Valuable Accounts

Many people fail to hit their sales targets because they just don’t know what they are selling. Yeah, they know the product or service and can articulate the features but that will almost always miss the mark.

The good account managers don’t focus on features or a laundry list of benefits because they know that will get them nowhere—especially with a reluctant prospect. Here are 4 things that strategic account managers can do to hit the mark with prospects.

1.      Know how your product or service can help your prospect solve problems that are top of mind and direct your value proposition squarely at those problems. This requires some work to really understand what they are struggling with. Start with any public information available (if your prospect is private, check out the public information for its competitors). One of my favorite documents to study after the Form 10-K and the Proxy Statement is their Analyst Day slide deck. Great stuff about strategy and execution from their top leaders.

2.      Know what’s important to your buyer and leverage your strengths. What makes your best customers stick with you? Is it your product? Or maybe it’s something else about the experience they encounter when doing business with you. You need to know—from the perspective of your customers—and really push those areas where you excel. Don't guess about this. Chances are you will be wrong. Ask your customers.

3.      Know who you are competing against and sell accordingly. Unless you are different from all the other companies out there (you aren’t), you stack up a little differently against each of your competitors. The best way to understand these performance differences is by asking your customers. If your company has a customer listening function, see what’s available. If competitive information is not available, start demanding it.

4.      Know when to stop talking and do it. Sometimes we just talk and talk, telling our prospect about every benefit they could ever hope to get from our product. Problem is, they don’t care about almost everything we just told them. Be focused. If you have done your homework and know what matters the most to them, focus on that and leave the rest for later. Sift through all the benefits of your product or service to arrive at those that give you the best chance to win.

Think of three seines with different size openings. The first seine allows through any benefits that help them solve their problems. The second seine allows through any of those making it through the first net that are actually seen as important to your customers. And the third seine is different for each competitor…of those making it through the first 2 seines, which make us a better choice than Competitor A?

This filtering system should allow you to focus on the very few items that will increase your odds of winning by knowing exactly what you are selling.

Face it; there is a certain amount of luck in everything we do. Get lucky and you succeed. Luck turns against you and you don’t. So what can we do to increase our odds of having luck on our side?

I’ve noticed a few things about good gamblers that probably apply to increasing the odds of successful account management as well.

·         Know the rules. If you don’t know how to play craps, don’t. If you don’t know much about the rules of your prospect, don’t approach until you do. What is their business model? What are their challenges and opportunities? What can you do to help them succeed? What are their protocols for starting new relatioships?

·         Understand how the house operates. Ever notice that you don’t get that tired in a casino? Might have something to do with the increased level of oxygen being pumped in. Ever notice that the drinks just keep on coming? Knowing these tricks help the winners avoid the pitfalls. Ever have one of those customers that meets with you all the time to learn what’s new, what are all the other companies doing, etc., but they never buy anything? I call them “Takers” and, if you let them, the relationship will go on the same way for a long time. Understanding that they are takers will allow you to adjust where you spend your time and find opportunities more likely to turn into business.

·         Know the odds. Good gamblers know the odds of every bet they make and focus their bets on the best odds. Good account managers focus their time and attention on the best places to create growth. If you knew which customers were loyal to your company and not at all loyal to your competitors, you would focus some serious attention there because your odds of growing share of wallet are much better.

·         Don’t be greedy. The consistent winners know when to stop and walk away with the loot. They resist the greed temptation, which is strong. Good account management starts with a focus on helping your customer succeed, not “winning” the business at all costs.

·         Pay attention. Counting cards is against the rules, but paying attention to what’s played is not. Pay attention to your customers. Most companies have a customer listening program in place. If yours does, pay attention to what your customers are telling you and use that to increase your odds. Who is telling you that there is a problem you can alleviate? Who is telling you that there is more business available? If your company doesn’t listen to customers in a formal way, its probably time to start.

Good gamblers have perfected the skill of optimizing the odds. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it does give you the best possible odds for success. Know the challenges and opportunities, don’t be greedy and pay attention to your customers. Always ask yourself, “How can I improve my odds of success?”

Too often our account management programs are like the local fitness center. And I don’t mean that they are healthy. Here are three similarities that I have noticed between fitness centers and our account management programs.

