Book details

  • Genre:business & economics
  • Sub-genre:Sales & Selling / General
  • Language:English
  • Series Title:Raise the Bar. Step Up.
  • Series Number:2
  • Pages:224
  • Paperback ISBN:9798995778424

Raise the Bar. Step Up.

Own the Account: Strategic Account Planning and Management

Overview

You can win the deal and still lose the account. A clean pursuit, a signed contract, a rung bell, and two years later a competitor has the next project, a new executive has her own preferences, and the renewal shrinks. Nobody was measuring the relationship, so nobody saw it slipping away.

This book fixes that. It answers the five questions every seller has been left alone with: 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?

Ken Powell built and ran global account programs at SAP, Oracle, Honeywell, and Halliburton, some of the largest software and energy companies in the world. This book is the system he used to run them, written down in full for the first time. You will choose the accounts worth your best hours, and know when to demote one. You will learn the customer's business almost as well as they know it themselves. You will author your company's Planks of Excellence℠, the three to five commitments you make to your most important customers, and grade every relationship against them, 1 or 0, no partial credit. You will plot every account on one chart both companies can read, map every person with fingerprints on your business, write a plan a stranger could run, install the operating rhythm that keeps every promise, and grow the account on purpose. You will measure Share of Wallet at Best Margin every quarter and review it with the customer.

Book 2 in the Raise the Bar. Step Up. series, for key, strategic, and global account managers, and the chief revenue officers (CROs) and VPs of Sales who coach them. Read The Habits of Great Sales Athletes for the disciplines that win the deal. Read this one to own the account. Plot. Execute. March.℠

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Description

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?

This book answers those five questions. It shows you how to move a customer from a transactional relationship to a strategic one, a true partnership, and how to measure where each account stands.

You can win the deal and still lose the account. Ken Powell has seen it happen to good salespeople again and again. They run a clean pursuit, beat the competition, sign the contract, and ring the bell. Then over the next two years the account slips away. A competitor takes the next project.

A strategic account 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. Get a handful of them right and you carry the number for the whole organization. Get them wrong and you spend your career chasing replacement business for accounts you should have grown.

Most teams pour their best people into their biggest accounts, then manage those accounts by feel. 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. The warning signs were there the whole time, and nobody was measuring them. That is what this book fixes.

This is the second book in the Raise the Bar. Step Up. series. It builds on the seven deal disciplines taught in the first book, The Habits of Great Sales Athletes.

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About The Author

Ken Powell started as a sales rep at Apple in 1986 and has spent his career since building, running, and measuring strategic accounts in complex business-to-business (B2B) sales. He has led global and key account sales at SAP, Oracle, Halliburton, McAfee, and Honeywell, and served as CEO and President of four software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies ranging from $5 million to $100 million in revenue. He has worked with thousands of sales professionals across every industry and geography. He built the methods in his books in those roles.

He is the author of The Habits of Great Sales Athletes and Own the Account, the first two books in the Raise the Bar. Step Up. series. A third, Own the Room, is in progress. Every chapter teaches the same way: why it matters, how to do it, what to execute, with a scored assessment so you know exactly where you stand.

Ken founded Sales Method (salesmethod.com), his sales excellence practice, where he educates, trains, and coaches B2B sales organizations until the disciplines are habits. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University, played Division 1 college soccer on scholarship, and has been a member of the Young Presidents' Organization (YPO) since 2002. He lives in Texas.

He built the strategic account system taught in this book in the global account programs he ran at SAP, Oracle, Honeywell, and Halliburton, taught it to more than a thousand sellers, and saw it adopted across the sales organizations of SAP, McAfee, and Halliburton. Through his work with clients from the Fortune 100 to private equity portfolio companies, and with global enterprises across manufacturing, technology, energy, and professional services, he has refined it since. The Planks of Excellence℠, the Foundational-Operational-Strategic maturity scale, and the points of execution at their intersections are his original work: a way to measure and move business relationships that he built when he couldn't find one that worked. Ken's conviction is simple: habits beat talent, and habits can be taught, trained, coached, and measured.

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