Supporting Strategic Account Management with Systems

by Dan Shaffer, S4 Consulting

Since S4 Consulting began almost 25 years ago, we have sold neither systems nor software. At the same time, we have a great deal of systems expertise. Because of this, our customers have asked us many times to help them locate, evaluate, implement, document for, and train on strategic account or CRM systems that would best support their strategic account management. The key to success in account management systems support is knowing what support you need, when to get it, and knowing what kind of support--computer or manual--is best for you. In our experience, CRM systems vendors will generally say that their systems will do anything that strategic account management requires, yet we find that almost none of the CRM programs includes the five functionalities we describe below. So if you are evaluating a CRM system, take the time to ask whether the CRM system includes the five abilities below:

1. Ability to Support Negotiation Planning

When negotiating new or existing master agreements as well as large sales opportunities, strategic account managers must be able to do what-if analyses regarding the tradeoffs of cost, growth, and profitability. Developing these scenarios typically requires the ability to quantify value provided to and received from the strategic account in question. Such data is typically hard to find or non-existent in most organizational systems.

Range of Technical Support Available:

• Lowest Level: Building spreadsheet-based cost, profitability and growth models – where base data is manually entered.
• Mid-Level: Leveraging a strategic accounts data warehouse: a database application that organizes and stores data in such a way as to facilitate retrieval and analysis – as opposed to information regarding transaction processing. This data warehouse is automatically fed data from multiple operational systems and appropriate external data such as total account market potential. The data warehouse can be used with appropriate modeling software–such as professional levels of Excel’s solver software that supports sensitivity analysis and mathematical optimization methods. Others solutions would ideally be web-based and remotely accessible.
• High-Level: Leveraging a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system’s database to include interactive modeling to support contract renegotiation. Such a model would typically be a custom-built application – possible an Excel model with macros or the equivalent available from the higher-level tools such as Business Objects, Cognos, or Hyperion.

Range of Technical Support Available:

• Lowest Level: Email lists/conference call service/contact managers like ACT or extended Outlook features.
• Mid-Level: Email lists and account specific website or area of larger strategic accounts communications web-site, tools such as Webex (www.webex.com) or Centra, both of which facilitate online meetings, web conferencing, teleconferencing, conference calling, and video conferencing services created for today's enterprise.
• High-Level: Leveraging a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system features to support communications with both customer and internal team members These systems typically allow for use of form letters, product description pdfs, proposal templates, email to team members, or other lists, and include the ability to store white papers, competitive analysis, or other types of frequently used communications to help with sales and service tasks.

The strategic account manager must be able to develop strategic account plans, distribute them for review, and update the plan as the execution proceeds. This typically involves templates and methods to record and process input.

Range of Technical Support Available:

• Lowest Level: Word processing document template and email. This could extend to use of Outlook or Lotus Notes’ document-management capabilities
• Mid-Level: Custom web-based applications to support plan development, review, and update via interactive functionality.  This can include example plans, training materials, and other features for executing a strategic account plan.
• High-Level: Customizing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system features to support the strategic account planning process such as creation, review, tracking, and update of account plans. Some of these custom web-based applications include the ability to allow a team to work on a document that could be leveraged to assist with the custom strategic account plan work.

Those in strategic account management must be able to monitor account sales and profitability to determine if account financial performance is meeting objectives. Without such a capability, strategic account management can be like playing football without a goal line: the game may be interesting but you really have no idea if you are winning. There is nothing simple about automatically pulling data from multiple sources and then aggregating it at the strategic account level. To make it even more complex, in many cases certain sorts of profitability cost data--such as those from extraordinary service and support costs or account-specific sales and marketing expenses--may not have been captured in the first place, which compromises management's profitability conclusions.

Range of Technical Support Available:

• Lowest Level: Manual entry of summary data from reports generated by operational systems onto an account-specific spreadsheet. This is mostly a kind of bookkeeping that keeps records of historical sales and costs. It’s a simple though tedious beginning to tracking profitability and sales forecasting. Strategic account managers should not be doing the data entry required.
• Mid-Level: Constructing a Strategic Accounts department data warehouse. Such a system would usually include appropriate Business Intelligence software (Cognos, Business Objects, Hyperion) all of which allow one to slice and dice data easily in various ways – such as sales by customer location and line of business over the last three years--to provide account-specific reports.
• High-Level: Implementing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system’s sales module (as opposed to call center, marketing, or field service modules) that has automated feeds from operational systems for sales and profitability data.

The strategic account manager must be able to monitor projects that are underway in his/her organization that benefit a specific account or will somehow impact that account. Monitoring is not managing - so a high-powered project management system is not required. However, it is critical for the strategic account manager to be aware of major milestone completion--either on-time or potential delays--and whether budgets are being met that impact either the customer or account profitability. Here then are five critical abilities that a strategic account program requires. If someone is attempting to sell you a system that "will solve all your strategic account management problems," we   suggest you take the time to see if the system you are considering can really do the five things we list above. Such questions can save you and your firm a great deal of pain and money.

Range of Technical Support Available:

• Lowest Level: Receive reports from the project manager of every project impacting the accounts and have a way to store and retrieve them electronically, such as Outlook.
• Mid-Level: Custom web-based applications to support project monitoring as a customer add-on to the organization’s project management software. This function might also be built into the software.
• High-Level: Customizing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to support the project monitoring process--review of progress and tracking, of major milestone completion and budget expenditures. One example would be Deltek at http://www.deltek.com. Deltek’s CRM application is primarily used by for project-oriented companies – mainly engineers and architects. Other industries would have to customize their own CRM applications to support.

Account management programs frequently complain that their internal IT departments give them tools they can’t use or don’t ask for.  On the other hand, IT departments often complain that account management personnel don’t know what they want.  Hopefully these range of technical support needs and options will allow you to have a more productive dialogue with your IT resources and will allow you to better manage your customer relationship assets.

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