KAM Archives | Deep-Insight

Forget elephants; hunt whales instead

Posted on August 16, 2021 at 2:14 pm.

‘Hunting elephants’ is a term used by sales people to describe the targeting of very large clients. Elephant hunting is difficult to do, but very profitable if you’re successful. The message from this blog? Forget elephants; hunt whales instead.

Whale Hunting with Global Accounts

It’s not often that I write book reviews but if there’s one book on sales management you should plan to read before the end of the summer holidays, it’s Whale Hunting with Global Accounts.

The author is Barbara Weaver Smith, but the book itself has contributions from 14 different experts in global sales. The result is a wonderfully rich, practical – and sometimes quirky – handbook for global sales management and leadership.

The quirkiness of the book comes from the title and inspiration for the book – the Inuit people.

The Inuit People

Here’s how Barbara Weaver Smith introduces the book:

For thousands of years, the Inuit people of the frozen North have risked life and limb to hunt the biggest game on earth: the mighty whale. They endure treacherous seas, frigid temperatures, and deadly ice floes for days at a time in order to catch these elusive and massive mammals. Why risk so much when they could have fish and caribou so much more easily? Because a single whale can provide a village with food and oil to last an entire year.

Would you hunt small game day-in and day-out, when you could hunt the biggest prize of them all every year?

It’s the same in the sales business; small fish will keep you fed but landing each whale-size account can fill your corporate belly for years. Hunting the biggest, most profitable deals is no easy task, and if your target escapes, you’ll lose time and resources. But the payoff is almost always worth your risk and effort.

Leave aside the quirkiness of the title and the references to the Inuit people. This book has contributions from a range of people who have ‘been there and done that’ in the sales world. Barbara Weaver Smith has assembled their views and her own thoughts on global account management into a structured approach for going after and hanging onto large complex accounts.

Key Takeaways

I always find it difficult to summarise a 240-page book in a few sentences but for me the four key takeaways are:

Knowledge. Global account teams need a massive store of knowledge about their target company and its market, as well as about industry and business challenges. Many sales reps go into a meeting with executives at a global company, armed only with their own product materials.

Structure. You can’t sell to and service large complex organisations unless you are well organised on your own side. The way you structure your own sales organisation must arise from a deep understanding of your client’s needs and preferences.

Process. This one is more interesting as it’s counter-intuitive. The more complex the sale and the longer the sales cycle, the more likely that sales people need to follow their own intuition rather than stick with the standard structured company sales approach.

Vision. Your company’s vision needs enough power to lead your customers through the challenges of consensus-building, the pain of change, and the inertia of bureaucracies.

Where KAM and GAM are Currently Failing

‘Whale Hunting with Global Accounts’ resonated strongly with me because it examines many of the challenges that I see within our own B2B clients. There’s no getting away from it: Key Account Management (KAM) and its big brother Global Account Management (GAM) are challenging activities.

Using the same four headings:

Knowledge. Many key (and global) account teams simply don’t understand their clients as well as they need to. It’s not easy if you have a client that operates in 20 different countries and people in all 20 have a view on your products and services. But you need to find out exactly what they think. Key account managers should not just be order-takers. They need to be information-gatherers, orchestrators and coaches. Yet many of our clients at Deep-Insight have excellent order-takers performing key account management roles. Square pegs and round holes.

Structure. I’m always surprised to discover just how product-centric many of our clients still are. Key accounts often have different product-based sales teams approaching them in a completely uncoordinated fashion. When key accounts are international – in other words, global – many of our clients are further stymied by their own national organisation structures. National structures do not support or encourage cross-border collaboration.

Process. Here’s one good example: Companies put processes and KPIs in place for key account managers. We have already seen that key account teams need a wealth of feedback from multiple individuals in each account. However, they are often given Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) targets that incentivise them to REDUCE the number of contacts they get feedback from. Why? New ‘Decision Makers’ and ‘Influencers’ are likely to give poorer scores than existing ‘Operational’ contacts.

Vision. Many companies think they have a vision that key and global account teams buy into. The reality is that every three months, that vision gets completely blurred by the requirement to hit quarterly sales targets. Cooperation and collaboration are pushed into second place. Long-term planning is abandoned as long-term account strategies struggle to survive the relentless demands of a quarterly sales culture.

All these things need to change.

Forget Elephants; Hunt Whales Instead

‘Whale Hunting with Global Accounts’ may not answer every question a Global Account Manager has. No individual book can but this one does provide an excellent framework for thinking about how to do GAM and KAM effectively. More important, it’s grounded in the real world and provides the CEO and Sales Director with a clear overview of the pitfalls of implementing GAM structures, processes and organisations.

It’s a worthwhile addition to any salesperson’s bookshelf.

So buy it. And remember: Forget elephants; hunt whales instead.

Key Account Management – First Principles

Posted on August 10, 2020 at 3:44 pm.

