How well are you managing your Strategic Customers?

Google

By Gary Peacock

In many of today’s markets growth is becoming slower. In slow growth markets competitors need to steal a market share from you. The first place they will look is your Strategic Customers. How well are you managing your Strategic Customers?

A quick test is during your 90 day account reviews: to ask two questions?

1. How many actions in the account plan are going to make a difference to the customers’ results and your results beyond this financial year?
2. How many actions are about more than your products and services?

The first question will show you if you are only being tactical—focusing on delivering sales this year. Or if you are also being strategic— building the relationship by doing some things that will cost you this financial year but produce a better sales result for you and your customer in the next financial year.

Some activities that support this year's sales is fine. However, too often and too soon, the tyranny of today drags Account Managers from investing time in activities that will pay off next year.  Not investing this time will soon condemn your relationship to being transactional.

The second question shows whether your Account Managers are simply salespeople with a fancy title. If the actions in the account plan do not include actions that are about more than products and services then you are only being tactical—focusing on delivering sales this year.

The best Strategic Account Managers bring ideas and insights to help their Strategic Customers improve their results without any immediate return in increased product sales.  Why? Simply because this is the biggest investment in the strategic relationship you can make. If your Strategic Customer sees you doing this and sees there is no obvious return for you, then they know you are serious about building the relationship.

Some simple examples:     

• Getting your HR manager to share with their management team ideas for improving their employee satisfaction
• Letting your Insurance manager share his experience of making a claim for a flooded factory
• Getting your IT manager to share her experience installing SAP so the customer can learn from your experience

None of these will sell you more products and services; all of these will build your relationship which will sell more products and services.

Too often, Strategic Account Programs drift towards becoming product sales programs and away from building the strategic relationships.  Building strategic relationships will build more sales beyond this financial year and will build barriers to keep your competitors out.

So, during your 90 day account reviews ask these two killer questions.

1. How many actions in the account plan are going to make a difference to the customers’ results and your results beyond this financial year?
2. How many actions are about more than your products and services?

If you need help to focus your Account Managers on their strategic relationships then call us on +61 2 9450 1040. We welcome any comments you want to share. To receive our blogs directly to your email then subscribe to the Gordian blog at the top right of this page. Simply add your email address to the box, click the button and you will receive all future Gordian blogs direct.

Take a different view and solve your problems faster

Google

By Gary Peacock

Do you have a problem that seems impossible to solve? One reason could be how the problem is stated. Typically, you see a problem from one view: from one perspective. But as JK Galbraith says, sometimes this protects us from thinking.

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

John Kenneth Galbraith

One way to get a different view

Imagine you have a problem with the productivity of your team.  You might state your problem as: Increase the productivity of my team. To get a different view, a simple technique is to rewrite the problem as a bigger problem and rewrite the problem as a smaller problem.

A bigger problem might be: increase the productivity of my department; A smaller problem might be increase the productivity of Barbara. So summarising you now have three different views of the problem.

 

Now you have three different views to choose from.  When you do this you will find this simple exercise forces you to create different views of the same problem.  This may make you realise the fastest way to solve your problem is to solve a bigger problem. Or you may find the fastest way to solve your problem is to solve the smaller problem. Even if you choose to solve the original problem, you have three different views of the problem and will solve the problem faster. This simple tool helps us quickly get different points of view.

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”

 George Eliot

Other ways of getting a different view

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world."

John le Carre

A quick way to get a different view is to leave your desk and talk to others, especially customers.  A client was recently complaining about an unresponsive and inflexible IT department not being willing to make it faster and easier for salespeople to access systems when out of the office.  A quick way of getting IT to change is to send them out for a day or two with a salesperson to visit customers.  As they see and experience the pain of using systems outside the office, they will start to find ways to improve the systems, fast. 

As Margaret Attwood says, Reality simply consists of different points of view. A quick way to get a different perspective is ask others from different departments how they see the problem. In every organization there are people who always have a different view to most other people. Find those people in your organization and have a coffee with them. They will always give you a different view. Remember the words of Comedian, George Carlin: 

“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty.

I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.”

What is your innovation appetite?

Google

By Peter Browne

If you want to achieve breakthrough change to grow revenue and profits, why not try innovation? However, Innovation has become an overused buzz word, and there are many assumptions made when the term is used.

Before undertaking any strategic planning with innovation in mind, it is critical to be clear on your organisation’s innovation appetite. At a minimum the innovation appetite must be agreed between the board and CEO.

The Innovation Spectrum

At one end of the spectrum innovation simply means doing what we currently do better or differently. In many industries incremental improvement can be enough to keep current customers satisfied, and maintain an edge over competitors. This approach is very low risk, easy to implement but has lower upside potential.

The other end of the innovation spectrum is developing new products and services that solve unmet needs of the marketplace, for example; products such as the iPhone/iTunes/App Store or low cost airlines. New products for unmet needs are typically much higher risk and higher return if they meet the needs of the market, but equally pose the risk of being abject failures.

So your organisation’s innovation appetites and risk appetites are closely correlated. It is almost impossible to introduce a more risky kind of innovation into a traditional, risk averse organisation, without some burning platform for change (and by then it is usually too late).

Developing Strategy

Understanding what innovation means to your organisation and your industry is essential. Being clear on this makes the process for developing strategy far smoother, as the boundaries can be set at the outset providing a framework for developing strategy.

For example, before undertaking strategy work we ask organisations to consider these questions:

• Will our focus be limited to existing products and services, or are you open to identifying new products and services?
• Are you focusing on the currently geographies served, or potential new geographies, even global?
• If new products and services are to be scoped what it the minimum potential market for them to be worth pursuing?
• What funding is available to fully evaluate and commercialise a new product or service?

Answering these questions up front provides clear boundaries for the strategy development team, and prevents wasted investment in time and money pursuing strategies that ultimately don’t get past the first hurdle.

Whether working with a customer on a Blue Ocean Strategy or change that is more incremental, we apply our expertise to set the foundations for developing strategy successfully. Contact us on +61 2 9450 1040 to discuss how adopting a different approach can help your company achieve a breakthrough change to grow revenues and profit.

To solve impossible problems faster, be unreasonable.

By Gary Peacock
Gary Hamel recommends working on a prototype and recommends freeing up 50% of available time and freeing up some money to work on the project. All the businesses I have worked with are already pushed for resources: they don’t have enough time, money or people to do what they want. So, how can you get the resources—time, money and people – to work on some of your organizations problems?

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Guru Gary Hamel is Wrong

By Gary Peacock
Management guru, Professor Gary Hamel has produced this short 9-minute video: Are you really serious about innovation. I am reluctant to argue with a guru like Gary Hamel, but I think he is wrong.

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