Interested in a Free Book for your Late Summer Holistays?
Of course you are! Everybody likes a freebie. A free draw.
Sitting on the beach; chilling out; reading a book. But which one? Or which beach? Given all that’s happening in the world at the moment, few of us are traveling long distances to get away this year. Holistays and staycations are big in 2020.
We can’t solve the issue of having to stay at home but we can provide you with a little light reading material for the back garden, couch or bathtub – you choose.
How to Enter Our Summer Giveaway
From Jun to October, we’re giving away a free Kindle edition of Customer At The Heart to a few lucky winners each week.
OK, it’s not quite Sally Rooney’s Normal People or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera but it should be of interest to any CEO, Sales Director or Chief Customer Officer in a B2B company who is interested in increasing revenues and reducing customer churn.
If you’re interested if throwing your name in the hat for a free electronic copy, all you need to go to our Contact Us page and tell us that you’d like to enter. Easier still, just send us an email with the phrase Customer At The Heart in the subject of your message.
It’s as simple as that. Enter every week if you like! We’ll announce the winner every weekend and send out a Kindle voucher to the lucky winner.
By the way, we take data privacy seriously – we’ll only use email addresses to send a copy of the book to the winner each week and we’ll delete all email addresses at the end of each weekly draw.
Stay safe.
John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight
Footnote
Have you ever wondered when the words ‘staycation’ and ‘holistays’ came into common usage?
staycationnoun
/ˌsteɪˈkeɪʃn/
a holiday that you spend at or near your home
“Turn off your phone and computer—you’re on staycation, remember?”
“UK holidaymakers opt for a staycation in Britain.”
I used to think they were both very recent inventions. I certainly never heard of the terms before the last global recession a decade ago. Well, it turns out that both words were in fairly common usage from 2003. There’s even some research from Merriam-Webster that suggests the word ‘staycation’ originated as far back as 1944.
The other thing I didn’t realise is that the words have slightly different meanings in Europe and the USA. Americans tend to use the term for activities that can be carried out within driving distance of their home where overnight accommodation is not required. Europeans – or British people at least – use the phrase to describe a holiday that is spent in one’s home country rather than abroad.
When we wrote Customer at the Heart, my co-author Peter Whitelaw and I interviewed several senior executives in large international B2B companies. Some were CEOs. Others were Sales Directors. Many were CX Directors or Chief Customer Officers. To be honest, the really fun part of writing the book was the interview process. Assembling all those interviews into a coherent book was a chore.
All interviews were excellent and insightful but some went off in directions that we had not planned at the outset.
This blog is about the fundamentals of Key Account Management (KAM) but that was not the topic I had in mind when I interviewed Joe Edwards.
I wanted him to talk about his time as Sales Director at Atos (which we did cover eventually). Before we got to that point, Joe talked about his first job as a sales manager at HP. This led us to a really interesting discussion on account management, key account management and account planning.
Account managers are called different things in different companies. And in different countries. Sometimes they are referred to as sales managers although less so in Europe than in America. In Europe, ‘selling’ is still regarded as a second-class profession. The ‘salesman’ is a person who deals in used cars or snake oil.
Across the pond in North America, sales is a true profession. Most of today’s sales techniques and approaches have been developed in the USA. In Europe, the term account manager (or some variation thereof) is more frequently used than salesperson. Business development manager (BDM) is a commonly used term in Australia. The titles may be different but the roles are generally similar and involve client management as well as increasing the level of sales within a particular account or portfolio of clients.
For very large clients, there may be a single account manager dedicated to the account. In most cases, the account manager will have a portfolio that might range from 5 to 50 accounts. The decision as to whether an account manager should have a portfolio of one, five or 50 accounts is an important strategic one.
Joe – We’re Doubling Your Quota
To illustrate this point, consider Joe Edwards, the sales director for Atos UK & Ireland whom we interviewed for this book. Edwards started his sales career with Hewlett-Packard (HP) where one of his clients was Boots, the pharmaceutical and retailing company. Senior management at HP then made a strategic decision to reclassify Boots as a key account as they believed it had significant sales potential.