Written by John O'Connor

When we wrote Customer at the Heart, my co-author Peter Whitelaw and I interviewed several senior executives in large international B2B companies. Some were CEOs. Others were Sales Directors. Many were CX Directors or Chief Customer Officers. To be honest, the really fun part of writing the book was the interview process. Assembling all those interviews into a coherent book was a chore.

All interviews were excellent and insightful but some went off in directions that we had not planned at the outset.

This blog is about the fundamentals of Key Account Management (KAM) but that was not the topic I had in mind when I interviewed Joe Edwards.

I wanted him to talk about his time as Sales Director at Atos (which we did cover eventually). Before we got to that point, Joe talked about his first job as a sales manager at HP. This led us to a really interesting discussion on account management, key account management and account planning.

I hope you enjoy this short excerpt from Customer at the Heart.

John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight

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Key Account Management

Account managers are called different things in different companies. And in different countries. Sometimes they are referred to as sales managers although less so in Europe than in America. In Europe, ‘selling’ is still regarded as a second-class profession. The ‘salesman’ is a person who deals in used cars or snake oil.

Across the pond in North America, sales is a true profession. Most of today’s sales techniques and approaches have been developed in the USA. In Europe, the term account manager (or some variation thereof) is more frequently used than salesperson. Business development manager (BDM) is a commonly used term in Australia. The titles may be different but the roles are generally similar and involve client management as well as increasing the level of sales within a particular account or portfolio of clients.

For very large clients, there may be a single account manager dedicated to the account. In most cases, the account manager will have a portfolio that might range from 5 to 50 accounts. The decision as to whether an account manager should have a portfolio of one, five or 50 accounts is an important strategic one.

Joe – We’re Doubling Your Quota

To illustrate this point, consider Joe Edwards, the sales director for Atos UK & Ireland whom we interviewed for this book. Edwards started his sales career with Hewlett-Packard (HP) where one of his clients was Boots, the pharmaceutical and retailing company. Senior management at HP then made a strategic decision to reclassify Boots as a key account as they believed it had significant sales potential.

Joe Edwards: After about a year as a sales executive at HP and having a dozen or so accounts, the company turned around and said, ‘Actually, Joe, we just want you to focus on Boots Pharmaceuticals, and we’re going to double your quota.’

I learned that I was skimming the surface with Boots for a year and it was nice and comfortable because I had lots of other accounts I could fall back on if I wasn’t getting the numbers out of Boots. Then the company said: you don’t have a choice; you either make your numbers out of Boots, or you don’t.

That drives a very different set of behaviours, and I thought to myself: “how am I going to do this?”

Key Account Management

One of the most fundamental strategic decisions a company can make in its journey towards customer-centricity is the segmentation of its clients. The reason that it’s important to have a clear agreed approach to segmentation is that it drives much of the account management strategy and often the operational strategy needed to service those customers. It also requires a fundamental change in mindset for the account manager.

Joe Edwards: I had to understand what Boots was all about as a business. That meant spending a lot of time on-site to the point where I spent about three days a week with them.

I used to hold clinics in the canteen and anyone who was about who had an IT problem would come and see me. Bit by bit, I built up a set of relationships and trust that convinced them that I wasn’t just in it for taking the order, but I was in it for the long term.

I was trying to improve service and the relationship between the two companies for mutual benefit. As a result, I learned a lot about account planning from the perspective of getting further penetration into the client company. I didn’t know enough about the supply chain or stock room in Boots which we had some opportunity in. I needed to understand the customer from a business perspective, not just from an IT point of view.

“If you don’t have a ‘Plan’ you’re going nowhere”

Joe Edwards: The lesson I took from it was ‘The Plan’.

If you don’t have a plan, you’re going nowhere. And if you don’t create ‘customer intimacy’ in the sense of understanding what your client is, what market they’re playing in, and what new things you can bring to the client to excite them on a regular basis.

If you’re not bringing anything to the table, and therefore the relationship starts to decline.

Key Account Plans

Joe took these lessons with him to his subsequent sales roles. At Atos, account planning for key accounts became systematic and strategic for all key accounts. When Joe was Sales Director for Atos UK & Ireland, the company had almost 10,000 staff and Joe Edwards’ task was to deliver annual revenues of nearly £1 billion from its customer base. Account planning was critical, particularly for key accounts.

Joe Edwards: What that means is not just putting the plans in place and monitoring every quarter as usual. We would, in our top accounts, have account reviews with the executive board. It was making sure that the CEO and the CXO were all over our accounts on a regular basis.

On those top accounts, we’re going to spend time with them. We’re going to prioritise our time and make several calls a week where we get out there and start talking properly to this client base.

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Customer at the Heart

That interview with Joe Edwards – and many others – was taken from Customer at the Heart: How B2B Leaders Build Successful Customer-centric Organisations by John O’Connor and Peter Whitelaw and is available in hard cover or on Kindle.