Episode 115: Why Systemising Key Account Management is a MUST to Grow Sales

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And engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Well, wherever you are in the world at the moment, I expect that you are mid season. And for me, they're often some of the most beautiful parts and times of the year. Those times when the heat of summer's gone or the cold of winter is not yet here, or, or vice versa, right? We're coming out of the cold of winter, starting to move towards that warmth of summer. And for me, particularly when you're coming out of winter, moving into those warm periods of summer, it is just that time of opportunity in life. Everything's a little bit brighter, everyone's a little bit happier because you know, you've got those warmer months and periods of time ahead. And for me, it's something when we talk about with sales teams where we can start to look towards brighter futures, that we really build that positivity and around our teams and ourselves and anyone, our customers, even those associated with the business. And for me, what that often comes down to in sales teams is knowing that you have a strategy within your team of repeatable sales that will take the pressure off, needing to have consistent new leads generated day in, day out, right? When you're, every month you have a, you know that you hit great results, you know that the next month you've gotta go out and generate all those leads again. And it almost becomes groundhog day when you're doing the same thing over and over and over again. And we talk about that being repeat income, annuity income, trailing commissions, whatever it may be. There's lots and lots of different forms in this. But for me, the times when we have the brightest outlook on our sales teams is either when we're just starting out or when we know we've got future Revenue ahead of us. I know absolutely without doubt when I've had my businesses that I was always looking at our three month revenue for forecast, right? And when I mean forecast, I mean pipeline of work that we know is coming through. And when that was full for me, I was a happy man. For service based businesses I'm consistently working with and those listening who work with me, they will know and with the rest of our team, they will know that I'm constantly asking you to aim for 12 to 16 weeks of booked work because when we have that forward flow, life is generally easier. Now for sales teams, that can come down to me to three areas. There's winning new revenue, right, which is your day in, day out, lead generation, having a big enough pipeline in your business to be able to bring those sales in. Number two is to be getting repeat customers. So when we have previous customers who have worked with us and with our business, that we're able to actually have a pipeline of services that allows them to come back and work with us again. And then the third one is getting more from existing customers. So that generally comes down to your basket size. An example I'll give here is a new bike, right? When you're buying a new bike, which yes, everyone's heard this, I'm on the road to doing my first Ironman at the moment. I've just had my new bike delivered and straight away, what else do I need to buy with it right at the time of purchase, at the time of filling that basket and checking out what else did I need? Drink bottle holders, shoes, pedals, right, Helmet, everything else that comes with that when I'm buying a new bike. So three really distinct ways of growing revenue in a business for me, where we start to think about forward generation and forward pipelines, key account management and repeat business really comes to the fore here. We spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about strategy, talking about new lead generation, talking about new deals, talking about negotiation, right? And really winning deals when it comes down to that first transaction. But I'd like to change the focus today and talk a little bit about key account management and what I'm seeing work really effectively across businesses who are reliant on repeat incomes. So win one customer could potentially be a really long sales cycle, but win one customer and then have repeated sales from that customer along the journey. That's what I want to focus on today. So we're going to jump straight into it. I'll preface it with only one more thing and that's to say that when it Comes down to what I think is really important within the sales industry. I often look at the number of requests that I'm getting around certain topics and without doubt the sales process and refining the sales process, finding the gaps and getting better at what we do is absolutely the number one. But at the moment, number two is around key account management. Lots of businesses asking to help train or retrain their teams around how to manage their accounts. And next week in episode 116, I'm actually going to focus on the train and retrain piece. We've done a few across the series around training, but I think it's worth just putting our minds to that again because when I see those inquiries jump up, it generally says to me, hey, we've got people that are wanting to know what's going on. So today though, let's focus on key account management. So what does key account management look like to me? Key account management for me is taking existing customers and turning them into repeat customers. So people or businesses who will buy from us again and again and again over an extended lifetime. The key measure here comes