B2B Account Management - beyond the jargon

Customer-centric growth is the destination, but what’s the pathway to growth once you’re comfortable with your customer acquisition (CAC) payback?

Pose this question to top account management practitioners and you’ll likely hear a variation of:

“Customer understanding”, “Effective opportunity identification,” “Best-in-class support,” “Personalised approach & personal connection,” “Long-term relationship building,” “Ability to demonstrate recurring impact,” and “Effective account resourcing/prioritisation,” among others.?

Pose the question to new business professionals and the focus will likely shift to “Effective positioning,” “Understanding & matching buying criteria” “Establishing product / market fit” with likely shorter timeframes & planning cycles.?

Pose the question to inexperienced B2B sales leads and you might hear the following:

“Land & expand.”, “Scale up the team.”?, “Build it, they will come.”

The latter three are likely generic bits of business jargon that you’ve heard before.??

And whilst they can sound flashy…?

And they can look flashy, especially when paired with some nice PowerPoint charts or some slides on your vision, mission & proposition.?

But if you peel back the layers of the onion, and there’s no robust sales plan or tactics in place behind these terms, they run the risk of becoming meaningless to your commercial team.?

The jargon can also further distance sales leaders from any emotional connection with their direct reports.?

Or worse yet, they can even spill into your customer relationships.?

For example, in a former role of mine our Sales Director would refer to clients in terms such as volume or value of “Stock” to renew. Urghhh!?

And whilst some may gloss over this terminology, it may not have been a coincidence that the entire team disbanded under this Director’s stewardship impacting churn considerably. The way sales teams are managed has a direct impact on customer satisfaction. wow, who'd have thought it?

So how do we avoid the pitfalls of a disconnect with the big picture, the sales execution & team bond whilst keeping our eyes on the growth prize??

For me, ‘Account Management is a science that blends rational and emotional appeal’?

So, if we’re looking to connect our strategy with some science – we’d likely look at the sales bowtie (Ref: Sales as a Science).??

And we’d likely be pairing this up with questions & data such as:?

• Actions taken to move account through the bowtie stages.
• Current Portfolio – volume / value analysis, key account maps & overall SWOT.
• Size of Prize & risks
• Volume of presentations & proposals

Combined with data on your solution’s rational appeal such as:

• Customer fit with ICP.
• Feature set fit with ICP pain points across various stakeholders.
• Alignment of proposition messaging with customer mindset: For example, will Cost saving or De-risking appeal more than Opportunity gains /Improvement?

AND then assume that the value of emotional appeal is almost always underestimated by leaders and practitioners alike. Humans (B2B buyers especially) project themselves as highly rational with suppliers but most decisions, in truth, are much more influenced by emotional factors than we care to think about (Harvard research).?

With this, it’s worth scoring our emotional bank account (Ref: Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) with our key prospects & customers. To establish whether we’re in credit or debit with our emotional bank account, we can bring in a snapshot of data (not simply intuition) including but not limited to:

• Any lead scoring or predictive analytics you have.
• Face time (both video conferencing & extra bonus for in-person meetings)
• Engagement with various stakeholders (Ref Miller Heiman – User buyer, Tech buyer, Economic buyer & champion/coach)
• Participation in customer advisory board or BETA testing programs
• Any conflict / troubleshooting & time taken for resolution.
• Ease or difficulty with previous negotiations
• Popsicle moments (Ref Sales as a Science) or Amazon’s surprise & delight (Unlocking customer smiles)

Of course, one can add to these metrics over time, but the trio of different reference points (Science, rationale for purchase, emotional connection to buyer) should serve as a nice temperature check on your client base & flag up if our emotional account is “overdrawn.”

These three reference points should also act as a pathway for your Account management team to self-correct (Ref: Sales rules of the road) their activity & behaviors over time, breeding adaptability and results over time.?

And adaptability is not only one of the key traits for top-performing sales teams of today… But also, a killer attribute for your business to add to its arsenal when navigating the turbulent pathway to growth in the future.

Author: Martin Head

LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/martinhead/

Martin Head is Enterprise Account Director, at Capture One, the leading SaaS Photo editing software and has worked in various commercial functions at Dynata, Centaur Media & Ascential leading relationships with corporate customers including the likes of Tesco, Adidas, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson (Kenvue), Sainsburys, Santander, Accenture, HSBC, Vodafone & others.