The Seven Keys to Managing Strategic Accounts by Sallie Sherman Joseph Sperry Samuel Reese

Author:Sallie Sherman, Joseph Sperry, Samuel Reese
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

HOW DO WE ASSIGN STRATEGIC ACCOUNT MANAGERS?

Some firms simply do not understand—as Motorola did—the need to concentrate strategic account management on a small number of accounts. We became aware of the problem in the early nineties, when we created a 36-member world-class strategic account manager panel. We periodically submitted research questions to this panel. In 1995, one of our consultants asked several panel members how many customers a strategic account manager could effectively manage. The panel members responded by telling the consultant he was asking the wrong question—he should be asking how many individual relationships an account manager should manage. The consultant then asked that question to our entire panel.

It seemed to us that, with the answer to this and other questions, we could construct an account-manager staffing analog, a tool we had not seen before. Among other questions, our consultant asked the panel how much time each month a relationship required to prevent “drift,” where the customer, not feeling enough attention from the supplier, simply drifts toward another supplier relationship. He also asked strategic accounts how often they needed to see an account manager. To our surprise, given the many industries and account managers replying, accounts and panel members agreed that individual relationship management took an average time of somewhere between two and eight hours a month. The two to eight hours is not necessarily face time. It could be phone time or email. It depends on the expectation of the strategic account contacts and the maturity of the relationship. New relationships tend to take more time; older relationships, once you establish reliability and trust, tend to take less time. This of course depends on any given account contact’s relationship needs ( Figure 5–6).

Starting with the 2 to 8 hours a month needed to prevent drift, we can begin to construct a strategic account management assignment model based not on sales models but on the expectations of account contacts. The model assumes that there are 20 workdays in a month, or 160 hours—although most account managers thought this assumption laughable. One said, “We’re on flex time here ... I can work any 90 hours a week I want to.” If you accept those two assumptions, though, a strategic account manager really has time to manage between 20 and 80 individual relationships. Account managers consistently told us, however, that the ideal number of relationships to manage was somewhere between 40 and 60, although most did admit to being responsible for at least 60 to 80 relationships. So their responses were consistent with each other. When we asked some account managers on the panel how they were handling the last 20 individual relationships, most said they were concentrating on the higher-leverage account contacts. In other words, they were skimming some of the account contact relationships.

FIGURE 5–6

Things to Consider

1. Strategic accounts have multiperson relationships, and require that a minimum of 5 to 10 relationships be managed.

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