Growth Strategy: B2B Sales and Account Management, the Nine keys to Success

What does it take to win the B2B sales and account management? In other words, what are the growth strategies of successful B2B rainmakers and account managers? This time-tested playbook shows how. First, we will start with the game of client profiling and move to other key strategic focus areas.

Client Profiling

The best sales and account managers use this technique to grasp their clients well. It includes your client’s prior margin, purchase history, volume history, level of service required, profit potential, and the type of relationship. For targeted firms, however, it is a different story. As a result, you may need to do some of the following: Talk to people working there, including partners such as vendors and contractors. Analyze to identify the characteristics of your best or preferred clients, such as:

• Where is their headquarters located?
• What are their pressing business issues?
• Which industry or sector do they belong to?
• How many employees do they have?
• What are their financial results?
• Are they involved in mergers and acquisitions?
• Are they involved in the regulated or labor-intensive industry?
• Are they involved in a turnaround or restructuring?

The key is to understand your clients and target clients as much as you can to be able to add value to their business by stating some trends and challenges, they are facing and how your service can be of great help. Then, be able to convey this message persuasively. Equally important is to identify the key players in the buying process, such as the purchasing manager, directors, or decision-makers, who are influential and whose blessing may be necessary. Also, you can do a portfolio analysis by analyzing the profit and revenue of each client from five years ago (three years may be fine). Then, for last year, the current year and project his potential in the near future (one to three years) by using each account’s customer lifetime value (CLV). Similarly, you should create a Google alert about these targeted companies to get some information about them. Better than this tool (Google alerts) is to subscribe to paid services such as www.insideView.com or www.Salesfuel.com to get relevant information about your targets. LinkedIn can also be of great help if you use advanced search to identify the decision-makers in these companies. As a result, you may be able to use referrals to get closer to your target decision-makers. Also, you can find your targets’ contact information with Dow Jones, Hoovers, ZoomInfo, and Avention on the internet.

Uncovering Client Dissatisfaction

Now that you’ve qualified your client, the key to successful account penetration is to ask relevant and insightful questions professionally. This will help you uncover not only their needs and wants but also the nature of their dissatisfaction. Understanding the cause of their dissatisfaction, whether it’s at the product or service level, features, price, customer service, or lack of operational fit, is a crucial step towards improving your services and strengthening your client relationships.

When you understand the cause or reasons for the dissatisfaction and know what your services or products can do to satisfy the client’s needs, you may be ready to create urgency.

Create an Urgency

Use the information you just got while asking the client to highlight the implication of this information (dissatisfaction information) on his business. Moreover, quantify this severity on his business with hard data, such as the loss of productivity and waste of time and money that his dissatisfaction implies. For example, tell the client how much time he can save if he uses your product or service by quantifying the difference in timesaving. As we all know, the cost is an important factor, thus quantifying the cost savings he can get when he uses your product or service in the next two to three years.

In other words, quantify with hard data the need-payoff of your offering to be truly persuasive. Indeed, the best have one thing in common: they don’t just sell their products or services but add great value to their client with their knowledge and advice. In other words, you should be half sales or account manager and half adviser or consultant to enhance your credibility with clients. By taking these steps, you would demonstrate that you want them to succeed, and they will return you that favor.

Understanding the Client’s Decision Criteria

The best sales and account managers know and care deeply about the client’s decision criteria. For example, quality, price, and speed. Also, the type of relationship required for the account and the client’s concerns regarding liabilities concerning the product or service performance. Similarly, a client’s budgetary concerns, his organization’s politics, etc.

Also, not all criteria are the same; some may be tangible, others intangible criteria. For this reason, organize them and understand better whether the decision criterion falls into the tangible or the intangible category. Then, ascertain each criterion’s importance and influence on your client’s decision. For example, between the tangible and intangible criterion, and by order of importance, which is the most important? What are his priorities at each level? Knowing this is crucial, given that you will need to compare his priorities with your products or service features and benefits to ascertain your competitive advantage.

That is, how the most important criteria for your client match you’re offering. If not, you should reformulate your weakness to make it as important as your client’s decision criterion without being defensive—be it tangible or intangible.  That’s the key to success in such a scenario. For example, tangible criteria may include price, speed, size, and time, among others.

Intangible factors may include quality, customer service, and reputation among others. Also, make sure to turn this intangible value into a tangible one by determining the implication of these values to be measurable to strengthen and highlight the value of your service’s intangible benefits. You can do that by asking some clients about the impact of your service or product on their business. Then, ask them for their estimates of your service impact in terms of speed, time saved, comfort, and productivity.

Negotiating With the Client

Unlike inexperienced sales and account managers, the best always sell first by persuading their clients and negotiating last. Why is that? Because when you give a discount first, which is one of your best arsenals, you increase your client’s bargaining power. All too often, they will ask you for more as a condition of winning their business. Moreover, unfortunately, you will likely lose your client’s business if you can’t, and the competition does.

Thus, savvy sales and account managers are aware of this problem. As a result, regardless of the discount they can offer their clients, they will use other persuasive means first and use the discount weapon last to have more impact. For this reason, they always win the business and close the deal. Above all, all the best sales and account managers know the price is not the only point of a negotiation.

As a result, they can keep their profit margins and add value to their clients by using other means such as training, installation, and warranties, among others, in their negotiation armory. Why use this strategy? Because they have done their homework, and from experience, they know in the long run, the cost of these services will be lower than the margin loss if they accept the price discount.

That’s one of the reasons they will always switch to another alternative to price discounts when negotiating with clients. In addition, unlike the inexperienced sales reps, they know the key to negotiation is asking an intelligent question to control the game. Also, when negotiating the price, they will always negotiate within a range, such as between 1 and 15%, to enhance their flexibility but never on price point as the inexperienced will.

