Raise the Bar. Step Up.

Somewhere in your career, someone has said it to you: the problem with this account is that you do not have a strategic relationship with the customer. If you lead a sales team, you have probably said it yourself. It sounds right, so you nod. Then you go back to your desk with five questions and no answers. What is a strategic relationship? How would I know one if I had it? How do I get one? What, exactly, am I supposed to do? And how do I do it? Most of the time, nobody tells you. The word strategic gets used as if everyone already agrees on what it means, and almost no one can define it, put a number on it, or hand you the steps to build one. This book answers those five questions. It is about the journey from a transactional relationship to a strategic one, a true partnership, and how to measure every step along the way. Here is why that journey matters. You can win the deal and still lose the account. I have watched it happen to good salespeople for 40 years. They run a clean pursuit, beat the competition, sign the contract, and ring the bell. Then over the next 2 years the account slips away. A competitor takes the next project. A new executive arrives with her own history and her own preferences. The renewal gets trimmed. The win that looked permanent turns into a vendor sitting in the corner of a very large customer, waiting for scraps and wondering what happened. The deal was won. The account was lost. The seller had a customer but never built a strategic relationship, and never had a way to see it slipping away. The first book in this series, The Habits of Great Sales Athletes, taught the seven disciplines that win a complex deal: the Why4, Modern BANT, Call Planning, the Strategic Pursuit Plan, the Joint Execution Plan, the Why4 Stress Test, and Pipeline Management. Those disciplines still run the show inside a strategic account. Every new opportunity in the account is its own pursuit, and you work it with the first book's toolkit. If you have not read The Habits of Great Sales Athletes, read it first. This book builds on it and does not repeat it. A strategic account is bigger than any one deal. It is a multiyear relationship with a large customer, and in most business-to-business (B2B) companies a small set of these customers produces most of the revenue and almost all of the profit that compounds year after year. Get a handful of them right and you carry the number for the whole organization. Get them wrong, or run them by reflex, and you spend your career chasing replacement business for accounts you should have grown. Here is the problem I see in nearly every company I work with. Teams pour their best people and their best resources into their biggest accounts, then manage those accounts by feel. They confuse a friendly relationship with a growing one. They confuse activity with progress. They cannot tell you, in numbers, whether the account is worth more to them this year than last, or whether the customer would say the same about them. When the renewal shrinks or the competitor wins the next project, it surprises them. It should not. The signals were there the whole time. Nobody was measuring them. That is what this book fixes.