Is Strategic Account Management for you?

Over on one of the LinkedIn discussion groups, a question came up about the steps of strategic account management. One approach I’ve been using this year with clients has a 5 step, project-driven cycle that can be done again and again:
1. Increase account knowledge and connections by calling more widely.
2. Do account planning with the customer from a collaborative vision.
3. Discover, diagnose and design projects that advance the vision; pre-establish the project’s value to the customer before starting.
4. Coordinate customer and internal teams to deliver project and achieve goals.
5. Present and validate project’s value to customer through executive level.

There’s a lot more to be said, but if you practice these five steps, you’ll be listening more to find out what the customer’s business problems are. Your solutions will include more than just product. As you deliver, you’ll build trust and credibility that will encourage the customer to tell you more, because they’ll know you care about them and their business goals.

This is not a short-term fix, and it won’t work with every customer. Some companies with really strong purchasing organizations won’t accept the value of projects when negotiating the terms of the next deal. Qualify the customer (and your own management!) before initiating this approach:

• Are other vendors treated as strategic partners, even if your company is not yet?
• Are the people you deal with capable of influencing purchasing to make this type of selling worthwhile? Do they give you signals before you start that project that it’s worth doing vs. other places you could put resources?
• Does your organization have expertise beyond product that will help you deliver value, and will it be made available to you?
• Are you calling high enough in the account that you’ve reached people who care about strategic business results, as opposed to product attributes?
• Will you be in the account long enough that this approach bears fruit vs. traditional selling?
• Is your account large enough that it will yield a return from the amount of time that this selling approach takes?

Check the Wiring

The landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River was a stirring tale of heroism, but it was also a test.  Communications and coordination in aviation events has been beefed up dramatically since 9/11.  “An episode like this is a chance to check the wiring and see how things are working,” said Philip Zelikow in an insightful New York Times article on how everything worked during the Flight 1549 incident.  The article describes the operation centers, open telephone networks, coordination committees and perhaps most importantly, the feeds from airborne cameras and telephone reports that helped managers get a grip on what was happening.

Do you have seldom-used emergency operations systems?  How are they activated?  How do you gather information to make good decisions?  Most of us don’t have life-and-death responsibilities, but a test of the wiring would still be a worthwhile simulation of how well your organization collaborates when something out of the ordinary occurs.

Be the Change We Seek

I opened my newspaper this morning to find some snarky opinions about the election.  If only the media, McCain and the voters had dug into the unsavory truth about Obama, ran one, things would have turned out differently.  Another laid the failure to elect McCain at the feet of Republican incompetence and malfeasance, saying “now, it’s Democrats’ turn to foul out.”

 

There’s an old story about a man in the 19^th century who encountered two immigrants in steerage heading for America.  “What kinds of people do you expect to find there?” he asks one.  “People there are unfriendly and unscrupulous,” said one.  “They’ll be out to cheat me.”

 

“Yes, that’s who you’ll find in America,” said the man.  He walked further down the deck and asked another traveler, “What kinds of people do you expect to find in America?”  The second immigrant got a faraway look in his eye and said, “I expect to find new friends, a boss I can work for, perhaps even a wife.”  “Yes, that’s who you’ll find in America,” repeated the man to the second immigrant.

 

Barack Obama freely admitted that he was not the perfect candidate, and that he’ll make mistakes as president.  More importantly, he’s asked voters repeatedly for their help to create lasting change. “We are the change we’ve been waiting for,” he said in one speech.  I was thinking about that invitation when my cousin called this morning.  He’d voted for Obama, but now he was wrestling with his own instincts.  He wanted to believe that the country could change, but his experiences have made him cynical.  He asked me how he could be more positive.

