Chapter 3: Key 2: Create Firm Alignment and Commitment to Meet Strategic Accounts Needs and Expectations

Overview

In Chapter 1, we examined firms that realized the potential of account management because they approached it as a business initiative—a means of optimizing business performance—rather than as a pure sales initiative. In this chapter, we look at other companies that, by defining customer management as a business strategy, were then able to align and mobilize their organizations to implement that strategy. Organizational alignment works when firms gain their employees' commitment and thus energize them to serve accounts more effectively. This chapter examines methods that have helped companies achieve such alignment, in the hope that you might apply similar approaches to your firm.

There are four sections to this chapter:

1. What is organizational alignment?

2. What are the benefits of organizational alignment?

3. What makes organizational alignment difficult?

4. How can a firm create organizational alignment?