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.
Some time ago, we posted a blog called Help! What do I do with my Stalkers and Opponents? It was about the actions that account teams need to take with clients where there are very poor relationships. This blog is about the accounts with the best, strongest and deepest relationships. We call these clients Ambassadors.
Let’s start with a quick recap of the five B2B client categories that we use at Deep-Insight:
Customer Relationship Quality – the Strongest Relationships
The most loyal clients are Ambassadors. They are your most valuable customers. Ambassadors have a unique relationship with you and will recommend you to others. They are also prepared to pay a premium for your products or services. Price is not an important consideration for them because of the quality of the relationship. Typically, a third of most company’s B2B clients are Ambassadors.
The next segment of clients are known as Rationals. They rate you positively but do not see anything unique in the relationship. Rationals will assess alternative sources of supply and the relationship can become unstable if good alternative offers exist. Typically, half of your B2B accounts fit into this category. Generally they are good clients albeit not as loyal as Ambassadors.
The Weakest Relationships
But wait! That doesn’t add up to 100%. What’s the story with the others? Well, the answer is that in all B2B client portfolios, there are accounts and individuals that don’t love you. We typically find that 10-20% of accounts have poorer relationships with you and fit into one of the following three categories: Ambivalents often have a “love/hate” relationship with you. In some instances, they love the way you solve their problems but hate the way you treat them. More often, you are killing them with kindness but failing to solve their business issues.
Stalkers are often only interested in price. Sometimes they can be large corporate accounts looking for discounts. Other times, they are smaller accounts with high service requirements and view your offering as poor value for money.
Opponents have the poorest relationships with you. They are deeply dissatisfied and often highly frustrated by what they see as consistently poor service.
Are ‘Ambassadors’ the same thing as ‘Promoters’?
If you use Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a performance metric, you’ll recognise the terms Promoters, Passives and Detractors.
Promoters are people who score you 9/10 or 10/10 when asked the question “Would you recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague?” Passives score you 7 or 8. Detractors score you anywhere between 0 and 6.
Ambassadors are similar but here are the two crucial differences: First, an Ambassador is a company rather than an individual. Second, to become an Ambassador you have to get a good Net Promoter Score AND a good Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) score. CRQ is our methodology for assessing the quality of B2B relationships and it is based on Trust and Commitment as well as some other factors, rather than Advocacy which is what the NPS metric is based on.
Think of it this way. Suppose you ask 20 people in a Key Account what they think of their relationship with you and would they be prepared to recommend you and your product or service. If the client is an Ambassador, 12 of the 20 individuals might be Promoters, six might be Passives and two might be Detractors. The overall relationship is great but there are still a couple of individuals who will not recommend you.
What do I do with my Ambassadors
For starters, sales and account teams should remember the following three things when they have an Ambassador client:
1. Recognise their importance and don’t take them for granted
The very first thing is to recognise that Ambassadors are generally your most profitable clients, for a number of reasons:
– They are typically less price-sensitive because they see what you offer as being unique.
– Ambassadors are generally willing to pay a premium for such uniqueness.
– Sales costs are lower. Less effort is required to extend existing contracts or negotiate new ones.
– There is less firefighting. Putting out fires can be expensive. Even when things go wrong, it’s generally easier to resolve operational issues with Ambassadors.
Don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t treat Ambassadors as cash cows. Invest time into the relationship to keep it fresh and exciting. It’s easy to get diverted to more problematic accounts where the shouting is the loudest. In our previous blog we talked about poor client relationships that are unprofitable. Unless there is a clear path to recovery, it is often better to re-allocate those resources to Ambassador clients where there is greater potential.
2. Ask them to recommend you
Remember that a high proportion of individuals in an Ambassador client are Promoters so they have already told you that they will recommend you. So take them up on the offer. Ask them for referrals. Those referrals could be the MDs of other divisions in the same company. This is important – it’s easier to expand your footprint in an existing client than to gain ‘new logo’ clients. Referrals could also be senior executives in other companies. Ask for testimonials or for case studies.
Trustmary is a Finnish company that helps clients do exactly that, by using Net Promoter Score as the key metric for identifying Ambassadors for their clients. Once the Ambassadors have been identified, Trustmary acquires testimonials in written or video format from those individuals.
Don’t be afraid to ask Ambassadors to talk at your next industry event or to be a guest speaker at your next conference. They want to help you. So just do it.
3. Start innovating and co-creating
As the account manager for an Ambassador client, you are probably in the enviable position of being a Trusted Advisor. You have the ear of the key decision makers in that account and the opportunity to bring new ideas and propositions to the table. Use that opportunity. Think of possible joint developments that you can do in partnership with the client. As well as adding more value and revenues, your next product line or service could result from such innovation or co-creation.
How many Ambassadors do you have?
The starting point for these decisions is an accurate and objective view of which category each of your major accounts fits into. Once you know that, you can start asking the right questions and taking the appropriate action.
Contact us if you want to find out how many Ambassadors you have!
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.
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. 
