Sales White Paper: Great Account Management

Great
Account
Management
WHITE PAPER

Share this White Paper! Copyright ©TheTAS Group. All rights reserved. 1
WHAT IS ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT?
When we talk about Account Management, what exactly do
we mean? Many readers will have different ideas of what
Account Management is and what it involves. TheTAS Group
sees three areas. First, it’s about penetrating our key accounts,
getting into as much of the account as we want to. This works
on two dimensions. On the one hand it’s about reaching
the entire breadth of the account. On the other hand, it’s
about getting as many of our products and solutions into the
accounts.
Great Account Management
INTRODUCTION
TheTAS Group has been developing and sharing
Account Management Best Practices since the late
1980’s. In the last 7 years alone we’ve helped almost
55,000 account management professionals. Some
of our customers have also helped fine-tune and
influence the content of what we deliver over the
years.With that experience behind us, chances are that
we’ve seen all the variations and issues that can crop
up, and we’ve helped organizations the world over to
beat them.
ThisWhite Paper addresses what Account
Management is about. It also covers the how, that is
the how to do account management, and how you can
get great at it. Thirdly, it looks at the benefits of being
great and overcoming the typical challenges that
business in the 21st century throws at us.
Within the readership of thisWhite Paper there will
inevitably be different levels of knowledge and
experience in Account Management. Some readers
will perhaps just be starting out on their Account
Management career. Others may be sophisticated
practitioners, looking to validate their own insights into
the market. ThisWhite Paper is aimed at the middle
ground, to cater to the widest range of requirements.
If you feel that your needs are not met, or would like
to learn more aboutTheTAS Group sales performance
methodologies, technologies and solutions, we urge
you to get in touch with us directly. You can do this via
info@thetasgroup.com.
If we’re doing this well, and have the right level of
relationships with our customers, then we fulfil the second
role of Account Management, which is to create the kind of
relationships that help to defend against any competitive
encroaches.
Thirdly, Account Management has a very important role in
targeting and creating new business within the account base
or accounts portfolio. This could be in the form of brand new
accounts, new products, or finding new routes to market.

WHAT ARETHETOP INITIATIVES FOR
ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT?
What challenges are facing the account management
profession? Interestingly enough,TheTAS Group has been
asking over 2000 organizations this very question since 2007.
What came out of this was that existing customers were
identified as a key, if not the key revenue growth opportunity
going forward. Indeed, the top 5 initiatives for organizations
were Revenue Growth, Customer Retention, Profit Growth,
Sales Effectiveness and Increased Revenue per Customer.
Four of these are lagging indicators, business results that
come in some time after sales activity for a certain time
period. They tie directly to account management work and
how well it is done. Sales Effectiveness, while it’s number 4 in
the table, is still viewed as‘mandatory’, or‘very important’by
84% of all respondents, and this a leading indicator.
Account management is all about using resources effectively
and it is sales effectiveness that drives the success in the other
initiatives. If the sales effectiveness is right, the others follow,
and that is the focus ofTheTAS Group.
Furthermore, the same survey found that 55% of
organizations feel that they’re not maximizing the potential
of their existing accounts. That means account management
professionals are collectively leaving billions of dollars on the
table every year, or worse still, leaving all that business there
for the competition to sweep it up.
This is probably why, in the same survey, 48% of companies
said they were planning significant investment in account
management improvement.
Top 5 Initiatives Percentage
Revenue Growth 92%
Customer Retention 87%
Profit Growth 84%
Sales Effectiveness 84%
Increased Revenue per Customer 70%
WHAT ARETHE ISSUES IN ACCOUNT
MANAGEMENT?
So what are the issues here? What is preventing us from
doing this, what is stopping us from getting where we need
to be, to be great?
The first issue is often lack of knowledge, and that’s not
just the‘what’to do. With account management you also
need to know how to do something. In many cases while
account management professionals know what to do,
they’re sometimes at a loss as to how to go about doing it.
We make this distinction when we talk about process and
methodology. Process is the‘what’you should do in order
for you to get from A to B. Methodology is the‘how’you
choose to do it. To choose a driving analogy, how you get
to your destination is a function of what lane you drive in, at
what speed, down which roads, where you decide to break
your journey, all with the desired effect of getting to your
destination given your requirements.
Account management, especially when it involves account
teams, marketing departments and partner organizations, can
be a complex task. Information sharing and communication
are critical. Everyone needs to be on the same page, knowing
the objectives and their specific role in accomplishing them.
When people are in different regions and don’t have the
right tools at their disposal, then planning, updating and
disseminating the knowledge and instructions becomes a
major ordeal.
These problems get thrown into even greater relief when you
consider global accounts and global account teams. Getting a
global account team properly aligned across regions, borders,
languages and cultures, to act as one unit, helping each
other, can be a very big task. These reasons are probably the
main ones that contribute to the feeling among the 55% of
organizations that their account management is not yet great.

