Account Management: CSO Strategies to Drive High Performance

Account planning creates sales motion and alignment around the customer, giving account management teams a structure and process to improve customer retention and growth.

Typically, sellers take a siloed approach to account management, creating account plans with an emphasis on how they will sell more products and solutions to the customer. This becomes the seller’s strategic plan for retention. The stakeholders — customers, organization and sales leadership — are viewed as contributors to helping the account management team execute on their plan.

Putting customers at the center of your account management strategy reaps better results. A client-centric account plan helps drive decision confidence — the critical measure of how a customer feels about their ability to make a purchase decision — which leads customers to more high-quality/low-regret purchases. When customers feel high levels of decision confidence, they are 10 times more likely to make a high-quality/low-regret purchase.

When account plans are frequently updated and account teams rely on them as a tool to drive decision making with the customer, organizations are 3x more likely to build customer decision confidence. To move account management and planning in the right direction, ensure account plans are not static, set-it-and-forget-it tools. Account plans need to be an organization’s source of truth for what it takes to improve customer relationships, and ultimately a tool to retain and grow key customer accounts.

Sales organizations often use relatively simple criteria for choosing key accounts. These criteria typically include:

• Current level of revenue generated by the account

• Company size

• Future spend

But the most successful companies also consider the customer’s long-term viability as a strategic partner. For a more advanced understanding of a key account’s value, conduct a detailed opportunity alignment analysis.

An opportunity alignment analysis helps account management teams measure opportunity by the long-term revenue stream from current accounts or prospects, while basing strategic alignment on the supplier’s ability to capitalize on opportunity. Accounts with high growth potential (opportunity), and compatible strategies for achieving that growth (alignment), receive the greatest commitment of time and resources.

Determining strategic alignment

Although it’s a straightforward process, determining strategic alignment requires a granular account management approach. Understanding customers’ alignment with the supplier’s goals, strategies and capabilities — not just generic attractiveness of a company or segment — is critical. By breaking down strategic alignment into discrete categories and developing quantitative assessment criteria, you can increase objectivity and accuracy around customer value. 

Successful alignment assessments have the following key elements:

• Relationship depth. Have the account management team assess the relationship depth with current customers. Accounts where you already sell to senior executives at the enterprise level, for example, receive higher scores than those where contact is relegated to a functional level.

Ninety-five percent of respondents to the Gartner CSO Priorities Survey reported they expect a higher growth rate from their key accounts relative to other accounts. Often, the CSO places the burden of achieving that growth on the shoulders of the key account manager (KAM).

The KAM role is challenging at best. They manage the most important, complex customers and have to interact with multiple stakeholders across the customer’s organization. They’re also responsible for aligning stakeholders from across their own organization. This is so time-consuming and difficult that 66% of KAMs agree that the amount of internal coordination limits their ability to sufficiently strategize for account growth. 

To enhance key account program (KAP) success, focus on the program, not the manager

Key account programs are often designed with fundamental flaws. Despite key account managers’ best efforts, crucial design criteria — such as key account selection and tiering, resourcing and executive sponsorship —  are hidden beneath the surface and sabotaging success. 

When faced with an underperforming KAP, audit your key account program design requirements, which are your keys for success. For each requirement, list the common challenges that impact the program and typical solutions to these challenges. Then navigate the common challenge of implementing each KAP requirement and implement the solution. 

The following list of examples illustrates how to set up your key account management program for success:

• Account selection and tiering: When common selection criteria don’t correlate to account growth, use a mix of qualitative and quantitative criteria to assess the broader strategic partnership.