Profitability Management

Managing your profit entails a detailed analysis of your accounts by creating a Profit and loss statement for each account. In effect, this is called profit mapping—that is, from the revenues, you will subtract different costs to reach your net profit of each account. As a result, analyze the profitability of each account, including the margin in percentage. Thus, be able to redirect your scarce resources strategically to your key accounts that deserve them the most.

Also, given its importance in profitability management, you should consider creating a 2×2 matrix for this special purpose. For example, on one axis, you can include revenue, including high revenue and low revenue. On the other hand, put the profit margin, including low and high, and then highlight the share of each quadrant in a percentage of the total revenue.

This exercise will allow you to devise an appropriate strategy to move from one quadrant to another in light of profit margin and resource allocation. MIT senior lecturer Jonathan Byrnes stated that 40% of most businesses are unprofitable given the lack of profitability managers. Hence, taking these critical steps seriously is crucial to maximize profitability. Similarly, to be truly profitable, be very selective in your account relationship selection in light of potential margin, the operating fit, and the resources required in relationship building.

Penetrating Big Account While Building Relationships

As we all know, B2B account management is very intimidating. However, it can be done by breaking down your target account into manageable sizes, such as by division, regional headquarters, and department.  Breaking down the value chain and ascertaining where your product or service will add value can be a starting point. Network as much as you can by going to their favorite events such as conferences, seminars, and the like. Using the power of networking, you can easily use referrals to enhance your relationship with the gatekeepers of your targeted firms with little effort. As a result, networking can save you resources that you would otherwise use to get to the decision-makers. Thus, using the power of networking in account penetration strategy is critical.

Then, after your homework, start your campaign with emails, telephone scripts, voice mail scripts, and targeted letters with a clear value proposition you intend to offer. Prepare educational content such as white papers, tips, and special reports that can add value to your accounts. Again, quantify as much as you can the business results you can deliver with your offering, given that you must be in the language of the decision-makers. This is where your value proposition comes in. For this reason, my experience suggests that you focus your efforts on that particular account’s business challenges, needs, and wants instead of your service or products to be successful.

Similarly, some sales reps often make the terrible mistake of confusing the purchasing manager and real decision-makers. However, these two functions play a different role; the former is more concerned about price and competitive pricing than the latter who is searching for real solutions to their challenges.

Indeed, you should never rest on your laurels when you get in and have only one sponsor in your account, given that he can be fired anytime or move to a different division or geography. As a result, wisdom entails building your relationship with as many key decision-makers as possible from department to division and within the whole organization. These steps will strengthen your position in the account and lock it from the competition. Equally important is to offer related services and products to your strategic accounts—given that this strategy allows you to develop your accounts while making the competition irrelevant.

Building a Replicable Business Model

You can find the best sales reps and account managers in various organizations. Instead of such an ineffective system, wisdom entails replicating the skills and best practices of the best in your sales culture to enhance your results. In other words, the best is not born but made, given that they may have understood some best practices that work wonders. The key here is to find a way to work with the best to instill their proven strategies in the less effective ones, for example, by working with them at each point of the sales wheel from prospecting to qualifying, from the need for development to the decision criteria, from negotiation to closing the deals, among others. You can interview them and ascertain professionally what proven strategies are best used at each point in the sales cycle to get dazzling results at your organization.

Thus, work with the average to get up to speed and get dazzling results from everybody in your sales team. You can use these proven strategies in sales training, given that you should deliver consistent results from the whole sales team members to improve your revenue and profit. You will enhance their performance variability by embedding behavioral consistency in your sales team members. Get rid of the self-defeating culture of A, B, and C players. Of course, some members will always outperform others but do whatever you can to reduce the performance variability.

Salesforce Compensation

Avoid the old-age practice of paying for mediocrity. That is, paying the salespeople based on just revenues. For this reason, instill a sense of accountability in your sales team members by tying some portions of their compensation to each account’s gross profit and net profit. By doing that, you will enhance your asset productivity and your bottom line. The key here is to understand that not all accounts are created equal. Some may be influential in light of revenues but, at the same time, drain most of your scarce resources without justifiable profit. Thus, manage your sales compensation with a forward-looking perspective by integrating the customer lifetime value of each account to be more productive and efficient in light of your scarce resources.

Dealing With Sales Forecasting Flaws

Many sales organizations commit sins using outdated models or timid sales forecasting strategies. The most common among them is extrapolating historical data into the future. This approach has two major flaws: First, your organization assumes the past will equal the future. Second, your organization did not improve in light of training and capabilities. Also, it assumes that the remaining potential of its accounts is out of reach.

However, contrary to that ineffective approach, wise sales organizations integrate two things in their forecast. First, their sales forecast includes the sales potential of each account. Second, their organization’s training and insight or new capabilities are also included in the equation. For example, if an organization made $10,000 in revenues last year on account of $ 30,000 potential and then later enhanced its training and capabilities, it should demonstrate that in its results. For this reason, Logic will imply a forecast between $20,000 and $28,000, which is pretty close to the real potential of the accounts if everything remains equal. But, not a weak forecast such as $10,500. That is just a 5% increment over the previous year. Thus, your results did not demonstrate improvement in your capabilities.

Indeed, your probability of account development and penetration should be greater with wider margins. Hence, using the outdated practice of past sales extrapolation, you demonstrate that your capabilities did not evolve to reach your accounts’ full potential. As a result of this flawed approach, you are missing big revenues and profit potential from your strategic accounts.