Account Base Marketing

by cosawi | Jan 1, 2020 | ABM - Account Based Marketing

DO STRATEGIC ACCOUNT MANAGERS REQUIRE SUPERPOWERS?

TIME FOR ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING TO COME TO THE RESCUE

The global economy is becoming increasingly complex and, since we work in the strategic account management environment, we can see the impact it has on the day-to-day role of strategic account managers (SAMs). We are finding the skill set of the strategic account manager constantly evolving and increasing in demand due to today’s disruptive environment. With customer integration increasing, it creates additional complexity to build trustworthy relationships and partnerships. SAMs’ own organizations are evolving and often centralizing, adding more to the SAM’s plate not only in terms of skill set but also number of accounts, expectations for growth and required competencies. SAMs are being stretched thin, from both a customer and internal perspective. Today’s SAM really does feel like she/he needs superpowers to do the job.

How did we get here?

We are living in a world of skyrocketing complexity and information overload, and a combination of trends in today’s economy are driving companies to shift to a SAM culture and mindset. One of the key pressure points that we see is the increased complexity and diversity of types of customer problems suppliers are asked to solve. Facing more complex and broader issues, SAMs have no choice but to engage differently to differentiate themselves.

Living as we do in a world overloaded with data, we increasingly look to technology to help us deliver valuable, relevant customer hindsight, insight and foresight. But to do so requires better data management, including a mastery of how disparate data sources connect and communicate in order to translate this information into relevant customer insight and foresight.

As the closest person to the customer and the owner of the customer-supplier relationship, is the SAM or KAM alone with all of the demands wrought by the new economy? We argue the opposite. Every superhero needs a partner, and the very best SAMs know when and how to bring the best people to the table to ideate, innovate and create impact for their customers.

Enter Marketing.

But First...

Let’s take a moment to level set. As you read the word marketing, you may have thought of enterprise marketing, branding, positioning, awareness campaigns, advertisements or flashy public relations campaigns. Shifting to account-based marketing (ABM) isn’t any of these things. So what is it, and why is it so critical in today’s world? Account-based marketing is the art of integrating digital marketing and the customer-buying journey to support, accelerate and be part of solution creation with the SAM and the SAM team.

Did you know that:

• According to ITSMA, 75 percent of executives will read unsolicited marketing if it contains ideas relevant to their business.

• Customers are twice as likely to engage when offers and communications are personalized (per Salesforce).

• Seventy-four percent of B2B buyers conduct half of their research online before engaging a vendor (per Forrester).

Download the Article HERE

About the Author

Dominique Côté brings 30 years of experience leading commercial teams in global pharmaceutical and biotech organizations. Her consultancy work is focused on Commercial Excellence, Executive coaching & leadership, KAM/SAM roadmaps & journeys, as well as Account based Marketing.

She is an accomplished international business leader, recognized as a chief architect of global account program journeys, leading corporate changes and cultural shifts for customer-centric innovation and patient value.

Dominique is a panelist and keynote speaker in Europe and the U.S. in the areas of commercial Excellence and Customer centricity. She writes and is published in journals like Journal of Sales Transformation, Velocity, and others on these topics.

COE Components: Avoiding Complexity

by cosawi | Nov 21, 2019 | COE - Center of Excellence

COE Components: Avoiding Complexity

Avoiding the tendency toward too much complexity and focusing on the center of excellence components that are really needed is an art.

The essential components of a COE are also important drivers for success. Avoiding the tendency toward too much complexity and focusing on the COE components that are really needed is an art.

The Pillars

1. Competency and training curriculum to develop personalized learning journeys aligned to the learner’s needs while ensuring the cohesion of the engagement model.

2. Business analytics that include the tools, advanced analytics and insight production, as well as case-based recording to scale and replicate within the organization, aligning solution and value enablers to the account needs.

3. Account-based marketing and innovation to have the digital marketing align with the strategic account. This brings the customer buying journey, the 360-degree view of the account, the oxygen to enable the SAM to deep dive into the real needs of the customer and what they care about. It also supports the design thinking competency to push innovation for co-creation and broader value creation for the accounts.

The Process

Process is often a scary word, but a necessity. The process aligns the definition of a strategic account, the criteria to select and prioritize them, the account plan itself and the metrics and measurements. You find here as well the operating mechanism, meeting and reviewing strategic accounts with its purpose, members and outcomes. The more this process is done in conjunction with the customer, the better the outcome and often the opportunity. One of the most important processes is creating a community of practice, the people process to increase communication, alignment and best practices exchange. In complex organizations, internal communication is a huge challenge. A strong community of practice helps share learning, project and best practices, driving innovation

and accelerating the agility to scale and communicate within its own organization. This community of practice composed of the SAM with enabling functions, management and leaders creates the cohesion to the journey, sustaining the vision while being the agents of change and ensuring agility of the COE and processes to always adapt to the customer and the customer’s customer. This process of building a community of practice is most essential in decentralized matrix organizations to break internal silos and contribute to ongoing alignment. To be successful in the SAM journey requires a cultural shift with a mix of mindset, skillset and process and the freedom to pivot and adapt to the account environment and needs. In our complex, often-matrixed organizations, a well-established COE will enable real differentiation for the benefit of the customer and for profitability.

Download the Article HERE

About the Author

Customer-Centric vs. Roles Curriculums

by cosawi | Oct 21, 2019 | COE - Center of Excellence

Customer-Centric vs. Roles Curriculums

Training curriculums are a essential tool to initiate and install internal collaboration and bring cohesion.

