Podcast Episode #22: The Single Most Important Thing in Key Account Management

Hi and welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. My name is Jermaine Edwards and I have become obsessed with customer behavior and how people and organizations win with their best customers long term. After starting, failing, and growing my own companies, 30 customer growth projects, hundreds of strategies, and the study of 50 years of customer service research, I've seen firsthand how and why organizations win, lose, and win again with their most important customers. This podcast is my way of sharing those insights, failures, principles, and strategies so you can become what I call an Irreplaceable Advisor, someone so valuable your customers never want to leave. In an increasingly competitive world, how do you continue to deliver unrivaled value and deepen those most important customer relationships? Join me as your customer growth guide, your Your journey starts here.

Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide, and welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. In this episode number 22, we're going to talk about customer leadership and how, regardless of where you are in the world, what particular circumstance you're in, whether COVID-19, as we're in the 2020 season at the moment, or anything else, customer leadership is a fundamental set of philosophies and principles and skills that allows us to show up as the kinds of people that our customers never want to leave. They always want to have around. When we adopt these particular principles, these ideas, we can begin to thrive in a much more rich and consistent way with our customers. So I'd like to explore that with you today. So I'll ask you this, and this is simply something that hasn't been discussed as really as well as it should have been in this particular field of key account management, and particularly in the area of any kind of commercial selling role. And it's the act of leadership. And a question for you is, you know, what if leadership was what we really needed fundamentally for key account success? And I really believe that in every aspect of what we do, we're always leading. But actually, what kind of leader are we becoming is an important distinction. We're always leading, but what kind of leader are we becoming? And so in times like this, which are very unusual, and for opportunities to really be leveraged in a way that we can be proud of and we can say, actually, we did a great job there, we actually need to be thinking through how we limit the risk of not becoming the kind of leader that we should become. And so I immediately realized that almost never in the world of success in key account management do we hear about the importance of leadership. And so as I work on my own leadership skills, I'm not the finished article, that's for sure. As I encourage my team and companies, as I look at my peers and encourage my customers, one thing that has stood out are the set of 6 really specific leadership traits that carry a clear philosophy, a core principle, and a set of actions, practices that I believe we can all aspire to achieve and to nurture and cultivate in our old roles— in our own roles, I should say. And there are 6 specifically: how to lead change, how to empower people, How to share a vision, how to inspire others, how to problem-solve, how to execute with precision. So these are some big ideas. I'm gonna cover them fairly quickly just to kind of give you some conceptually, just some ideas on how you might think about this that I'd encourage you to have a think about what you might want to do with that directly. Go a bit deeper perhaps in the blog with a few more ideas and descriptions, or perhaps give my team a call and let's just help you out, think about these specific ideas, or take it back to your business and say, actually guys, we want to be become this kind of customer leader that Jermaine Edwards is talking about. So let's explore this a little bit more. So the posture of customer leadership is really important. This begins at the philosophy level. So more than ever, we want to step up, we want to be the kinds of customers, kinds of partners to our customers that they really seek after. And for us, the posture of leadership, for us to be taking Seriously is about leading ourselves and our customers for future success. So the idea is we want to lead from the front, and this is all about learning how to invite our customers into the result and not the activity. So we want to help our customers to see the vision of where we're heading and why that's important to them. So we want to lead from the front, but we also want to lead from the side, and that's about coming real close to your customer to help them execute to achieve the ideal result that they want. So notice when I gave you the 6 traits, I started by leading with change and executing with precision was the last. What holds this together is this how idea of vision, and that is really important as we lead from the front and lead from the side. So we need to become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily even if you had no title or position. And most of the time, we are people leading our contacts, our customers, and sometimes we don't necessarily have a huge senior position. Sometimes we might, but that's irrelevant. It is about what kind of leader we're trying to become. And so these leadership qualities I want to begin to explore with you. So let's do that now. So let's talk about leading change as a customer. Now, change has its own set of structures itself, but I want to just give you a few ideas to think about what we might need to consider as a customer leader as it pertains to change with customers. So here's what I'd like to consider: that as a key account manager or director, our ability to help lead and enable change is really critical, particularly as we think about the way in which we move people through a process, how we reduce or eliminate specific kinds of risks and ensure that we're maintaining revenue, reputation, and retention of our customers and allowing them to get the kinds of results that they want. So rather than kind of walk you through different change models that you can go through, I just want to give you a set of questions to start with. So the first thing is, when you're inside a change or looking to help somebody else change, we want to ask ourselves, what kind of change are we trying to make with and for our customers? Change up for us and change for our customer. And that's a really important question. It's probably a question that is most important, because when you understand what kind of change you could— you're trying to make, then you can define the kinds of actions more clearly on how best to make that change of reality with the least amount of frustration and least amount of friction in the relationship. And once you've understood that, you don't want to start thinking about making people and the result the focus and not the change itself. So once you've understood the change, you go, okay, let's focus on people now. It's, it's focused on how we help them and how we think about that result with them so they get bought into this picture of the change. Both from a need perspective and making them much more aware, but also creating deep desire as we support them