 

I told my cousin I was searching for a small, concrete way in which I could contribute to the changes that we all want.  I hold no position of power; I’m just a consultant who works on business plans and performance management systems for large companies.  But I told him about a talk I’d had with a colleague, who directed me to a European software company that sells software for monitoring corporate responsibility initiatives.  If American companies are going to make progress reducing their carbon footprint or being more energy efficient, they’ll need to define performance metrics throughout their organizations that align with those objectives and their compensation and incentive systems.  So, I’m investigating whether there will be a market for this kind of software in the U.S.  If I’m successful, I hope it will be a tiny contribution to the effort President Obama will lead to free our country from dependence on foreign oil and to address our response to managing climate change.  I’d like to think there are millions of people out there now quietly asking themselves, “What can I do to help?”

Does gasoline need a price floor?

In the run-up to the (keep your fingers crossed) Obama administration, discussions on how to actually accomplish “change we can believe in” are starting. The NYT covered the formation of Obama’s transition team last Saturday, and now Andrew Sullivan has posted on Robert Samuelson’s suggestion for a gas tax.  From a letter I posted recently, here are some additional thoughts on how to preserve momentum for consumers and investors to conserve and promote alternative energy: 

Recognizing that U.S. policy intervention cannot set the world price of oil, why would a floor for domestic prices be a good idea?  Because as a cartel, OPEC does appear to have the power to influence world prices, and they use that power to discourage conservation and alternative energy investments. If you look at U.S. petroleum imports and the change in prices for energy relative to the consumer price index, the real $ value of those imports have gone up dramatically, while energy prices through 2007 remained in a narrow band relative to overall U.S. price inflation.  I don’t know if you could prove it, but I think at least until the end of 2006, staying in that narrow band by manipulating production levels was a key OPEC goal. The chart below shows that the relative price of energy never increases faster than general inflation[1]:

As long as price increases aren’t too volatile, Americans don’t seem to change their behavior regarding energy, either as investors or consumers.  It was only in 2008 with $4 per gallon gasoline that real changes in miles driven and types of cars bought started to kick in.  Now, with gasoline prices apparently headed back to $2/gallon, we risk losing progress on energy independence even before we start.  See this press release from a sustainable travel advocacy group on a potential rise in American auto sales with a drop in gas prices:  http://www.acttravelwise.org/news/1199

Using a flexible tax to set a 2009 floor on energy prices (say $3 per gallon on gasoline) with regular annual increases to the floor(e.g., a 4% increase would create a floor of $3.12 in 2010) would bring certainty that the days of cheap gasoline are over.  Investors and consumers would have a clear understanding about future fuel prices to make decisions on the kinds of cars they buy or the miles they drive.  You could argue that people should have figured this out already, but the history of the U.S. sport utility vehicle market in the 1990s suggests that consumers make short-term decisions; “reduced energy costs, whether achieved through energy efficiency or less expensive energy supply, will result in increased energy demand, a phenomena know as the rebound effect.”[2]  Extending this flexible tax to other forms of energy would encourage conservation and create a return on investment for other forms of alternative energy. The flexible taxes could decrease as market prices rise to and then above the floor; the revenue from these taxes could be used to fund green energy programs.  If this approach is sold as a response to OPEC’s cartel behavior and a step towards energy independence rather than as a new tax, I think Americans would support it.

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[1] Figures from the CEA Economic Report to the President 2008 (B-70) and the Energy Information Administration Annual Energy Review 2007 (p. 130).

[2] CEA Economic Report for the President 2008, p. 169.

What Makes for a Great Team?

My colleague Bill Helkamp, who conducts executive communications training, recently posted an article on the long-term strengths of our home-town Minnesota Twins.  Although the Twins are sitting out the playoffs after losing a season-ending squeaker to the White Sox, Bill has some fascinating insights on why the Twins contend more often than a small-market team should.

The Twins commitment to their strong player development system is in the DNA of the team.  It was critically important to Calvin Griffith, the previous owner who brought the Twins to Minnesota in 1961.  Griffith put his farm system in place because he didn’t have much money compared to rich teams in the big media markets of Chicago or New York.  With the exception of Bert Blyleven, who came to the Twins in a trade, the stars of the 1987 and 1991 World Series came from the farm system.  The current owners, the Pohlads, have plenty of money, but use their keen business instincts to avoid overspending.  The Twins have been blessed with capable “baseball men” like Andy MacPhail, Terry Ryan and Bill Smith, and the great players like Joe Mauer who just keep coming.  The Minnesota Twins have been built for the long term – not fancy, but consistent, disciplined and selfless.  We could all take a lesson.