down to customer lifecycle value. That is what is the cost to win our customer now versus what the revenue that they will generate to us over their entire lifetime. There's some really obvious approaches here. Toothpaste. When you're winning customers, they will generally buy the same toothpaste again and again and again. Bikes is a good example, right? You buy your branded bike. I've just bought a canyon. There's a number of parts and products that I'm going to need and there'll be a bike shop that I go to to get my servicing done again and again and again. It can be equipment in the B2B space where you're buying one product and that has a lifetime. It needs servicing, it needs maintenance. Right. It needs to be upgraded, it needs bolt on parts. Or you could extend your fleet, whatever it may be. So for me, I think the definition around key account management is repeat business. But where does it start and where does it finish is where I often see some conjecture among sales teams. So today I'm gonna share from my point of view, in a couple of decades and tens of thousands of deals experience here around what I think key account management success looks like for teams. So let's talk about where it starts. For me, Key account management starts immediately once your first deal or customer engagement is signed. The ink is not yet dry or the digital signature has just come through to your business, whatever it is, right? That's for me when key Account management starts because the best key account relationships I see across extended periods of time are built through deep trust and care. And in that first delivery cycle, that first time, when a project's won and it's delivered, that's when a lot of trust can be built. Because often, let's face it, things don't go perfectly smooth in the first delivery cycle. So for me, as sales team, sales leaders, we need to be making sure that our teams are focused on key account management from the moment they sign that deal. And that comes down to building a structure where we can repeatedly, across every single deal that we win re engage with our customers as we need to. How can that look? Some ideas here that we're having a weekly meeting with our delivery team if it's an extended project, or we're having a meeting at the start and finish with our delivery team if it's a short burn project, we agree with our customers when we're going to be touching base with them. We agree with our customers what we're going to be talking to them about, right? So if we're delivering a major, a project, a building, for example, right. We agree that we're going to touch base at the signing a contract a week after launch, when council paperwork submitted, when we first have stock to site, when we first turn soil, right. And so on. If it's a smaller project, if it's a service implementation, we talk about at the start of the final scope, after the first week of delivery, right, at the end of delivery, whatever it may be. But for me, it's all about defining and being really clear when we're gonna be checking in with our customer. Right? So that, for me, builds great key account relationships in the early days, primarily because the customer can see that the salesperson is invested in their journey. You've heard me say before, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. This is a big proponent of this, of getting in with our customer and making sure we're building that relationship very easy, very straightforward. I'd be surprised if many people listening haven't heard this before. However, my experience says that the majority of people don't do this very well. And the reason they don't do it well is because they don't have a repeated structure that the whole team has signed up to that says, yeah, this is when we're going to contact our customer. This is how we're going to deal internally with our delivery or our customer care teams, right? This is how we're going to Handle issues as they arise. This is when the salesperson is going to be brought in. So that for me is number one, right when we've signed the paperwork. The implementation period, the second phase of key account management is we start to look at how we build long term revenue growth. Right? And we're not even talking about selling more at the moment. And certainly this piece doesn't either. The second piece here is that we are engaging with our customers in their first three months of implementation. Again, it comes down to building set structures within our team around how and when we're going to do this. But for me, what it will normally look like is either month one, month two, month three, six weeks, month three, or if it's a project that is quite consistent. So they've bought a piece of equipment, right, that's got a long lifetime. It might be month two, four and six, for example. But regardless, the point here is that we have repeated touch points with our customer to make sure they are happy with their purchase. Now that's fantastic that they are. Now, in most instances, we should see that customers are reasonably happy, right, with what they've purchased. There'll be some teething issues, they might have some questions to ask you. Right. But in the whole, if we're working for a business that's reasonably proficient at what it does, we, we should expect to see that the satisfaction from customers is generally pretty strong. In fact, my experience says that satisfaction with a new product or a new service is rarely higher than in those first few months. And that for me is when really good key account management can overlap