The role of the account manager in Strategic Account Planning
Sunday, April 12th, 2009The role of the account manager
The job performed by the account manager varies between organizations. The objective, typically, is to work with the nominated customer to maximize its lifetime value to his/her company and to maximize the lifetime value of his/her company to the customer. To do so he/she will carry out a number of
activities, including:
Establishing and maintaining relationships throughout the customer’s organization.
Co-ordinating his/her firm’s activities and work with customer contacts to ensure that the trading process works smoothly.
Communicating the customer’s needs, priorities and key initiatives within his/her organization.
Negotiating and obtaining orders/contracts.
Preparing and implementing the account plan.
The role of the account manager in account planning
In ‘best practice’ organizations the account manager drives the account planning process in a number of ways:
Developing a deep understanding of the customer’s business and their priorities.
Gaining a deep understanding of their own organizations objectives and strategies and the implications thereof
Providing advice and helping the customer solve problems thereby building mutual trust which is essential to mutually productive account planning processes.
Conducting internal account planning sessions with the account team to both gain the benefit of their thinking and their commitment.
Provide coaching and leadership to the account team to motivate them and enhance the quality of their inputs.
Engage the customer in the planning process thereby making the process more realistic.
Leverage the value and expertise of the entire company, increasing both the profile of the customer internally and increasing the ideas input into the plan.
Coordinate resources so as to present one face to the customer through achieving congruent thinking and vision by the whole account team.
Integration of senior management into the process, enabling both the inputs and outputs to assume a greater power and momentum within the business.
Using the planning process to build the relationship with the customer and add additional dimensions that increase its interest and strength.
The challenge for most account managers is to balance the tensions between short-term revenue and profit generating pressures and investing for enhanced long-term relationship capital.
The major challenges of key account planning
Preparing the strategic account plan is a non-trivial exercise. It is both challenging and time consuming. Done well it substantially enhances the power and impact of the key account management process with both the customer and internally within the supplier’s organization, generating high returns on the time and energy invested.
Amongst the main inhibitors and challenges to effective implementation of successful planning are:
Collecting reliable information about the position of competitors in the individual customer account.
General competitor information is usually readily available but only of limited use. What is needed is detail about how each specific competitor is doing in the customer, what they have done historically and what they plan to do in the future. This needs both finely tuned antennae to detect productive sources of information and detective reasoning and deduction skills.
Selecting the most appropriate strategy based on one’s own strengths and the competitor’s vulnerabilities. Developing the best strategy is partly the product of good analysis and systematic processes but equally of creative insight and innovation.
Getting the support of internal colleagues to implementing the plan.
The account manager will spend as much, if not more time gaining internal support and resources to implement the account plan as external customer support. Without it the plan remains an interesting, but ineffectual document, not warranting the time invested in it.
Moving to joint planning with the customer.
The key account planning process provides a valuable tool that, amongst other benefits delivered, helps to link the customer closer to the supplier. Only by helping the customer to achieve its objectives and implement its strategies in its market place will the supplier create real value.
Strategic account planning – the key success criteria
1. Does the plan motivate and excite?
2. Does it generate internal commitment?
3. Does it generate customer commitment?
4. Does the plan generate greater confidence?
5. Is the plan regularly reviewed and action refined?
6. Does the plan provide the focus for activity?
7. Does the plan enable more to be achieved than without it?