More on Obama’s Money Machine

A great article in the June Atlantic on how technology and collaboration techniques financed Obama’s nomination:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance

Ready for Prime Time

My daughter has been using Skype to call back to Minnesota during her visit to France.  I finally signed up for an account this morning, and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the call.  My previous experience with voice over IP, a few years back, was that it was not ready for prime time.  At 2.1 cents per minute, it’s going to become my preferred means of making international calls (although calls to mobile #s are spendier).

The experience with Skype fit nicely with a request from a client to add a web cam and download collaboration software (in his case, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007) to begin doing some live chats over the web.  This particular client is a real pioneer in the management of global virtual teams, and has conducted weekly team audio calls for years.  They have the drawbacks of all teleconferences:  everyone signs in, but not all are present.  When we tested it this afternoon, the addition of video adds a dimension of engagement that should make those calls more interesting.  Of course, the addition of a web cam to a laptop means dealing with a whole host of issues I never thought I’d have to be concerned about, like what you can see behind me, or whether the camera is in focus.  It’s also a wake-up call for people like me that are inconsistent about personal appearance when I’m not face to face with clients!  No webcam calls before 8:00 am, I think.

Tribes

The New York Times (“Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?”) and the Economist (“Mobile telecoms”) published articles this week on the anthropology of cellphones.  Did you know that 3.3 billion people, or half the world’s population, are wireless?  Nokia’s Jan Chipchase and other “user anthropologists” are roaming developing countries to figure out how to sell phones to the other half.  According to Chipchase, your cell phone number is becoming the one fixed piece of your identity.   

“Over several years, his research team has spoken with rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them more or less say the same thing:  their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cell phone.”

The Economist articles tell stories of how wireless is changing the patterns of work and social life in advanced economies.  Most telling are the percentages of people by age that send text messages, listen to music, watch TV, etc. on their phones; as I can testify, the kids of the baby boomers live in a new universe when it comes to communication.  Who’s in tune with this trend?  The Obama campaign.  At their big rallies, they’ve encouraged hundreds of thousands of people to text the word “hope” to 62262; then they text you back.  Since I attended a rally in February in Minneapolis, I’ve gotten an average of a message a week.  They’ve encouraged me to vote and to watch debates, they’ve updated me on primary results, invited me to parties and to volunteer opportunities, and of course they’ve asked for donations.  According to his web site, Obama has received contributions from almost 1.4 million people.  In March, an average contribution of $96 from 442,000 people yielded donations of $40 million.

Can you organize people into interest groups and communicate with texting while not being perceived as the latest purveyor of spam?  Obama seems to have managed it.

Beginnings and Endings

I’ve put off blogging.  With the best of intentions, I asked my web person to put the capability in place last year, but this is the first entry.  I got remotivated after seeing the ABC special on the last lecture of Randy Pausch, the inspired ideas of a Carnegie Mellon professor battling pancreatic cancer.

Why the delay?  Life happened:  surgery to repair a mitral valve, and then recovery; an exceptionally busy time with teenage children; the demands of my consulting practice; and most recently, taxes.  And then there were the self-judgements:  will I have enough to say?  Will it attract readers?  Will it have meaning for me and for them?  Couldn’t this as easily occur within the pages of an offline diary?

We’ll see.  Expect short, weekly postings on my passions:  the vagaries of our behavior and how we analyze and organize ourselves in families, businesses, teams, churches, political parties, et al; the books and other media we use to communicate and clarify our values; and the news.  My work involves helping people and organizations to answer vexing questions and to make meaning and connections, to gain courage to change their strategies when needed, and to effectively influence others.  It’s an inexact science.  I’ll muse about it, provide what I hope will be interesting links and, if Encouragetalk draws some readers, invite you to dialogue.  The tone will be idiosyncratically personal with occasional infomercials.  Caveat lector!