Joe Edwards: After about a year as a sales executive at HP and having a dozen or so accounts, the company turned around and said, ‘Actually, Joe, we just want you to focus on Boots Pharmaceuticals, and we’re going to double your quota.’
I learned that I was skimming the surface with Boots for a year and it was nice and comfortable because I had lots of other accounts I could fall back on if I wasn’t getting the numbers out of Boots. Then the company said: you don’t have a choice; you either make your numbers out of Boots, or you don’t.
That drives a very different set of behaviours, and I thought to myself: “how am I going to do this?”
Key Account Management
One of the most fundamental strategic decisions a company can make in its journey towards customer-centricity is the segmentation of its clients. The reason that it’s important to have a clear agreed approach to segmentation is that it drives much of the account management strategy and often the operational strategy needed to service those customers. It also requires a fundamental change in mindset for the account manager.
Joe Edwards: I had to understand what Boots was all about as a business. That meant spending a lot of time on-site to the point where I spent about three days a week with them.
I used to hold clinics in the canteen and anyone who was about who had an IT problem would come and see me. Bit by bit, I built up a set of relationships and trust that convinced them that I wasn’t just in it for taking the order, but I was in it for the long term.
I was trying to improve service and the relationship between the two companies for mutual benefit. As a result, I learned a lot about account planning from the perspective of getting further penetration into the client company. I didn’t know enough about the supply chain or stock room in Boots which we had some opportunity in. I needed to understand the customer from a business perspective, not just from an IT point of view.
“If you don’t have a ‘Plan’ you’re going nowhere”
Joe Edwards: The lesson I took from it was ‘The Plan’.
If you don’t have a plan, you’re going nowhere. And if you don’t create ‘customer intimacy’ in the sense of understanding what your client is, what market they’re playing in, and what new things you can bring to the client to excite them on a regular basis.
If you’re not bringing anything to the table, and therefore the relationship starts to decline.
Key Account Plans
Joe took these lessons with him to his subsequent sales roles. At Atos, account planning for key accounts became systematic and strategic for all key accounts. When Joe was Sales Director for Atos UK & Ireland, the company had almost 10,000 staff and Joe Edwards’ task was to deliver annual revenues of nearly £1 billion from its customer base. Account planning was critical, particularly for key accounts.
Joe Edwards: What that means is not just putting the plans in place and monitoring every quarter as usual. We would, in our top accounts, have account reviews with the executive board. It was making sure that the CEO and the CXO were all over our accounts on a regular basis.
On those top accounts, we’re going to spend time with them. We’re going to prioritise our time and make several calls a week where we get out there and start talking properly to this client base.
************************
Customer at the Heart
That interview with Joe Edwards – and many others – was taken from Customer at the Heart: How B2B Leaders Build Successful Customer-centric Organisations by John O’Connor and Peter Whitelaw and is available in hard cover or on Kindle.
There’s an old saying that “the cobbler’s children are the worst shod”. In the past that definitely applied to Deep-Insight. We advise clients like Atos, BT and Serco to build customer centricity through:
– Annual strategic assessment of all clients
– Clear plan for choosing the right contacts and getting them to commit to giving feedback via an online survey
– Comprehensive review of the feedback to agree strategic initiatives for the next 12 months
– ‘Close The Loop’ meetings with each client to agree actions to improve the relationship
In Deep-Insight’s early days, we even struggled with the first point. We thought the survey couldn’t be completely independent and honest as it was not being administered by a third party. We got over that objection pretty quickly. It’s true that our scores are a little inflated because the survey is not anonymous, but that’s not the point. The numbers aren’t the most important thing. Any customer feedback is invaluable. We have now been running CRQ assessments with our own clients on an annual basis for several years. Last year, we got our best ever scores.