1.      The New Year’s Resolution. Every year when January rolls around I can’t find a locker, and the locker room is so crowded it’s ridiculous. This happens because people make a resolution to get fit, lose weight, whatever. So people flock to the gym. Three weeks later, things are back to normal. Happens every year.

I see the same thing with account management programs. Account managers adopt a new account planning tool or commit to customer-focused account management. It lasts for a while, but sooner or later, people figure out that being customer focused takes work and they revert to their old ways. For anyone who doesn’t revert, a real competitive edge exists.

2.      Dress for Success. There are a group of people at my club that don’t really work out. But they look incredible. They buy workout outfits the way I buy suits, shirts and ties. Everything is coordinated. Style is definitely trumping function. I always figure I look tired and sweaty when I’m there regardless of my clothes.

These dressers remind me of the account managers that talk a great game, show up at all the right places, and send birthday cards to all the company executives. They just don’t sell anything. They look good, but they are not doing the right things. They are not achieving company objectives.

3.      The Injured Reserve. There is a guy at my club that is constantly present, but never working out. But, there is always an injury excuse. “I came to lift, but I tore my rotator. Better sit it out today.” Next week, a leg. His back the week after.

This manifests itself in account management with the typical excuse, “That doesn’t make sense for my customers.” Everyone else should use our account engagement tools, but this account manager is different. Uh huh.

These fitness center tactics are common. We simply have to be more diligent, more customer-focused, more value-additive than our competitors. We have to actually work out, use the tools our companies have given us. Time to get fit!

Here’s some old news—the world has changed. Things aren’t the same that they were 2 years ago. It’s not all bad, in fact, there are some very good things about the spot we find ourselves in (see my contrarian entry of December 28, 2009). But we have to operate in ways that help us succeed in this new world.

That goes for our account management programs as well. Account managers don’t need quotas and call logs to be successful. They need tools that help them serve and penetrate customers more effectively.

In the old world, we simply had to keep up with the growth that most of our customers were experiencing. In the new world, we have to understand our customers in a way that allows us to help them succeed. That’s how we find new opportunities to grow our businesses. Do account managers in your company have that understanding of your customers?

In the old world, we needed to convince our buyer of the value we provide. We did that by focusing on the product or service and its features. In the new world, the power often belongs with procurement. If we don’t build strong relationships with our buyers and develop solutions that help them drive their business, procurement will make a pure commodity of our offering. Do your account managers have the tools and direction they need to build these relationships and deliver solutions rather than products?

In the old world, capital was plentiful and we could take risks in how we allocated our resources. In the new world, our margin for error is tiny. We better be right when we make decisions to allocate resources, including decisions to allocate account managers and other resources to our most strategic accounts. Does your company make these decisions in a vacuum or based on gut feel, or do you use objective measures and input from the customers themselves?

It’s a new world. We must arm our account managers with tools that set them up to succeed.

You know that you have witnessed or experienced something remarkable when you say, “Wow!” When you say it aloud when you are the only one in the room, you have experienced something truly special.

This weekend, I saw a story about the latest structure to warrant the moniker of the World’s Tallest Building. The Burj Dubai was just opened in Dubai, The United Arab Emirates. The following chart gives a little perspective to just how tall the Burj Dubai is (follow this link for a list of the tallest buildings in order—The World Trade Center is not on the list, but would have come in at the tenth spot).
 

The pictures of the building would have made me say, “Wow!” if I were among other people. The chart showing how much taller the Burj Dubai is than other buildings designed to be inhabited made me say it out loud, very loud, when I was alone. By the way, The United Arab Emirates is home to an incredible 13 of the top 100 tallest buildings (33 are in China and 30 are in the USA).

That’s the kind of experience we want to create for our customers. How can we do something or help create an experience for our customers that makes them say, “Wow!” when they are all alone? That’s the kind of experience that creates a commitment that will allow you to power through many challenges and struggles, and achieve many successes together.

There are many things that are simply required in business relationships. And we must do those things really well. But doing the fundamentals flawlessly doesn’t create that moment that really gets your customer’s attention. That requires something else. That requires creating an experience for your customer that they will not forget.

Think about the things that are important to your customers and over-deliver. Surprise them with something that helps them. Do something for them that your competitors would never think of doing. Do something that creates an experience that really sets you apart.

Don’t tell them that you are going to over-deliver, don’t even tell them once you do it. Let them discover it for themselves and experience it. Let them look off in a daze and say to themselves, “Wow.”