Learning and development capabilities need to be integrated into the COE to build a customer-centric curriculum. This curriculum ensures that every customer-facing individual is aligned to the same engagement or selling model and this is a key success component of SAM transformation. Training curriculums are a essential tool to initiate and install internal collaboration and bring cohesion, avoiding misalignment of a company value proposition. To achieve this, a well-established COE – where the learning and development team builds curriculums with the customer-centric mindset and needs – is key. Such a COE-supported and centralized approach has the potential to establish engagement model branding, enabling a instinctive, differentiating engagement model shared by every customer-facing individual versus the traditional way of building role curriculums. Despite the complexity and variability of roles, centralized curriculums also provide the same principles to apply and create that differentiating model for engaging with the strategic accounts.

Think Global, Act Local: Focus on Localization

Many organizations that have implemented SAM realize that finetuning is needed to be successful, not only at the global culture and mindset level, but also at the level of local execution. For example, in life sciences, a SAM COE must have the flexibility to execute according to country healthcare archetypes. This means, depending on the decisionmaking and level of healthcare integration, the execution of the SAM competency and processes will vary.

Going faster than the evolution of the local health system will be detrimental to commercial success; falling behind will impede an ability to participate in and impact the creation of solutions for shared health issues. Centralizing common vision, strategy and main process within the COE is key, and is a pragmatic way to free up local SAM capabilities to focus and adapt efforts to locally varied business priorities and customer realities.

Breaking Down Silos: Enabling Alignment

SAM is a journey and is about team selling. Despite SAM being the owner of the relationship with the account, bringing value beyond products and services requires thorough organizational alignment, including the alignment of all enabling functions. COEs help enabling functions speak the same language as the commercial organization, aligning communication, content and purpose. Such COE efforts give functions like economic, outcome research, marketing and others greater capability to bring insight for the SAM to be differentiated in the relationship and in the mind of the customer as bringing business relevance and value. COEs also help enabling functions participate as a part of the team and have their voice at the table with the organization and customer teams, in order to foster innovative and valuable solutions delivered to the strategic accounts. Breaking down internal silos amongst functions remains one of the biggest barriers to overcome in the SAM journey, and COEs play a key role in this regard.

Download this PDF HERE

About the Author

Building global excellence

by cosawi | Sep 1, 2019 | Business Transformations, COE - Center of Excellence

Building Global
Centers of Excellence

The center of
excellence has
emerged as a best
practice for stabilizing
organizations

Much has been said about the challenges and values of building global centers of excellence for key account management (KAM) and strategic account management (SAM) as a strategic operational group within organizations. Each year, the Strategic Account Management Association (“SAMA”) issues awards for SAM programs and mature programs. One thing every winning company has in common is they all had an established centralized programming office, or center of excellence (“COE”). An irrelevant coincidence? We think not. Establishing a COE is the key success factor for implementing an effective strategic selling and strategic account management approach. Despite this fact, only 10 percent of SAMA member companies have a COE, let alone an effective one. With such a clear business opportunity, it is time to take a closer look at COEs, i.e., their challenges, benefits and key characteristics for SAM impact and success.

The COE has emerged as a best practice capable of stabilizing many organizations, independent of industry sector. These COEs can be the catalyst to create the right mindset, skillset and process for distinctive go-to- market and customer-centric engagement models, with direct mid- to long-term impact on bottomline results. Despite this fact, strategic account managers still report that their own internal organizations’ navigation and alignment is one of the biggest barriers to their success.

Years of operational integrations and globalization of many organizations’ enabling functions have provided great pilot programs opportunities for organizations to try, fail and learn how to be successful in centralizing SAM centers of excellence and programming. There is a fine balance needed to centralize operations, process and governance while preserving and enabling customer proximity and localization.

A better understanding of a COE’s primary benefits and characteristics is clearly needed to help companies overcome their internal barriers and failed initiatives. Effective COE operationalization requires a close attention to each of the following COE characteristics and values.

The Cultural Shift: Alignment
of Mindset

SAM is not only a business initiative, but a cultural shift and a journey. It requires passion, resilience and a strong understanding of SAMs ability to increase revenue generation. Effective SAM is at the core of how a company appears and stands out in front of its customer. If an organization wants its SAM initiatives to be successful, it must align both its SAM mindset and communication.

How is this done? By establishing an effective COE. By targeting integration and alignment of mindset and communication, COEs can drive cultural and engagement model continuity throughout the organization.

Implemented effectively, COEs can even avoid the creation of silos when SAM journeys are established outside of sales and commercial groups (as separate initiatives and engagement models).

Download this PDF HERE

About the Author

A SAM Journey & COE Keynote

by cosawi | May 20, 2015 | Others

A center of excellence is a critical success factor in any Strategic account management journey. Listen to a keynote from Dominique’s corporate time where she shares her journey in different organization and her learning.
Key NOTE Strategic account management organization conference

DO STRATEGIC ACCOUNT MANAGERS REQUIRE SUPERPOWERS?

TIME FOR ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING TO COME TO THE RESCUE

How did we get here?

But First...

About the Author

Recent Posts

COE Components: Avoiding Complexity

Avoiding the tendency toward too much complexity and focusing on the center of excellence components that are really needed is an art.

The Pillars

The Process

Download the Article HERE

About the Author

Recent Posts

Customer-Centric vs. Roles Curriculums

Training curriculums are a essential tool to initiate and install internal collaboration and bring cohesion.

Think Global, Act Local: Focus on Localization

Breaking Down Silos: Enabling Alignment

About the Author

Recent Posts

Building Global Centers of Excellence

The center of excellence has emerged as a best practice for stabilizing organizations

The Cultural Shift: Alignment of Mindset

About the Author

Recent Posts

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Building Global
Centers of Excellence

The center of
excellence has
emerged as a best
practice for stabilizing
organizations

The Cultural Shift: Alignment
of Mindset