How to avoid overconfidence when managing major accounts?

“Through SAM we have unleashed a new level of focus and energy that has made the whole journey extremely rewarding for everyone.”

— Chris Cowley, Managing Director

Image by Garoch_Pixabay

Don’t Fly Too Close To The Sun

A key to long term success is how well an organisation transforms to manage strategic accounts differently. Recently, we worked with a CEO of a large global client who decided the way of the future was managing their most important accounts in a structured way. Our recommended approach, which was not accepted, was completing a structural internal audit to see how they currently managed strategic accounts and then interviewing a few of their top accounts.

However, the CEO was confident their current approach was working and he did not need in-depth analysis.  The CEO started on the change journey and excitedly changed all titles of salespeople to account managers.  Many writers often refer to companies that don’t change behavior as suffering from Icarus Syndrome, and I agree.  ( http://www.adaptivecycle.nl/index.php?title=The_Icarus_Paradox )  Changing job titles on a business card from salesperson to account management is as flawed as Icarus flying to the sun.

Icarus.

Icarus (1906) illustration by Edmund Joseph Sullivan

In Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of Daedalus. Daedalus created a huge maze for King Minos of Crete. To keep the secret of the maze, King Minos imprisoned Daedalus and Icarus in a tower.

Daedalus a master craftsman hatched a clever escape plan by creating two sets of wings made from feathers, glued together with wax. He taught Icarus how to fly and warned him not to fly too high towards the sun because the wax would melt. Together, they flew from the tower towards freedom. However, Icarus soon forgot his father's warning and started flying higher, until the wax melted under the scorching sun. His wings dissolved and he fell into the sea and drowned.

To avoid a fate like Icarus, organisations that want to manage major accounts strategically need to transform the whole organisation. We have worked with many successful organisations across the globe where the initiative is driven by the C-Suite with one senior executive owning the transformation.

Change Success

Transforming your organisation with Strategic Account Management (SAM) is a major change initiative. Too often the SAM initiative is seen purely as a sales project. Like all change initiatives, there are many risks and organisational hurdles that need to be overcome.

The key to transforming any organisation is to have a project that unifies the whole. Over 25 years, I have never found a better way to change a business than managing your top 20 accounts in a more strategic way.

I believe that leaders and companies can easily fall into the trap of believing that their current way of managing top accounts is working and working well. This excessive self-confidence or hubris often means that any competitors activity in top accounts is dealt with by matching price and not leveraging value.

Every attempt to deal with a competitive threat with price matching is not strategic, but operational. The lure of maintaining market share at all costs is what we call ‘profitless volume.’  We don’t want to lose market share to a competitor, but each price drop has a short and long term effect on profitability.

SAM encourages everyone to be part of managing the top 20 accounts and everyone from account managers through to the C-Suite contribute value every day to each account. Every time a member of the executive team discusses any of the top 20 accounts, the conversation should include:

1. How do we add value today?

2. What do we need to do to continue to be relevant to this account?