In this era of relentless commoditization, some sales organizations approach “value co-creation” and “collaborative partnerships” with customers as lofty goals, likely unattainable and therefore unthinkable. Yet, most companies that thrive in today’s marketplace understand that building relationships and creating value both for and with their customers is exactly how they are able to achieve their success. In many of those organizations, strategic account management (or SAM, as it’s commonly known) plays a critical role in winning and growing relationships with key customers.
Even so, SAM is often dismissed out of hand as too expensive, time-consuming, or complicated for any but the largest, most elite corporate environments.
Before you leap to that conclusion, I would encourage you to inform your decision making with real knowledge, and it’s readily available if you know where to look.
SAMA (Strategic Account Management Association) is a non-profit, 8,000- member organization that can help your company determine whether SAM is the right direction, and support your efforts to implement and maintain a successful SAM initiative.
SAMA’s mission is to “establish strategic, key, and global account management as a separate profession, career path, and proven corporate strategy for growth.”
“SAMA is a knowledge exchange base, an extensive network of experts and practitioners focused solely on the area of strategic account management,” President and CEO Bernard Quancard told me when we talked recently. Under his thoughtful leadership, SAMA has amassed a substantial electronic library of best practices—articles, videos and an abundance of other resources on the various elements of SAM. The organization hosts two major conferences every year, one in the U.S. and another in Europe. “These major events are the culminating points of the best practices exchange,” he said. “They assemble the most knowledgeable practitioners in the world.”
The SAMA University/Academy program offers training on SAM’s key competencies through a Certified Strategic Account Manager (CSAM) program, and the training can be customized and delivered in-house according to the needs of the company. Training content comes directly from experts and consultants who have been thoroughly vetted around how much value they can bring to the defined competencies.
“SAM is a corporate strategy, not a sales initiative,” Bernard said. “Companies are struggling to get out of the ‘commoditiza-tion impasse.’ This means collaborating to co-create value by engaging their most important customers, and this is a company-wide effort.”
To bring it about, Bernard believes that C-level buy-in is essential. SAMA also has the resources to help in that area.
In many cases, the ambivalence that companies feel toward SAM comes from some basic misconceptions about what it is and what it takes to implement. Some companies, for instance, may have the impression that “strategic” is about the size of the account or its geographic location. A big customer is not necessarily strategic, while a smaller account may be very important indeed. Identifying which accounts are truly strategic is essential to building a partnership with customers that will benefit from this level of collaboration. Then you’ll want to align your internal resources to create and deliver value solutions to those customers, and hire the right talent to carry it out. “A good strategic account manager is not necessarily a ‘good salesperson,’” Bernard told me. “They need to be a good manager.”
There’s little doubt that implementing SAM has its complexities, but I urge you not to shy away from investigating how it might work in your company and, even better, for your customers. Understanding is the first step, and SAMA can help you achieve the enlightenment you’ll need to implement SAM in your own organization.
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