Account Management

In account management, you protect and grow your base of positive customers (see Chapter 4). You count on their untapped opportunities to grow your sales production at a faster rate than their market segments (or, at least, your sales quotas) grow. You concentrate on ensuring that their goals, filters, and systems of evaluations still favor your company.

You want to be at the joint planning level (where you progress from vendor to supplier to partner) and help customers set and achieve their long-term goals. Your sphere of influence should be at the C and D levels. Jim Bujold, of Johnson Controls, succinctly described account management as helping customers forget how to achieve their goals without you.

Positive customers become comfortable doing business with you a certain way. A way that might not have anything to do with making goals, benefits, filters, and systems of evaluation measurable. For example, a customer is accustomed to your responding to their requests for making product presentations or proposals. The customer might find it unusual that after all these years you now seek to find out their goals. Yet, the pitfalls of not making your professional bonds with organizations as strong as your personal bonds with contacts are well documented. So, how do you change established precedents for conducting business to benefit both you and your customers?

First, ensure that you honor the most important rule of customer etiquette: Fulfill customers' expectations of the purpose of the sales call before trying to fulfill yours. If customers expect to discuss specific products and prices, etiquette requires you to comply. Unfortunately, this compliance might diminish your ability to sell value. Therefore, change their expectations. Make the purpose of the meeting relate to the Measurable Phases (MPs). For instance, before you start MP 2: Measure Potential, customers should agree the purpose of a meeting is to gather specifics of their goals and filters.

Introduce positive customers to MeasureMax concepts by encouraging them to think about their goals chronologically. This thought process is a natural and comfortable way for customers to discuss their goals, the first step in MP 1: Spark Interest. Your questions take them from their past goals to current ones to future ones. In other words, you begin with the known goals of yesterday and today, and then work your way to their speculative goals of tomorrow. Let their thought process evolve logically. Build on their and your accomplishments. Ask them how you can continue to help them in their endeavors as you uncover the specifics of their goals or the filters affecting them during MP 2: Measure Potential.

Example

• Steven: Olivia, how do you feel your goals changed from a year ago to now?

• Olivia: Steven, reliability was our major concern, but now it is to reduce operating costs.

• Steven: Why is that?

• Olivia: A corporate edict states that we have to cut expenses by 8 percent.

  Steven continues by focusing on how Olivia thinks his company can help her cut operating costs by 8 percent. In addition, he seeks answers to making her goals measurable. (What do operating costs entail? How much does 8 percent equal?) He gathers specifics by referencing the filters to her goals. Her answers determine his next questions per Chapter 5 strategies and tactics.

Making positive customers' goals and filters measurable builds stronger professional and personal relationships—and price and delivery-resistant barriers to competition. Customers can look back on any sale they completed with you and measure how your solutions met or exceeded their goals. Your last sale is a reference for the next one, even if your contacts or sponsors change. You always can point to your documented performance. Remember, you want to be a business partner who helps customers to achieve long-terms goals, not a product vendor who satisfies random short-term needs.