Managing Strategic Accounts

Next week, we’re holding another of our Walker Forum events (www.walkerinfo.com/walkerforum). Recently at these events, we’ve been focusing on key aspects of customer-focused companies and how they compete, operate, adapt, etc. One of these areas of focus has been leadership. At our last Forum, we held a panel discussion among four executive sponsors of customer listening efforts in their organizations (summarized in a prior blog post at: http://blog.walkerinfo.com/blog/walker-information-blog/page/4).

Next week, we’re taking it a step further. We’ll be conducting a virtual interview with the CEO of an extremely customer-focused high-growth company. In the interview, he'll share his advice to other CEOs trying to rally their organizations around customers (and reap the benefits of that):

1.       Be seen and heard talking with and listening to customers – make sure the entire company knows this is your top priority.

2.       Put an objective rewards system in place to drive your desired behaviors – in this case, it’s a stock award when customer metric goals are achieved.

3.       Race to success – set high long-term goals and work back from those to drive annual plans to get to those goals as quickly as possible.

He suggests this approach will make a company’s shareholders as happy as his are – and, trust me, they are!

Sonya McAllister

Principal/SVP