HOW DOYOU DO GREAT ACCOUNT
MANAGEMENT?
In theTAS Group’s experience, which distils two decades’
worth of best practice, it is generally lack of knowledge that
is the most critical issue. So how do you do great account
management? There are five main areas to great account
management. These are: profile, segment, create, select and
execute.
Before you develop your
‘go to market’strategy, you
first need to do the market
research. Only then can you
begin to understand the
profile of the market and
your customer – the issues
your customers think about
and their organizational
structure.
Certain slices of an account are more attractive than others.
So you need to segment the account – establishing which
particular destinations in the account are of high value to
both you and your customer.
Once you’ve prioritized the segments in your account, then
you can look to create new opportunities.These solutions
must address the business needs of the customer, based on
your ability to understand their needs.
With lots of new opportunities created, you need to select the
appropriate strategy to approach the account and focus on
those areas that will provide maximum return on your efforts.
But as they say – when a ship misses a harbor, it’s rarely the
harbor’s fault.With the right strategy, you need to focus on
great execution – building a business development plan for
the account while leveraging marketing, partners and other
resources to help you succeed.
If you adopt, use and keep using a structured account
planning methodology, you’ll fix issues before it becomes too
late, lose your way less often, and get to where you want to
be.
PROFILEYOUR CUSTOMER
In the physical retail business they say it’s all about 3
important things, location, location and location. In Account
Management it’s also about 3 important things, research,
research, and research.
When you are developing an account plan – it’s all about
knowledge and knowing your customer’s mind comes from
understanding it. Before you even start planning, you need
to know a lot of things about the customer. These include:
goals, markets, industry trends, competitors, relative market
position, financial performance, merger and acquisitions
activity, and the structure of the account itself.
Today, the role of the professional account manager –
indeed that of the entire account team – is to create value,
not just communicate it. You need to understand what the
customer values before you know how to position your value.
Understanding the landscape your customer is living on is
critical and is related to something called mutual value.
Mutual value is the desired destination you want to reach
when building a business relationship with your customer
and it’s where the investment levels of you and your customer
are truly aligned. If you don’t get that alignment, then either
you or your customer is not getting the return on effort.
Organizations are usually comfortable articulating the
value for their own products or services. And this is where
the homework comes in, because you can’t find the areas
of mutual value until you know what is valuable to your
customer. If organizations get the homework right, they have
a great foundation. This will save a lot of time in the long
term and will also help establish immediate credibility for you
when you collaborate with your customer.
S1 S2
BU1
BU2

