If many of your customers are “sitting on their hands”— citing Brexit and Trump and Iran and US-China trade war—then your sales are flat, or declining; you must downsize your costs or upsize your productivity. Upsizing your people’s productivity is easy to say, hard to do. It’s always been tough to do, but now many of your people face constant change and face constant stress. For example, imagine working in one of the big four banks urgently completing many recommendations of The Royal Commission.

Change, Business Problems, Gary PeacockGary Peacock1 October 2019Value, Resilience, ChangeComment

How to avoid overconfidence when managing major accounts?

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.

Change drives success in Managing Major Accounts

Everything written about managing major accounts strategically has one theme: it’s not a marketing or sales campaign, it’s a leadership initiative driven by the C-Suite.

The overarching key to long-term success is how well the organisation changes to manage strategic accounts differently.

The pace of change produces problems for you to solve - locally and globally!

Global industries and local communities struggle with the pace of change. Typically, the pace of change is reducing resources like time, money and people. Reducing resources creates difficult problems that appear to be impossible to solve, what we call impossible problems. In local and global marketplaces, impossible problems occur for organisations and for individuals. For all these impossible problems, we need brave individuals to take action to solve the problems and then implement the solutions.

Why Bridge Silos and Get Your Departments Rowing in One Boat

Executives regularly complain their departments are not working together well. In some large organisations, executives spend most of the time refereeing disputes between departments. Why does this happen?

Share Account Management Results Internally!

We’ve worked with global companies embedding account management frameworks and these companies continue to be successful. What drives that success?

How can you persuade a few to change the many?

Have you ever needed to change a large group’s thinking or behaviour? A difficult situation, but recent research can help with this. As always, remember to stay ethical, you can use this for good and bad.

How many people in a group do you need to change the minds of others?

Change, Persuasion, Gary PeacockGary Peacock22 October 2018Persuasion, Change, Groups, Persuading for ResultsComment

How Can You Change Made-up Minds - Part 2

For those cases when you face people with made-up minds, we continue to give you some ideas to get unstuck and to get other people to change their minds. In part 1 we used some of the ideas of persuasion guru, Robert Cialdini.

Many powerful ways to change made-up minds use emotion. Business psychologist Peter Sullivan often explains that the word emotion can be written as e-motion and explains this as e is the electrical force that puts us into motion.

Gary Peacock, PersuasionGary Peacock29 June 2018Persuasion, Persuading for Results, Change, Emotion, StoriesComment

How Can You Change Made-up Minds? - Part 1

Regularly, clients ask how to change others minds, especially when it appears the other person has made up their mind and seems unlikely to change. Sometimes this is because you are not trying to persuade the other person, you are just giving them your opinion and then getting frustrated because they don’t agree with you. But let’s assume you have tried some professional ways to persuade and you are stuck. In a series of blogs, we will give you some ideas to get unstuck and to get other people to change their minds.

Gary Peacock, PersuasionGary Peacock8 June 2018Persuasion, Persuading for Results, Change, Uncertainty, Motivate, ActionComment

Four Strategic Insights from Value-Based Healthcare

What insights did I get from attending last week’s Medical Technology Association of Australia’s (MTAA) summit on Value-Based Health Care?

Change, Gary Peacock, Account Management, SAMGary Peacock30 April 2018Strategy, Value, Healthcare, ChangeComment

Focus on Growth_Now! [Part 2]

Companies are spending more time on how to compete in competitive markets using value. Four factors give best companies a competitive edge that drives growth:

Intimately manage your top 10 – 20 key clients.
Identify and manage your exceptional & strategic suppliers.
Focus on your unique value proposition for your market – your competitive edge.
Align throughout the company around the top 3 factors, always— allocating resources, developing talent & managing operating costs— for growth.

In an earlier blog, we explained the first two factors that drive growth. In this blog, we will expand on factors 3 and 4.

Focus on Growth - Now!

By Stephen Kozicki & Gary Peacock

Over the past three years, the world has changed dramatically, and forever from digital disruption, Brexit and Trump. Your industry and your top clients are feeling the stress as their markets change, fast. These fast changes mean that your business needs to be more agile in response to the market. For companies unprepared for these changes this means lower revenue and lower profits.

Our blogs are usually short and punchy to grab your attention. This blog is a little longer than usual because delivering growth is just too important and too urgent to reduce the ideas down to a page, so we have split it into two parts.

To Grow – Act Now!

With customer's you can't afford to lose, watch out for the C word [Culture vs IT]

People rarely talk about the C word because it's not something easy to mention in business circles. Mention culture and at least one business person in the room will roll their eyes. Why? People are reluctant to talk about culture because they have seen many unsuccessful attempts to change the culture. Often these attempts use posters and coffee cups.

Most attempts to change culture fail. Why? Because it's tough and it's often an unequal fight between well-meaning management and the existing culture: a man and a shotgun versus a man and a tank.

So, should you give up? Start by understanding the risk.

Change, Gary PeacockGary Peacock2 February 2018Culture, IT, ChangeComment

Your Future is Faster

In Engineering and Psychology, there is a principle of Least Work. That's least physical work and least mental work. Our experience tells us if something is mentally hard, many people will tend to do nothing or keep doing the same.

So what?

Business Problems, Gary PeacockGary Peacock15 December 2017Future, Fast, Rapid Results from Teams, ChangeComment

What are the barriers to organisational change?

The first barrier to change is most people don't like change. They tend to stick to what they know and what worked before. However, change is happening: like it or not.

What's your strategy for 2017?

We ended 2016 with a real wake-up call for everybody in a leadership, executive or management role – the status quo of business was disrupted.

Over the holiday break I would take a book down to the beach to read which inevitably attracted conversation from other beach goers, firstly on me being the only person reading a book with everybody else on some device.

I liked the book because it challenged some of my concepts around leadership and self-motivation and that is always a sign of a great book.

What changes would drive you to manage your accounts more strategically?

The business environment is constantly changing. These changes in markets, competition and technology are hurting the results of many companies.

The priorities for companies are to create superior customer value, retain high-value customers, be more innovative and be more efficient. However, there is immense pressure to drive down operating costs, compete increasingly on price, and respond to rising customer demands.

Many companies find it impossible to respond to change and simultaneously pursue strategic priorities. So, they end up mainly reacting to change.

How can you use these changes to your advantage and find opportunities for improving your business results?

Why manage accounts strategically?

Managing accounts strategically is a proven way to systematically monitor changes in your customers and competitors and make strategic choices for the future. Companies across many industry sectors have successfully applied the Strategic Account Management (SAM) framework to drive relentless positive change in their business.

So, what are the benefits of working more strategically?

Why is executive sponsorship so important in change initiatives?

Executive sponsorship is any change initiative is imperative to success. It is just one of the five risks to managing the change: implementing strategic account management, as discussed in 'What are the risks with organisational change?'

With a SAM program the entire business must own major accounts. There must be genuine commitment and active involvement from the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and other senior executives..

What are the risks with organisational change?

How do you manage organisational change with Strategic Account Management (SAM)?

Introducing a SAM program into your organisation must be treated as a major change initiative. Treating the project as purely a sales project is setting yourselves up for failure.

A SAM program takes time to get results and is an initiative to change organisational culture.