In competitive positioning, the advantage lies in saying it first.
Salespeople should have access to what the competition is planning to do because, in competitive positioning, the advantage lies in saying it first. If you know that a competitor is going to raise an issue, it’s better that you raise it first. If possible, neutralize it and position it as an advantage for you.
If your competitor is allowed to come in and say things unchallenged or unanticipated, he or she gains an incredible amount of power. It takes up to 10 times more resources and effort to change someone’s mind than it does to help make it up in the first place. You can see why timely knowledge management can have a significant impact on competitive advantage.
If you plan to compete in a professional manner, you must anticipate issues and shape them — often without mentioning your competitor by name. Instead, you can say, “Other firms approach this area in this way. Here is our approach, and this is why we think it is superior.” The chances of having this perceived positively are much greater if you can anticipate the competition’s move.
Tools for Account Management
In the area of account management, the technology bar is raised once again. Not only do we need to manage an opportunity and the politics and pains therein, but if we’re trying to dominate a global account or we have a major strategic account, we also need to know the current status of every opportunity. If we don’t, the results can be disastrous.
This is where a CRM system can be of great value in identifying and cataloging opportunities worldwide.
Jon Hauck was delivering a Total Enterprise Account Management (T.E.A.M.) workshop to the Daimler Chrysler account team of one of our clients with attendees from the United States, Germany, and several other countries. The goal of the workshop was to build a global account plan.
As they went through the process, they discovered that the prospect actually had four strategic business units involved in the decision-making process, not three as they had originally thought!
This led to a call to the CIO, which resulted in identifying a key pain around a quality initiative, all unknown to the account team. Based on this knowledge, they were able to develop a plan to compete for, and ultimately win, the business.
Had they not invested in the account planning process and gotten everyone to collaborate on a plan, they would have missed a huge opportunity from a division that they didn’t even know existed.
With greater visibility into all opportunities throughout the world, by having all opportunities on the same system, you can achieve greater access, avoid conflicting pricing, and structure joint proposals that the competition can’t match. At the account management level, you also need to be able to drill down into individual opportunities to find out if they can be combined with other opportunities to outflank the competition. In many cases you have a better chance of winning a bigger deal than winning a smaller one.
New Research Tools
One of the first things we need to do is research the account and be very knowledgeable about the strategic issues and initiatives so that we can talk intelligently with executives, link our solutions to their high-level initiatives, and earn greater than commodity pricing. Technology and the Internet have been invaluable in enabling companies such as Hoovers and OneSource to gather information from a wide variety of sources and put it all in one place so that salespeople can quickly get the names of the executives, the issues, and the background information they need before calling on an account.
But outside electronic research is not enough. What you need to identify is pain, initiatives, and issues. The best source of this can be reporters and financial analysts. These people are paid to dig in and find the big, snarling, nasty problems that executives are embarrassed to admit.
Benchmarks for Pain Creation
Another good research organization for finding pains and issues for demand-creation selling is a company called Stratascope, Inc. Stratascope gathers industry statistics and available data on companies based on their financial reports. The company then works with salespeople to help them identify areas where an organization has a gap between its statistics or financial ratios and the industry standard. Using information from Stratascope, if an organization has a solution to the problem, they can actually create a value proposition based on closing that gap.
For example, a prospect averages 83 days sales outstanding in accounts receivable. The industry standard is 67, and the best in industry is 59. Based on the prospect’s financials, if you (the salesperson) can close that gap to meet the industry standard, you can show the prospect the savings and return on investment (ROI) he or she would experience as a result of implementing your solution. Maybe the result is an increase in earnings, more freed-up cash, or even an increase in shareholder value by a penny a share. This is a powerful approach in demandcreation selling that the consultants have been using for years.
Obstacles to Effective Account Management
There are some major organizational and cultural barriers to effective account management that are above and beyond what technology can solve. One is split policy and revenue recognition. Another is turf guarding, and a third, obviously, is communication.
Some salespeople would rather have 100 percent of zero than give up a percentage to someone else. This is the “me” mentality, and this mind-set has to be defeated internally in your culture if you are going to have a successful account management program.
Two of the bigger barriers to technology at the account management level are personal compensation issues and regional boundaries. When SAP was very small, it dominated several accounts because one salesperson could handle a major global account. When SAP became entrenched in other countries, there were internal fights in these accounts over whose share was whose.
The challenge is to keep these struggles internal and away from the client. Never let your service levels be affected by internal arguments.
The people who are probably the best, but not perfect, at this are actually the big consulting houses. For one, they have good revenue recognition—split policies that recognize who sold it and who has to support it. They also evaluate each other in regard to promotions and advancement in making partner. They know that they are going to need another partner some day down the road on their own deal, so, for the most part, collaboration is part of their culture.
They are usually able to put the good of the client above their internal priorities in order to make the pie bigger. Not that there are not fights, but they seem to have a collaborative approach — more so than many of the product companies we work with.
Building preference must be done before a formal buying event takes place because then the lights come on, the guards go out, and the walls come down.
In addition to listing research and opportunities, one of the key places where technology can be of help is to create a balance sheet of political assets— a metric of relationships— within a company. This is a way of measuring preference for you and your firm with powerful executives between the sales.
If you have a good account plan and the technology to make it available to everyone with a need to know, you can set clear goals and leverage your team. Everyone who touches the account in the organization knows what the objective is and can use the normal give and take of daily business to trade for access to the people you need to meet. Without a written companywide plan, and a system to make it accessible, this is simply not going to happen. There is also no way to present your documented value and negotiate it for preferred-vendor status.