Have you ever noticed that some people manage to find the worst in everything? Or how the grass is greener on every other side of every other fence?

The great philosophers have always recognized this. And I heard it from one of them this morning on my drive to work. This great philosopher was famous for his works in the 1970s and 1980s. His name? Meat Loaf.

In one of Meat Loaf’s hits which has become a cult-like classic, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, near the end of the song in a line that is repeated many times, he laments:

                        It was long ago and it was far away,
                        And it was so much better than it is today.

Meat Loaf, no surprise, wasn’t talking about a great macroeconomic environment or business trends, but it sums up how many people think about the situation we find ourselves in.

Here’s a bit of a contrarian view—I think we are better off today than we were 2 years ago. Here are a few reasons I think that…

·         Because a defeatist attitude will get you one thing—defeat.

·         Because 2 years ago things were so heated—overvalued, overleveraged, oversold, overbuilt, etc.—that there was only one way to go. And we went.

·         Because today we have a base to build on that is much more solid. A base we can grow from. Instead of treading on thin ice waiting to fall, we are now in a position to slowly, steadily, fundamentally grow again.

·         Because now we have all been through Marine Boot Camp. The Marines “knock ‘em down to build ‘em up.” We’ve been knocked down. We’ve learned a lot. We’ve survived and it will make us stronger.

So, as we head into 2010, I am very bullish. I am excited about the things that we are going to see in the coming years. I am excited for steady, controlled, fundamental growth that creates a stronger economy and more wealth for more people.

Best wishes for a prosperous 2010. We’re headed in the right direction now!

I just read an article about this in Reader’s Digest. Wowie. Most of the things would cause your stomach to turn, especially the three sections titled “What We Lie About,” “What You Don’t Want To Know,” and “What You’re Really Swallowing.” Sometimes that high level of trust that we place in restaurants may not be warranted.

Then I came to the end of the article and saw this snippet offered by Melissa McCracken, a longtime waitress in Hawaii.

Once on Mother’s Day, this older lady came in alone and told me that her kids weren’t able to be with her that year, but they had mailed her a gift card. So I told my manager that we had to make this an exceptional experience for her. I told her to come back with a friend some time and use her gift card because tonight, her meal was on us. We comped her dinner, and I sat with her through dessert while she told me about her kids. My coworkers were happy to cover my other tables for 15 minutes. The woman told me she would remember that dinner forever.

That’s the kind of experience that causes a customer to be so emotionally attached to your business that almost nothing will drive them away. And, they will look for reasons to buy from you more often. It is an experience driven by the unexpected, not the free meal.

Do something unexpected for your customers, and do it before the end of the year. Start the year off with a bunch of customers that have just been treated to an unexpected, good experience. Start the year off with a bunch of customers that will help you grow your business.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. In my entry titled Phil or Tiger? I wrote about the reasons that people are loyal to Phil (because we can relate to him) and Tiger (because we admire him). Whoa! OK, because we admired (past tense!) him. Tiger has offered us all a very important lesson about the slippery slope of image. (Note: I am not going to jump on the bandwagon of people judging Tiger. That doesn’t mean I agree with his actions, I simply think that angle has been covered and it’s not the point of this entry.)

Tiger worked very hard to create an image that really worked for him. It worked to the tune of $92 million in endorsements in 2009. That image started with his appearance on the Tonight Show and the Mike Douglas Show. It was built by his 3 consecutive wins in the U.S. Amateur, and grew with each of his 14 major championships. It was years in the making. Yet he destroyed it quickly.

Our images as companies are similar…it takes us a long time to build an image that we can rely on to help grow our businesses, an image that drives customers to us, an image that allows us to attract and hire the best people.

We work very hard to deliver an exceptional experience to our customers every time. We do that to build our image and our relationships. It takes a solid repetition of positive experiences to build that image and only one bad one to damage it.

Every experience you deliver to your customers must be good. Don’t allow yourself to ever get close to that slope of image-damaging disappointments. Tiger did and it was steep and very slippery.