into generating new business. And in essence, the time to ask for referrals is the most impactful. It might be referrals, it might be reviews, it might be testimonials, it might be case studies. But certainly as we're checking in with our customers, that's the time to be asking for this information. Not only does that help build your relationship with your customer, that is the customer, if they feel that you're doing a good job for them, right. They're more than happy in most instances. Of course, there's always exceptions, but my experience says that customers are generally happy to help you out. But the second thing it can do is it can actually broaden your business and help that future pipeline of revenue for you. Right. Which can take some of your pressure off lead generation. What it also does though, is when you ask for referrals, it can often lead to internal referrals within that business. Right? So other sites, other brands, other people within the Same site who might need the same product, right? If you're providing training, if you're in my industry, you're providing strategic sales training to a certain division of the business, right? You might jump across to another division, but if you're not asking your customer for referrals or who else could use your service sheet, it's very, very rare that you get this, right? Don't ask, don't get. And what I really like about this approach in the first three months is it leads with making sure that the customer is happy, but then it follows up with looking at ways that you can connect further with new customers or help their business in greater detail. For me, I cannot count the number of times where I have seen a key account sales lead ask a customer, hey, is there anyone else I should be working with? And the customer's response is actually to recommend someone internally within their business, super powerful. You start to cross that across the business and it strengthens those key account bonds, right? Taking you from that intellectual loyalty, that product loyalty, through to that emotional loyalty across the business. The third thing that I like to see from the first three month engagement is that we start to work through the customer, how often they want to hear from us, right? Because once we get agreement from the other side of town, right, the buyer's side, that they're really keen to hear from us every two months with new things that are happening around what we're doing, or every six months or every 12 months or whatever it may be, we've in essence made an informal agreement or contract, right, as to how we're going to be talking to each other now, please. We can take the reference to a contract and agreement really loosely, right? But the idea here is that when asking someone, hey, what can I do to add value to you? If they're responding to us with their preference, then my experience and certainly the teams we work with says that they're going to be more open to hearing from you down the track. Okay, so part one of Key Account Management was getting your delivery cadence, right, and really building that relationship with your customer after the sales process. Part 2 around key account Management was making sure that we are structuring how we contact customers in their first period of usage of a product. It's not just to make sure they're happy, but. But it's also to be asking for referrals, internal or external, and building out a cadence as to how we want to talk with each other. Great. So they're the first two things done, right, Nice and straightforward. But the Fortune here is in making sure that we systemically execute this over and over and over again. Right. Third piece here is it comes down for me. Once we've had that initial rollout and we've had the engagement period during their first usage, what comes next is understanding how we can most add value to our customer base. So where we're adding value can be really impactful around ensuring that our key account business grows. Few things at play here. One is it keeps competitors at bay. But two is if we can understand what is most impactful to the other side of the fence, to our buyer side, to our partner, to the whoever it may be. Right. If we can understand the problems that we can continue to solve for them or, or the opportunities that we can continue to capitalize on, that is when we start to get a really strong key account relationship. I can distinctly remember about 10 years ago when we were in the renewables game. I had a customer who at the start was all very much transactional by product. Lowest price of product, reasonable output of product. And we continue the relationship. But by the way, Ben, I'm using three or four of you and I interchange you in according to our site rollouts as we need to. Where the game changed for me was when I realized that that customer had this product which happened to be lighting at that point in time, was only stage one in a many stage journey. And where I could be helping that customer make progress on the next stage of his journey and the next stage and the stage after that before we actually got to it. We started to build a relationship where I was actually providing value beyond just a product. There was some guidance in there, there was some advice from what we're seeing in the market, we even broadened out into products that this customer wasn't using, right into energy, energy procurement. But we spent a lot of time around how they can buy and use their energy better beyond just installing the products that we were putting in. And what