throughout the process. So those are the first two questions I'll just give you. What kind of change are you trying to make with and for your customers? And then make people and the result the focus, not the change. And again, I encourage you to go a little bit deeper on this and think about how you might apply change in your own business. The second is empowering people. So, you know, one of the unique opportunities as key account leaders is the opportunity to empower. The empowerment is that place where, as a customer leader, you have the power to enable others to act on your behalf and importantly, for the benefit of others. And you might say, well, I guess that sounds good, Jermaine Edwards, but how do you actually do this? And so I'm glad you asked the question. I didn't say any of these tricks would be easy to implement but they are very, very possible. So here are just a couple of things to consider. Again, just the first two to start with. So the first thing, if we're thinking about empowering others and getting others to work proactively for the benefit of others, for the benefit of getting something completed, as a leader, we want to first understand the skills and abilities of those around us. That includes your peers and your customers' capability, and that might be organization-wide, it might be a department, it might might simply be just an individual. And this, this is a, you know, a deep thinking process in some way, but it's not a difficult one. You can actually do this fairly quickly. It's just a bit of an audit. What specific skills do you need to serve your customer and help them achieve the goals you both have? And what is it that's in their own business from a capability perspective that might help enable that, or the, the the furtherance of that particular goal that they're after in order to achieve the overall result or outcome. And so once we understand and can navigate that, we can then begin to communicate and bring those individuals in, or the capability in, wherever that is. So we want to share with those people that we notice the skill and capability, or where the resource is. We want to make them aware of what we've noticed and invite them again into the result, not the activity or not the change itself, but being aware that of their responsibilities and goals. And actually, as we bring them in, we want to include them and say, look, here's some things we think you could be really valuable in helping to achieve. We invite them into that. We make them the person who is important as we think about the overall change we're trying to make. We want to empower them to the ability of encouragement for the, for the design bridge of encouragement in that area. And this is something everyone can do to empower other people, is recognize other people's skills and abilities, acknowledge them for it, and invite them into their own capability— something they're really good at already— but invite them into the result of what we're trying to achieve together, and not just the activity itself. So it's just two big things to consider. The next is sharing a vision. As I mentioned, at the center of all communication, you know, between you, your customer, your organization, has to be a shared view of where you're going. And that's what we call the vision. Where are we heading? What's that big idea? And so a definition of vision that I have is something that is clear, distinctive, and specific view of the future that connects and defines the strategic advances of an organization. So it's a vision, is clear, distinctive, and has a specific view of the future connected with defined strategies for an organization, strategic advances that an organization might make. And so when we look at that, and you may have another one yourself of what vision may be to you. But in taking this particular one, effective leaders clearly define a vision and communicate it in such a way to foster enthusiasm and commitment throughout the organization. And if it's clear, distinctive, and specific with a future intent connected with strategic advances, we can as individuals automatically see the power in that particular statement, and we're drawn to it daily because we can, we can see our role and how it connects deeply to it. And if we've thought about empowerment, if we thought about the whole idea of how— of the change that we're trying to make, then when we get to the place of sharing vision, that should be much easier. We'll have more buy-in, we'll have the ability to begin sharing in a more meaningful way. So what are some ways in which you can share this? Well, just make sure you have clarity on what it is that you're trying to do? Where is it you're trying to go? And the expectations with every identified person in your business and your customers' business. What is it we're asking people to actually do? As it relates to the vision, as a leader, it's so, so important that we maintain clarity of expectation, because within any kind of relationship we have with others, there are always 3 things that exist. Trust, commitment, and expectation. And believe me, most people don't talk about it, but if one of those things is missing, particularly trust, but either of those things are missing, you will not get the kinds of results that are possible with the relationships that you have, and you'll always be working from a place of inadequacy. And so we want to begin to thrive, and part of that vision has a core role in bringing together expectations of how we all work together. Then we want to go to inspiring people. Now, are your customers inspired? This is a big thing because even I struggle with this at times. But when we think about our profession, really, in our job role, is it really said that we need to be somebody who is inspiring, somebody who's pursuing the ability to inspire. But actually, in a recent survey by Bain and Company, the fascinating thing looking at the traits of leaders and how others, employees particularly, view specific leaders, and they noticed 33 specific traits that inspirational leaders have. Things like positive attitude, keeping their word, appreciation, emotional expression, expressing empathy, directing, Listening to and valuing those you lead. These won't necessarily be mind-blowing revelations. What it reminds us of is these particular traits are accessible to us. We have the ability to be inspiring both to our customers and to our peers. So just take the note that actually the, the act of inspiration doesn't come with being somebody who's charismatic. It comes with being somebody who embodies the characteristics of somebody inspirational. If you can lead if you can be humble, if you can be empathetic, if you be connecting, if you could be positive, if you can allow yourself to show up to be challenging and to do that in a way that helps others, you can be somebody who is also inspiring. Next, we want to solve problems. So as a customer leader, one area that must be mastered is how to help our customers solve problems. That means we need to adopt three kinds of big ideas here, or shifts in perspective. And that is number 1: we need to move our perspective. So we need to start thinking differently about how we work with customers to solve problems. And what do we need to do? We need to focus on root cause evaluation and not be led to be influenced by symptoms