The only problem is that in 2019 we probably didn’t include as wide a selection of contacts as we should and we could have worked harder at getting a higher completion rate. Last year, our completion rate was 49%. That’s not bad but this year we agreed we wouldn’t be happy unless we hit 60%.
So how did we do? Were we still the cobbler’s children?
Deep-Insight’s 2020 CRQ results
We were definitely more determined this year in getting commitments from you to give us 10 minutes of your time for feedback.
It worked – we achieved a 66% completion rate so my first message is to say ‘Thank You’ for such a wonderful response. Our results were very good too: a CRQ score of 5.7 and a Net Promoter score of +44%. Not as high as last year, but I’m still really pleased by those scores.
Retaining our Unique Status
We also retained our ‘Unique’ status which means that we are in the top 10% of our own database of scores. Uniqueness requires a combination of a winning ‘Solution’ and a wonderful ‘Experience’ for the client.
Areas for Improvement
Even though our clients see us as Unique, there are still areas we need to improve upon. Our core product offering is seen as really good but, in some places, we’re not seen as innovative enough and there are a few areas where we could invest more in our technology.
Closing The Loop
At this point, we have been in touch with most of our clients and scheduled a ‘Close The Loop’ meeting to discuss their feedback on us, and to agree some actions. One of the areas we will be seeking further feedback on is where we focus our development efforts in terms of ‘Innovation’ and ‘Technology’. Here are the three areas that we are trying to prioritise:
1. Further development of Deep-Dive. Deep-Dive is our online analytical portal. It has become an invaluable tool for us to extract insights for our clients but it’s not as intuitive as it could be.
2. Integration with Salesforce. Many, if not most, of our clients use Salesforce as their corporate CRM tool. Some of our clients import the CRQ and NPS results (as well as verbatim comments) from our assessment into Salesforce so that account managers and service teams can see instantly what the most recent feedback was.
3. More Benchmarking & Industry Comparisons. We have 20 years’ worth of benchmarking data and although we’re not big believers in industry averages, many of our clients would like to know if they’re in a particular quartile or decile for their industry.
Cobbler’s Children
We’ve tried hard this year so hopefully we’re no longer the cobbler’s children. Thank you again for your time and input into this year’s CRQ customer assessment. I really do appreciate it and we will make changes based on your feedback – particularly around where we should focus our efforts in the next 12 months.
Interested in a Free Book for your Summer Holistays?
Of course you are!
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the days are getting longer and temperatures are becoming respectable again. Conversations are drifting towards the topic of summer holidays. Sitting on the beach; chilling out; reading a book. But which one? Or which beach? Given all that’s happening in the world at the moment, very few of us will be traveling long distances to get away this year. Holistays and staycations are going to be big in 2020.
Unfortunately, we can’t solve the issue of having to stay at home this summer. However we can provide you with a little light reading material for the back garden, couch or bathtub – you choose.
How to Enter Our Summer Giveaway
For the next 13 weeks we’re going to give away a few free Kindle editions of Customer At The Heart to one lucky winner each week.
OK, it’s not quite Sally Rooney’s Normal People or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera but it should be of interest to any CEO, Sales Director or Chief Customer Officer in a B2B company who is interested in increasing revenues and reducing customer churn.
If you’re interested if throwing your name in the hat for a free electronic copy, all you need to go to our Contact Us page and tell us that you’d like to enter. Easier still, just send us an email with the phrase Customer At The Heart in the subject of your message.
It’s as simple as that. Enter every week if you like! We’ll announce the winner every Friday and send out a Kindle voucher to the lucky winner the same day.
By the way, we take data privacy seriously – we’ll only use email addresses to send a copy of the book to the winner each week and we’ll delete all email addresses at the end of each weekly draw.
