Where is the Your Strategy for Strategic Accounts?

Here are five questions about your strategy for strategic accounts:

1. Could someone deep in your organization explain your corporate and strategic account management strategy?

2. Do you have a written strategy for strategic accounts?

3. Are the end points of these strategies clear?

4. Will your average worker be able to use those strategies to make decisions and prioritize tasks?

5. Given these strategies, do your people know what your firm is not going to do?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, you have some major work ahead of you.

You can’t always know who the account is going to contact to solve their problems. If a key resource is on vacation, the critical customer may be passed off to another employee who may have no idea that this is a large customer calling. In the worst case, this employee does not treat the customer with the respect it deserves.

If you do have a strategies for corporate and for strategic accounts, how far down in the organization have you driven those strategies? In too many cases the strategy is written but it lives in the Presidents office and is only used when s new strategy needs to be developed.

The last question, regarding what your firm will not do, is very important. Assuming your firm is not all things to all customers (a marketing approach that we do not recommend), all people—salespeople, marketing people, operations people—need to know where to draw the line when a customer makes a request. If a salesperson has promised a service above and beyond your strategy to land the account, someone needs to discipline that salesperson. On a number of occasions, we have seen the firm accept the customer that was overpromised to. That sends absolutely the wrong message to the firm employees—that strategic rules are flexible. JSperry