future projects
“Engage, win and grow: Driving success for you and your customer”
“Introducing strategic account planning at Volvo Trucks UK”
Account and enterprise alignment
Most of the time, the value packages that a SAM proposes to a customer
will involve the contribution of several product, business unit,
regional, and country managers from across the enterprise, which
is most often organized by product groups, business units (BUs),
and geographies. Yet when SAMs are asked if it is easier to sell
internally or externally, most (if not all) agree that internal selling
is the bigger challenge. Usually this is because the company is not
well aligned around the objective of co-creating value with its most
strategic customers.
“Ensuring account and enterprise alignment”
“Built to win: Ecolab’s corporate accounts philosophy”
“The future model of sales: Aligning value creation and value capture to drive results”
Knowledge Management Systems
There is literally no better guide for a SAM in the co-creation of
value with a customer than a successful business case executed by
one of his or her colleagues. Knowledge management systems serve
as institutional encyclopedias of successful business cases. When
a SAM is confronted with a business challenge with one of her customers,
she can simply plug into this virtual library to retrieve the specific
case that’s closest to the one she is facing. It’s like having the
entire business knowledge of her organization at her fingertips,
anytime and from anywhere in the world. Depending on the supplier’s
business, the knowledge management system should include industry-based
information on trends, practices and solutions.
“Implementing knowledge management systems”
Internal KPIs/financial
Financial metrics and KPIs are essential tools to use to convince top
management that investing in the SAM initiative returns significant
financial rewards. Because investing in SAM is expensive and significant,
top management will continue to demand exceptional returns. Revenue
growth, gross margin, and net profit are absolutely indispensable
for measuring the financial stoutness of the SAM investment, but
keep in mind that they are lagging indicators. Just as important,
if not more so, are predictive metrics, such as evolution in share
of wallet, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
“Setting internal KPIs and financial metrics and business support for the SAM program”
“Metrics to help calibrate the right investments for a strategic accounts organization”
“Measuring and managing customer profitability”
Customer SRM/Metrics
We recommend sitting down with your strategic accounts to identify
a set of meaningful, measurable metrics you can use to gauge the
success of a strategic relationship. The metrics you use will be
specific to each customer, but there will be broad overlap. A few
suggestions from one of SAMA’s most mature SAM organizations include:
● Target percentage of prior year sales for quantifiable
business results (QBRs) implemented
● Percent of obsolete systems upgraded with the
goal of 100 percent over seven years
● Number of opportunities identified for customer
products to be potentially used in supplier manufacturing operations
● Joint customer satisfaction survey improvements
● Gains in share-of-wallet for the supplier with
the customer
“Evaluating supplier relationship management culture, systems and metrics at the strategic customer”
“From vendor to preferred supplier in just three years: The SKF story”
“The SAMA guide to customer-supplier scorecards”