Stay safe over the summer months. John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight
Footnote
Have you ever wondered when the words ‘staycation’ and ‘holistays’ came into common usage?
staycationnoun
/ˌsteɪˈkeɪʃn/
a holiday that you spend at or near your home
“Turn off your phone and computer—you’re on staycation, remember?”
“UK holidaymakers opt for a staycation in Britain.”
I used to think they were both very recent inventions. I certainly never heard of the terms before the last global recession a decade ago. Well, it turns out that both words were in fairly common usage from 2003. There’s even some research from Merriam-Webster that suggests the word ‘staycation’ originated as far back as 1944.
The other thing I didn’t realise is that the words have slightly different meanings in Europe and the USA. Americans tend to use the term for activities that can be carried out within driving distance of their home where overnight accommodation is not required. Europeans – or British people at least – use the phrase to describe a holiday that is spent in one’s home country rather than abroad.
I was invited by Rob Baldock, the MD of Clustre to give a short webinar a couple of weeks ago on Love in the Time of Corona.
Actually, it was really about how some of our clients are maintaining business relationships while they are locked down at home but still have access to a telephone or the internet.
So here’s a summary of the 5 actions for maintaining long-lasting business relationships in the “time of corona”.
John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight
********************
My Role as a Relationship Counsellor
Good morning. I’m John O’Connor, CEO of Deep-Insight. I sometimes refer to myself as a relationship counsellor. We set up and run Customer Experience programmes for large international B2B companies. Our clients are the likes of Atos, BT, Serco, Santander and so on. We also run Employee Engagement programmes and I’ll talk about one client in the course of the next 10 minutes but primarily it’s the MDs and Sales Directors of B2B companies that we deal with.
I call myself a relationship counsellor because our job is to help senior executives understand and enhance the relationships they have with major accounts. We do this by telling them:
Which of their accounts are in good shape and which are like to defect to the competition;
Which account managers are doing a good job at building long-term relationships within those accounts;
What is the one thing that they as senior executives need to address in 2020 because it’s an issue across all of the client base.
The theory is quite simple: people only buy from people that they trust. Long term commitment between two business partners is based on exactly that – a relationship built on Trust. Although B2B stands for business to business, I often say it’s really P2P (Person to Person). Organisations don’t buy from organisations. It’s people who buy from each other, even when they work in large organisations.
5 Actions You Need to Take
So keeping that in mind, how should we deal with our clients in the current environment? I’ve been reflecting on what some of our clients are doing with their customers and it seems to boil down to five things. These five actions are all based on building an emotional connection with clients and enhancing that client relationship:
1. Tell Customers how you are Contributing to Safety
2. Treat Customers with Care and Empathy
3. Communicate Constantly and Consistently
4. Treat Employees with Respect
5. There is no fifth action: Just make sure you do Actions 1 – 4
1. Contributing to Safety
This first point may not apply to every company but it probably does apply to most. Tell your customers what you are doing to contribute to their safety. After all, this whole COVID19 pandemic is primarily an issue of human safety. People out there are naturally concerned both from a personal and from a professional point of view.
Some of our clients deal with safety for a living. For example, one of our clients is a company called Survitec. It has over 3,000 employees manufacturing safety equipment for Defence and Marine clients. We’re working with the Marine division which manufactures everything from life jackets to the largest lifeboats you’ve ever seen. Their clients include cruise companies, oil & gas organisations, ship manufacturers, ship managers and so on.
Let’s take something like a lifeboat inspection. In the last few weeks, Survitec has literally re-written the manual for doing a lifeboat inspection. It had to, to make sure that it complied with WHO guidelines on things like workers practicing social distancing, the wearing of gloves and face masks, the basics of handwashing and use of hand sanitisers; on carrying out deep cleans after work has been completed. All shipments that are sent from Survitec’s warehouses are cleaned and wiped down before being dispatched.
But there’s not much point in rewriting the manual if you don’t also tell clients that you have done so. That’s what Survitec has been doing.