a true partnership with your customers for very significant
value – and that’s what account management is all about.
Operating as a trusted advisor can be expensive. If your
customer is not willing to invest with you then you’re wasting
resources. You need to understand what the customer values
and how or if, based on your resources, you can deliver that
value profitably. If you’ve ever been unable to answer the
question‘what business project of my customer’s does my
product support?’, then you’ll know you haven’t figured
out the elements that are central to understanding your
customer’s business.
After determining the kind of relationship you should have,
you also need to think about the client’s business drivers
and associated critical success factors. Then you’re able to
categorize the kinds of opportunities you have, and develop
new ones – from the installed base variety through to the
potential new opportunities.
It is important to acknowledge that opportunities created by
you are by definition unqualified, and you need to choose
carefully which ones to work on.
SELECTYOUR STRATEGY
Strategy selection is built on the work you will have done
so far, and you need to regroup and look at all business,
installed, current and potential. By giving your installed base
opportunities and current opportunities due consideration,
you can decide which ones are worthy of taking their place
alongside the potential opportunities in your view of the
account. This picture will enable you to determine your
entire account level objectives and devise your strategies to
maximize the return from the Account.
You must consider the resource implications, the risks and
the costs of your selected strategies – and equally look at
the balance of your account plan. Think about the correct
combination of business and service units. Think about
whether there really is mutual value there. And think about
revenues in the short versus the long term.
The last part of strategy selection is to develop a revenue
objective for each target unit. This gives you a good picture of
the overall revenue potential your effort represents.
SEGMENTYOUR ACCOUNT
Account segmentation is the process of identifying all the
discrete divisions or units within an enterprise account, where
you might find a fit for one of the solutions you offer.
A good place to start is Business Units and Service Units.
Business Units manage the primary customer-facing activity
of the company. Strategic decisions are made here. Service
Units work internally to serve the Business, and they are
typically areas like IT or purchasing, HR and so on. There is
a tendency for account managers to focus their attention
on service units as the easy to spot budget holders, at the
expense of the opportunities lurking in the business units.
When you’ve figured out the Units, you need to weight them,
to help you find those intersections of what is important to
you and important to them. The first part of this equation is
easy. But you can’t get the second part unless you adopt the
customer’s perspective. Put yourself in their shoes and be as
objective as you can. Looking at how these map out, mark
out the various focal points – yours and your client’s – and
look at the points of intersection. Some are going to be more
important than others. A professional approach to Account
Management walks you through the steps of identifying the
mutual priorities, and these are where the potential lies.
This is a very important stage in great account management
too, because the decisions that you make here build the
foundation of your account plan. You should make sure
they’re all taken with the customer’s perspective as your
spectacles.
CREATE NEW OPPORTUNITIES
In the create stage, you’re looking to create new opportunities
within your accounts. It has already been emphasized how
important it is to understand your customer in order for you
to do this. Account management is a partnership with your
customer, and this partnership can be thought of in three
broad areas: first the level of relationship you enjoy with them;
second, their business drivers, business initiatives and how
they measure success; third, the mutual value of potential
opportunities.
Taking level of relationship first,TheTAS Group identifies
a number of levels of relationship.The highest form of
relationship is called theTrusted Advisor where you form

EXECUTE
In many ways execution is the last 10 yards of the race to get
to the tape. You’ve got to be decisive there. But you’ve got
to be in the right position after the first 90 yards, and that first
90 yards is about planning. Here’s where the methodology,
or the how to do it, can help. Remember that Account
Penetration is a team event, and you’ll want to involve your
team in this planning.
Once you have identified the goal for your account, there are
a number of objectives you will want to achieve: Revenue
objectives – for your current and installed base opportunities;
Business Development objectives – for your potential
opportunities that you identified in your Account Map and
Cross-Account Objectives – which ensure that you effectively
manage your extended team of specialists, such as marketing
and partners and which cover other non-revenue issues such
as‘customer satisfaction’– in other words, keeping your house
in order. Remember, don’t try and do everything, you have
your Account team, other internal teams like marketing, as
well as partners and other third parties to help you.
An individual’s decision orientation is often determined by the
role they play in a company or their natural leaning toward
one approach. Understanding an individual’s orientation
is critical to being able to relate to them, and offering them
solutions which fit their needs.
A company’s culture also impacts how that company buys,
and therefore how you should sell to it. As with decision
orientation, there are a number of types to consider. Each
culture requires a different selling approach, and you need
to assess the prevailing culture in your account to correctly
position yourself, your company, and your value proposition.
It is unrealistic to expect that you can provide all of the
answers for your customer all of the time. Maybe there are
partners whose skills and resources you can leverage. In fact,
there are probably many other organizations involved with
your account and you may need to find partners that can
help. These could be influence partners who can provide
access or complementary offerings, or reseller partners,
who can provide additional coverage and implementation.
Leveraging partnerships can accelerate and extend your
reach, but you should treat them well, like you would treat
your customer, while making sure you see return on your
efforts.
RECAP ON GREAT ACCOUNT
MANAGEMENT
First there is the research, so that you can profile the market
and the business challenges your customers think about and
their organizational structure.
Then you need to segment the account to find out the
pockets of the customer’s business which are important to
them and also to you.
Third, you should look to create new opportunities which
meet the business needs of your customer, built on your
understanding of their needs.
Fourth, you should analyze and select the appropriate
strategy to address the account and focus on those areas that
will provide maximum return on your efforts.
Fifth and finally, you need to focus on great execution,
which involves building a business development plan for
the account while leveraging marketing, partners and other
resources to help you succeed.
Keeping a structured account planning methodology will
make sure that your account management team is on
the same page, they all understand their role and what is
expected of them. You can’t do great account management
on your own, it won’t scale. It is definitely a team exercise.