happened out of this was that we built a relationship where I was adding value beyond just the product level. That old Warren Buffett quote where we're moving from technical loyalty through to emotional loyalty, right from products, features and benefits through to providing value trust. But we've heard trusted advisors, not a saying I really subscribe to. I'd prefer to look at people as saying we're partners who add value, right? As long as we are making someone's life better or doing something for them that they couldn't do themselves, certainly not easily. That's where the key account relationship will really Prosper. So for me, that relationship moved from transactional to strategic. And they are still my favorite customer across my entire time in doing business because we built north of $10 million worth of work through them. Okay, so how are we doing that? How are we making sure that we're adding value to customers? Well, for me, those first two stages, understanding the delivery and talking about the satisfaction they had within the product, absolutely, for me is where we start to get a greater picture around what long term value looks like. We can start to ask questions around what else. Right. What are they doing now that they've installed, now that they have bought new cars for their fleet, what's the next stage for them? Is it buying their fuel better? Is it equipping their cars with new equipment? Is it having branding done on their cars? Is it having a rollout of additional cars into different parts of their business? Right. There's lots and lots of things we can talk about when it comes to a fleet management of a car. Now, not all of these are going to be direct products we sell, however, where we can provide introductions, where we can provide some advice around how other customers have done it, right? Where we can help shorten their learning journey for whatever naturally comes next in their buying cycle. That's adding value, where we can talk about products and features that we're adding to the product they bought. If we go back to my bike example, I've bought a bike, the front end of my bike, it needs to be raised. I need a greater upwards angle to help block the wind and make me more aerodynamic. I need some new tyres, right? A disc wheel at the back, I need to have a look at, perhaps if I've got the right seat, lots of little things that need to bolt on. It's a slippery slope and a never ending game. But if that partner that sold me the bike was talking to me about this regularly, which they're not, by the way, canyon where I bought the bike from, if you need some help, let me know, right? But if they were regularly talking to me about how I could add more features to my bike and adding that value and solving the problems, then hey, we have a really good long term partnership. So the piece around adding value, how do I recommend you do that? For me, it's having a cadence of meetings with our customers. It is by far the simplest way that I've seen this work over a very long period of time. Just because of the advent of talking via video, just because of the introduction of AI, just because things are changing in the world from A sales delivery perspective. It doesn't mean that people's motives or how they like to do business have as well. And what I mean by that is that people still like engaging with people and we still within reason. Right. And we still need to talk to our valued partners to be able to come up with solutions, work through the gray and improve our businesses. So for me, the piece that's really important here is making sure that we are setting up a regular cadence of meetings and having a clear structure on what we go through, what's working, what has yet to work, what are the next opportunities, what's the best thing we can do for you? Really straightforward format. What's working, what isn't working yet? Right. What's coming up and what's the best thing that we can do for you? Okay, so that's certainly a terrific way to approach how, how we can hold regular meetings with our customers. And what comes out of that then is opportunities. Because when we're talking to our customers, when we're engaging with them, that's the point in time when we start to hear more about what's going on in their business lives. We can add to this some digital nurturing, right. Where we have newsletters, where we have general customer engagement through webinars, right. Where we're providing anything that's educational or increasing their knowledge base, all really valuable. So podcasts, terrific way. When we can have customers who are dealing with our business continuing to engage with us, it's not always going to be face to face, but any point where we can have, you know, touch points increase between us and our customers, that's beautiful. Key account management. Okay, so we've looked at making sure we're staying in touch with our customer during delivery the first three months or equivalent hotspot for when you've provided a service or a product to customers that the most impactful first period of time with them. Right. Understanding how we can create value long term and then setting up a really regular cadence of contact with these customers. Right. There's a few forms there, whether it's face to face video or some nurturing programs. Right. That's the really important part. Last but not least, in fact, I'd say last but most important is making sure that we are expanding our relationships with with the customer. So if we're a B2C brand, right. That deals directly with a consumer. Right. A single