2. Treating Customers with Care and Empathy
Quite a few of our clients have customers that operate in industries that have been hard hit by COVID-19. I’ve already mentioned Survitec and the fact that it works with cruise companies. Now that’s a tough industry to be in at the moment.
We have another client called Timico which provides a range of IT services to UK clients. Many of these are operating in the restaurant and retail industry. These companies are hurting – both at a corporate level and at a personal level. A lot of what Timico has been doing in recent weeks is talking to their clients, understanding what their particular circumstances are and, in many cases, renegotiating deals and contracts based on the reality of what’s happening in their industry at the moment. For Timico it’s all about “providing confidence that they are doing everything they can to support their customers”.
I’m sure you have clients in a similar position. Be like Timico. Be empathetic. Go into listening mode.
3. Communicating Constantly and Consistently
Remember that communication is two-way. It’s about listening as much as it is telling. In fact, it should be a lot more listening that telling, in the current environment.
We have another client called Invenio that has about 1,000 staff deployed on large technical projects all across the globe – Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa. Last Friday, we completed a customer feedback programme for them and while there was some debate at the start of April about whether we should go ahead, the CEO Arun Bala decided – correctly – that now was absolutely the right time to find out what his clients were thinking. As of this morning, we’re going through all the feedback with the various Invenio account owners. The next step is for those account owners to go back to their clients, share and discuss the feedback, and come up with action plans to address any issues.
4. Treating Employees with Respect
You might say this is not related to customers but remember that your staff are the daily interface your company has with clients. Treat them in exactly the same way that you treat your customers. Put it another way: “How can you expect your staff to provide a great customer experience when they are not having a great employee experience?”
Now, more than ever, your customers will judge how you deal with them currently when they consider who they do business with in the future. You probably know there are lists circulating in the UK naming companies who have provided bad customer and/or employee experience!
We have a Danish client called Pelican that operates a series of self-storage facilities for small businesses and for consumers all across the Nordic region. Most of their sites only have two staff so good communication with employees is again a key requirement for Pelican’s management team. Two weeks ago, we completed an employee assessment for Burkhart Franz, the CEO of Pelican, and I’m going to read you two comments that came back from staff in that assessment:
“Since Pelican has taken quick actions during this corona crisis, my trust in our company has grown. My score is higher than before due to this fact.”
“It’s really nice in this hard Corona situation that I can trust my employer. At the moment I have no worries about losing my job or salary, like many of my friends and family. Thank you for that!”
Now even if Burkhart wasn’t in a position to make any financial commitment to his employees, he’s the sort of guy who will let employees know exactly where they stand and what is likely to happen. And they really appreciate it. Be like Burkhart. List to your employees. Do it now.
Summary
So here are my key messages again:
1. Tell Customers how you are Contributing to Safety
2. Treat Customers with Care and Empathy
3. Communicate Constantly and Consistently
4. Treat Employees with Respect
If you need a fifth message, it to spend a lot of time thinking about the other four, because these are actions that companies need to take now, not just because they’re the right thing to do, but because they make sense commercially as well.
I’ll finish off with a message from a recent conversation I had recently with Ed Stainton, who manages the major government accounts for BT including the relationships with various police forces across the country. Based on their most recent customer assessment, we know that Ed already has a fantastic set of relationships with his clients but he’s convinced that in the next Deep-Insight assessment, the scores will be even better. Ed is convinced that this is the case because his teams have been working 24 x 7 throughout March and April on a whole range of activities directly or indirectly related to COVID-19. Ed believes that enhanced contact is going to lead to better and deeper client relationships. I think he’s right.
Thank you for listening and remember: be like Survitec and Invenio! Be like Arun, Burkhart and Ed!
If you’re interested if throwing your name in the hat for a free electronic copy, all you need to go to our Contact Us page and tell us that you’d like to enter. Easier still, just send us an email with the phrase Customer At The Heart in the subject of your message. 
All interviews were excellent and insightful but some went off in directions that we had not planned at the outset. 
