Build The Ultimate Strategic Account Management Plan

Strategic Account Managers (SAMs) are charged with nurturing and cultivating business in your company's most important customer accounts. It's a critical sales role in every company; one that’s essential to achieving your revenue goals. Here are two steps you can take to support your SAMs and their ability to nurture and expand customer accounts.

1. Provide a Cadence Around Critical Activities

As a sales leader, it’s important that you help your SAMs with a consistent sales plan that's based on established performance benchmarks. Consider implementing a Management Operating Rhythm® (MOR) or a cadence for SAMs around their account management activities. 

Implementing an effective MOR provides your SAMs with operational leverage and a cadence for focusing on planning activities that help them build strategic customer relationships. Implementing an operating rhythm helps managers drive the accountability around the activities necessary for repeatable success. A great sales operating rhythm should address three main areas, corporate visibility, talent management, and sales planning and execution. See how you can implement a Management Operating Rhythm into your current internal structure.

2. Analyze for Gaps in Your Processes

Strategic Account Managers are some of your company’s most elite sellers. They’ve most likely proven their abilities by rising through the ranks of both tactical and consultative selling and now are charged with the care and growth of important customer accounts. Most SAMs are charged with responsibilities in these key areas:

• Creating business relevance for your products and services within assigned strategic accounts
• Nurturing relationships to provide greater access into customer organizations
• Establishing leverage within higher levels of the organizational hierarchy
• Increasing key business opportunities aligned with the customer’s strategic direction
• Creating better referral and/or reference opportunities for your company
• Providing more effective and efficient account management
• Creating a unique and beneficial competitive advantage within the customer account

To successfully accomplish this list of big-ticket items, your SAMs need a solid strategic account management process to back them up. Creating that process is sometimes a tall order for sales leaders. To refine your focus on a solid SAM program, examine these critical areas of success. How well does your internal structure support your SAMs ability to: 

• Build and Retain Top Talent: Attracting and retaining a talented Strategic Account Management team is often a challenge for sales leaders and organizations. Consider how you can ensure that these managers have the skills and tools to do their jobs well. Here are six steps to take.

• Create and commit to high-value forecasts: The primary purpose of your account management process should be to increase expansion within customer accounts, driving long-term monetization. Build a standard rhythm around those sales planning actions. Ensure that rhythm fully leverages your SAM’s capabilities and focuses them on the right activities to increase pipeline and improve forecast accuracy.

• Make quarterly business reviews valuable for customers: Most executives have been through countless lackluster or for lack of a better term, bad QBRs. Your SAMs may be dealing with customers who are avoiding these important discussions and/or opt to not come altogether. With a buyer-focused sales process, you can help your SAMs validate success in these meetings and open up conversations on expanding customer accounts. Evaluate your sales process to ensure it doesn't hinder the QBR actions and impacts.

Meet Aggressive Growth Goals

As a sales leader, defining how to support your sales organization and Strategic Account Managers (SAMs) in increasing retention and recurring revenues takes careful consideration. Consider the approach that one CRO used to define the organization's biggest opportunity to scale revenue growth. Segment's story provides insights for CROs on what it takes to increase annual recurring revenues and measure up to urgent pressures to grow.