HOWTECHNOLOGY HELPSYOU
EXECUTE
InTheTAS Group’s experience, organizations find that
execution is the most difficult. Technology has been at
the forefront of trying to make things easier and better for
salespeople for quite some time. While some salespeople
struggle to see the‘what’s in it for them’from CRM systems,
there are now software applications that are designed with
the sales person exclusively in mind and are built around what
they need to do.
It is important to see technology as just another delivery
mechanism, but it has the power to scale, the power to
leverage and the power to inform and communicate, when
done the right way.
The software-as-a-service model, of which the screenshot
of Dealmaker fromTheTAS Group is an example, provides
anytime, anywhere access to a whole team of people,
and in the account management domain, this means that
the process of sharing, updating and communicating
information is made straightforward. In this picture, which
is an Opportunity Map for an enterprise account, all team
members can see at a glance the business units and service
units down the left hand side, they can see what solutions are
in the organization’s portfolio across the top, and they can see
where the opportunities are and the value associated with
them. There are also links to business drivers, initiatives and
critical success factors for the team to follow. This is just one
screen of a software application, but what it illustrates is that
your account management team is properly informed and
engaged, and this greatly increases the chances of successful
execution.
As well as software tools to improve communication
and productivity, the Internet is also making account
management more effective. The advent of web 2.0, with
blogs, discussion forums and multi-media content means
account management professionals can reinforce their own
knowledge and execution best practice whenever they like.
Account Managers can simply go to the web and view the
appropriate content. Rather than being pulled back to base
for time-consuming refresher courses, they can get what they
need on the job, which is‘just in time, just enough, just for me.’
THE GLOBAL ACCOUNT
Nowhere is the idea of team execution more crucial than
in the global account. Global accounts can be fraught
with problems, with geographically dispersed teams,
language and cultural differences, and different divisions or
departments overlapping and trying to sell different solutions
or sometimes the same solutions into the same account.
Communication and awareness of what the other team
members are doing can be a nightmare. You’ll know what we
mean if you’ve been in a meeting with the global account and
the customer is telling you things about another part of your
company that you didn’t know about and which affects your
customer in some way. What kind of a signal does that send
out to your customer about your ability to coordinate your
account management and to execute properly?
Global accounts are generally very large, and commercial
activity, merger, takeover or sell-off activity is happening
somewhere in an account like this all the time. But when a
company is properly aligned around the account’s Business
and Service Units, has a deep understanding of the customer,
and all the regions are interacting properly, helping each
other out where necessary, then great things can happen and
the bond between global team and global account is almost
impregnable.

