Ready to increase your profits and revenues by 30% or more? It’s time to focus on developing your Key Accounts.
Developing Key Accounts is a skill your sales team needs to hone to be successful in sales.
Developing these accounts is the process of building long-term relationships with your company’s most valuable accounts. It’s easy to focus, instead, on the new sales you’re making and the opportunities they present. Of course, this is a justifiable task to pursue, but not at the expense of your key accounts who need nurturing on a regular basis.
Why? Because key accounts often contribute a significant amount of your businesses revenue and can be critical to your growth and sustained sales.
Many times, we find there are new business opportunities within Key Accounts that are more likely to close compared to acquiring a new client, at least short-term. They also spend up to 33% more than new customers.
Being “more likely to close” is worth keeping in mind when tasks compete for priority!
Our Five-Step Plan to Develop Key Accounts
Here is a five-step path to get you started on developing Key Accounts to increase revenue.
1. Determine Your Definition of Key Accounts
Key Accounts will receive a great deal of your company’s time, energy and resources. Therefore, you should create an explicit and strict definition for how to ID these accounts to make sure that they’re in your ideal customer framework. The more detailed and specific the criteria on top of that, the better.
The best approach is to choose between three and five of the following criteria to base your definition on:
- Revenue potential (avoid weighing this too heavily)
- Centralized purchasing
- Product fit
- Solvency
- Growth potential
- Existing relationships
- Possible Channel Management partner
- Cultural fit
- Geographical alignment
2. Understand Each Key Account Company
Develop an intimate, sophisticated understanding of the account’s strategy, market position, finances, products, and organizational structure. Use this information to make business cases that show how price changes, customization, and add-ons will increase value.
3. Perform Regularly Scheduled Business Reviews
- Develop a standardized business review template for each Key Account that not only captures your KPIs, but more importantly theirs.
- Use the business review as the impetus to solve problems and to determine new opportunities.
- Stay up to date on the business’s goals, financial health, and current initiatives.
4. Know the Key Players in Your Key Accounts
In B2B sales, you are selling to a group of decision-makers who hold different positions in the company. Each has different levels of influence on the purchase. Hence to keep up with these individuals, you can build a Key Account Organization Chart.
On this chart you’ll be able to:
- keep track of those with whom you’ve had communication
- know where they stand within the order of things
- determine the key players involved in the decision of doing business with your company
Having a Key Account Manager simplifies things in this respect and is a far better approach than the so-called Bow-Tie approach. With a bow-tie engagement, only the initial seller and initial purchaser in each firm is in contact. You need to know people in many departments: marketing, R&D, Ops, etc.
The reason is that players change – and here, we’re wanting an ongoing relationship that works.
5. Listen with Intent and Be Prepared to Collaborate
Trust is one of the most important components of building ongoing relationships with Key Accounts.
The B2B relationship has changed from that of vendor-buyer to partnership.
As such, you’re no longer selling to a buyer. Rather, you are a buyer’s partner who is invested in helping their business succeed. In other words, you’re selling within a mutually beneficial relationship. The more your buyer succeeds, the more your product or service is going to succeed at that business.
Moving Forward With Key Accounts
As you move forward, continue to cultivate your key account relationships but also keep an eye on non-key accounts. A customer who is about to experience significant growth may qualify as a strategic account. Earn their loyalty by treating them as a Key Account before another company has the chance.
Key Account management is an important component that can raise your company’s sales by 30% or more, as we said up top. When you discover the potential these relationships hold, you’ll see these customers through a brand new lens.
360 Consulting is Passionate About Growing Your Sales Through Key Account Management
Are you ready to develop your sales strategy but aren’t confident about where to start? Growing your sales is what gets us out of bed in the morning.
At 360 Consulting, we deploy systems and strategies that work. Period. We’re ex-VPs of Sales who have chosen to go into consulting to bring you the maximum growth. We’d be delighted to talk. Contact our experts today for a free consultation!