Manage Key Accounts as if They Are Key

In any countertop business, a few key accounts can make the difference between just scraping by and having a highly profitable year. To maintain a positive relationship, these accounts require special attention, and it is always worth the extra effort to provide them with it. To begin, it is first necessary to identify your key accounts.

Don’t Lose Sight of the Goal

The idea behind singling out key accounts is that you will treat them as special, giving them the recognition and treatment they deserve. If the age-old 80/20 rule applies, 20 percent of your customers generate 80 percent or more of the profits. These customers should be made to feel as though they are really special. Most companies recognize this strategy as being important and create sales plans and organizations to reflect the idea. Many, however, lose sight of the objective of this strategy when they try to implement tactics in support of it.

As an example, one company gave its top 100 customers a special number to call for customer service. The customers were to call this number only when the product had failed, resulting in a serious loss of revenue for that customer. The customer would need assistance immediately. In practice, however, when key account customers called the special number, they were apt to experience a serious delay in service. That is because they needed to be qualified for the special service before they were eligible to receive it. They may have been better off calling the number meant for the masses.

Another company considered too many customers key accounts. What happened was that, internally, each region of the company wanted to define its own key account criteria. No region wanted to be left out of the program. The result was that the number of customers who were put into this group far exceeded the number of customers that the sales staff could reasonably accommodate. The key account sales reps did not have time to treat each customer with the special attention that the customer deserved. The hope was that each special account would be visited at least once a month, or once a quarter at worst. In fact, many were visited only twice a year or less often.

What Do Key Accounts Want?

What does a key account want from sales staff? Some key accounts do not want frequent contact, but most of them do. If its partnership with your company means that a customer is a key account, it is going to have a number of wants and needs that have been expressed frequently in market research. In general, key accounts want the following from you and your sales staff:

1. Understand their business – They do not want to have to explain their needs over and over because you have changed sales assignments or do not remember from last time.

2. Know how they make money and how your products and services help them accomplish that

3. Know their future plans – Are they expanding? Are they moving? What are their major problems? In what direction do they see their business or industry segment going in the future? You need to know in case you can help, even if they do not think the problems apply to your product or service. Find out what their problems are, all of them, and find ways to help.

4. Know the entire history of your business relationship – This means knowing not only their order history with you but also any problems in the relationship, even if those problems did not involve the sales activity (such as missing delivery dates or service delays).

Conversations with key accounts in this way can help you discover trends that will affect your business. Identifying these trends can allow you to adjust your product offerings to meet the needs of the key accounts and stay ahead of the competition.

Give Your Key Accounts Special Treatment

Many companies do not treat these types of customers as truly special. Designating them as a key account should be meaningful to you and the customer. If the people your company deals with at the key account do not feel as though they are being treated as important to you, the designation of key account becomes a negative, not a positive, in their mind.

Make sure that your best customers do not feel that way. You may want to ask them what being a key account means to them and how they would want to be treated. Some of the answers may surprise you. This type of research is invaluable. It may be done fairly easily if your sales team is sincere about making these customers feel like the select few. Ask the right open-ended questions about what being a key account should mean. Describe how the relationship should work and your reasons for designating them as key accounts. Find out their thoughts on how to grow the partnership, so both companies profit.

The bottom line: Do not lose sight of your overall objective to make the key account feel special as you implement the tactics of that strategy.

 

Article Source: Articlelogy.com