purchaser. I've heard many times the argument that says, well, we're dealing with one person, it's irrelevant. For me, that doesn't hold because. And let's avoid smaller purchases that happen every now and then. I'm talking about bigger purchases, right? You know, thousands of dollars or more or repeated purchases. Even if it's just subscription based pricing or subscription based products and services, there is very rarely only one person involved in this decision. So finding a way that you can be engaged with the family if you like, whether it's their partner, whether it's their friends, it's those that influence them. That's the bit that for me is really impactful. And that can be as simple as if you're a product or a subscription service, having a second user login, right. So you've got that second user that you can engage with, right. If you're providing physical product in there, it's dealing with or asking your consumer who else uses that product and trying to get some details about that user so that you can personalise the service for them, whatever it may be. Regardless of whether you're B2B or B2C, there's an impact here around cross threading at a B2B level. I think it's far more obvious. It's finding others within an organization to build relationships with. The really obvious reasons here are that if that person who is using your product either falls out of love with your product or leaves the organization or moves on to something else, right. You then have other relationships that you can fall back to. But for me, the opportunity leans here is that you have others that you can increase, you know, the sales of your products to. This is where you get to upsell. This is where you get to provide more multiples of units. This is where you get to understand how others are using your product to see if there are opportunities for them to get engaged with your business. And for me, I think the whole approach here, right, really is underpinned by having a system of where you can repeatedly engage with your customers. Whether it's during the first delivery, whether it's during the initial three to six months of a product, whether it's when we're creating value and meeting the customer regularly, or simply that we're cross threading right across our relationship period with customers. We've got to have some systems that prompt us to do this again and again and again, right. So it's not just about agreeing as a team how we're going to do it, it's also about providing the systems in there so, so that we can be prompted to do what we need to do. That for me, in a broad spectrum is how great key Account management evolves. I'd expect that out of there. There's lots of things that you do know and you've heard before, but my hope is that you can find a couple little pots of gold that you can take from there, make a slight pivot on, and do again and again and again. Particularly the piece around cross threading. I think that for me is the area where I find most upside with businesses I work with. And probably the second piece, the runner up to that is in those first three to six months of when customers using your product, right. Really touching base and trying to understand ways, right? Use the bike example, understand ways where they're riding their bike, right? What are the extra tools and, you know, products they need? Who else can they get you talking to? Who can they refer you to? So just to sum those up, great, key account management for me is engaging with your customer as you're delivering the project. Engaging with your customer in those first few months of usage, generally when satisfaction's highest or also new problems are highest. The third piece is understanding how you're going to create value so you're really clear in your organization, ongoing value. Number four is your regular cadence of communication. And number five is cross threading, expanding your network across the business to make sure that you can really deliver long term. Okay, so that's key account management in a nutshell, right? If there's anything in there you want to expand into more, get in touch with me, you know where to find me. But before I go, today I'm on the road to Cairns. We have four, five weeks to go as we're going live. I tell you what, I feel really underprepared, but certainly the last couple of weeks for me has been all around the bike and understanding just what great riding looks like. It's not just hours on the bike, it's your position, it's your aerodynamics, right? So you know how much wind is pushing in front of your face and how much is flowing past your body more effortlessly, but also your position where you're actually sitting on the bike, how many watts you're able to push out, right? How tired your hip flexors are or how constrained they are once you get off the bike to be able to jump off and run. I'm using wind trainer sessions, all these different ways of approaching riding. And you know, hats off to elite cyclists, it is a sport where there is more than just your ability to grunt and push hours. Certainly that helps, but there's a hell of a lot of knowledge that goes around maximizing your position and everything around it. So that's been my big focus. Bike volume has been up. I'm up over 100ks a couple of times a week or at least once a week, but I feel like I got a long way to go. So five weeks and counting. Road to Cairns. I'll keep you updated for now. That's it for today. Thanks everyone. Keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

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