GREAT ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT
BEHAVIORS AND BENEFITS
So what does first class account management look like? It
is about a collection of certain kinds of behaviors. It’s about
sound planning, thoughtful opportunity creation and
intelligent strategy selection. It’s about good team interaction
and great team execution. And it’s about committed
information sharing and communication.
When this set of behaviors is consistently replicated in
account management, the right results emerge. These results
can be grouped into 3 headings: revenue and profit growth;
customer satisfaction and retention; and internal alignment
and velocity. In terms of revenue and profit growth, this
is the creation new opportunities. Organizations are also
penetrating more of the account and selling more of their
products or solutions. All these good things come from
adherence to account management best practices.
In terms of customer satisfaction and retention, organizations
develop a greater understanding of their customer’s business.
They also garner a deeper two-way relationship with their
customer. Their solutions are aligned to their customer’s
needs, solving their problems, doing what’s important and
valuable to them and hitting their critical success factors. All
this comes as a result of doing the research and earning the
right to collaborate with their customer on mutual business
value.
Internal alignment and velocity refers to both the account
team and other areas outside it. This generally relies on
good technology as the foundation, walls and roof. With it,
account teams can update and disseminate account plans
quickly and easily. There is real-time information sharing.
Finally, teamwork is accelerated because of the productivity
gains of being hooked in to a CRM-type system, your account
management system, and your opportunity management
system.
HOWTO APPLY GREAT ACCOUNT
MANAGEMENTTOYOUR OWN ROLE
Applying this to your own account management role is worth
exploring, because the best practices in the world don’t work,
if they don’t work for you. This Paper has covered account
management in general terms, with a slight bias towards
larger account management, and not all readers do‘general’
account management. It is a complex, challenging but
rewarding profession, and some readers will be working at a
global level, some at a national level and some at a regional
or territory level. Some will be performing hybrid roles.
Terminology abounds in the Account Management business,
and some will also refer to their accounts as ABC accounts, or
perhapsTier 1,Tier 2 andTier 3 accounts.
Whatever the
terminology,TheTAS
Group likes to take a
role-based approach
to thinking about
account management,
because a‘one size fits
all’approach will not
always work. At the
top of the pyramid
shown there is the
global account, and the role would be as one of a large global
team supporting the account, as represented by the n:1. At
an enterprise level, there might be one dedicated account
manager per account, but although that person’s role is 1:1,
it would still be to treat their account as a marketplace and
penetrate business and service units.
With a portfolio of smaller accounts, portfolio account
managers would clearly perform a 1:several or 1:n role
and work even harder to leverage partner and marketing
organizations to work on B and C accounts. Then there
are hybrid roles, usually territory managers, who would
manage both a region from a direct perspective and a range
of partners. With such a range of account management
roles,TheTAS Group strongly recommends readers think
about where they are in the pyramid and establish their best
practice accordingly.
n:1
1:1
1: n

SUMMARY
ThisWhite Paper addressed what account
management is, the results it is looking to achieve and
what the issues are that prevent organizations from
achieving this.
Having covered the what, the Paper then covered
how great management should look. The five stages
of the account management approach are to profile
the market and customer, segment the account,
create new opportunities which reflect the customer’s
perspective on business, analyze and select the
strategy best able to achieve the goals for the account,
and finally plan and execute on that strategy.
Teamwork and team execution is of paramount
importance. Technology can help here, and the
leveraging and reinforcing power of technology can
keep an account team informed, committed and
coordinated, no matter how globally dispersed they
might be.
Finally, the Paper outlined the behaviors synonymous
with great account management and detailed the
results in terms of revenue and profit growth, customer
satisfaction and retention, and internal alignment
and velocity, with the proviso that readers adapt best
practice to their own account management role.
TheTAS Group hopes that thisWhite Paper has given
readers an insight into howTheTAS Group and our
customers believe that great account management is
within your reach. If you wish to find out more, please
contact us at info@thetasgroup.com.

ABOUTTHETAS GROUP
TheTAS Group helps progressive sales organizations increase their sales velocity resulting in higher win rates, bigger
deals, shorter sales cycles, and more qualified deals in the pipeline. Our unique value is deep methodology embedded
within intelligent Dealmaker software, 100% native in Salesforce. Smart coaching, delivered just-in-time, improves
sales performance and accelerates sales results.We have changed the paradigm of improving sales effectiveness from
traditional sales training to delivering sales methodology and insights when and where the sales person is working a
sales opportunity.
For more information visit www.thetasgroup.com
Copyright ©TheTAS Group. All rights reserved.This briefing is for customer use only and no usage rights are conveyed. Nothing herein may be reproduced in any form without written permission ofTheTAS Group.

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