For those of you who think a Gee Haw Whippy Diddle is the same as a Thing-a-ma-bob or a Whatchamacallit or Doohickey, let me fill you in. In the Appalachian mountains, people would often make their own toys out of the resources at hand, which often meant wood whittled or carved with their knives. The Gee Haw Whippy Diddle is one such toy. The toy has a propeller that, by rubbing a stick across notches carved in the handle, either turns to the right (“gees”) or turns to the left (“haws”). If you make a good one and know just how to handle it, you can successfully make it gee or haw on command.

Let me tell you, it’s not that easy. I can usually make one gee or haw but not make it go either direction on command. To do both you must really know the toy, have lots of experience with it and then treat it just right.

Just like customers. In order to really help our customers succeed, we must first really know them. We must build strong, trustworthy relationships with them. We must strive to understand their needs. We must really understand how their business and their industry works.

We must also understand that in order to make our relationship strong we need to constantly work on it. Persistent focus on helping our customers succeed will help to develop the trust we must have. This experience is the ingredient that both comes from and makes for long relationships.

We can never lose sight of our responsibility to take care of our customers. Ask yourself, “What have I done today to make my company as important to our customers as they are to us?” What valuable insight can you offer them today? What have you heard or read about their industry that they need to know? Take care of them constantly.

It takes a lot of practice to make a Gee Haw Whippy Diddle gee and haw. It takes a lot of work to earn the trust of your customers. It’s a good feeling when you can get a haw to follow a gee. It’s a great feeling when your customers come to you for advice because you have earned their trust and respect.

Here are a few things that I am thankful for that have popped into my head since Thanksgiving Day.

I am thankful that my wife (who made a great Thanksgiving meal and a terrifically prepared turkey) does not push leftover turkey. I know it’s healthy, but I’ve had enough.

I am thankful for clients that are extremely demanding—they make us more proactive, more innovative and more humble.

I am thankful for clients that have left us and told us why. They allow us to avoid mistakes in the future.

I am thankful for good competitors. They make us diligent and sure to bring our “A” game all the time.

I am thankful for all the people at Walker that challenge what we do to help our clients succeed—every day. They are the value that we deliver for our clients.

I am thankful for all our clients that trust us to help them solve their issues and leverage their opportunities. They are the heart and soul of our company.

I am thankful that sweet potatoes taste more like dessert than potatoes.

Companies spend billions of dollars on acquisitions. They spend millions of dollars with lawyers to make sure that the companies they buy are legally formed and protected from certain legal and business risks. They spend millions of dollars with accountants to make sure that the financial disclosures are a good representation of the target’s financial position and operating results. They spend millions of dollars with engineers to make sure that the products do what they are supposed to do. These millions are well worth it.

And most companies spend and do almost nothing with respect to the single biggest and most valuable asset in most transactions—the customer base.

Before you spend your shareholders’ money on acquiring another business, shouldn’t you know how valuable that single largest asset is?

Wouldn’t you like to know…

·         How loyal is the customer base that you are buying? Are they likely to continue to do business with you after the deal?

·         What are they loyal to…management? The brand? The product or service? The account team?

·         What challenges are customers having with the target?

·         What opportunities exist within the customer base to jump start post-deal growth?

·         How much of the revenue stream is in high risk of leaving?

·         How do customers view the target relative to its competitors?

Due diligence on the customer base—real due diligence, not the standard phone call to 5 pre-wired customers—can dramatically increase and accelerate value accretion. After all, what’s more important than the customers that account for every dollar of revenue that you are buying?

We all set goals for ourselves and then, truth be told, most of us forget the goals and just continue our daily routine. In order to succeed and help our customers succeed, we must be willing to be relentless in the pursuit of our goals.

There is a group of people that have formed a subculture that demonstrate this unending, unwavering drive to achieve. They are those people who set out to hike the Appalachian Trail from one end to the other in a single trip. They are called thru-hikers.

To add a little perspective to the goal of a thru-hike, the Appalachian Trail (AT) runs 2,178 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mt. Katahdin in Maine. Most thru-hikers start in Georgia in the spring and finish in Maine about 6 months later. And they do this with a backpack that can weigh as much as 40 pounds strapped to their back.

They walk anywhere from 10 to 20 miles each day, encountering many challenges that nature throws their way—weather, wildlife (bears, snakes, skunks, bees, etc.), dramatic elevation changes, primitive shelters or no shelter for sleeping, injuries (lots of ankle sprains, many ankle breaks), etc.

Now that you are convinced that they are crazy, what can we learn from them? Here are a few things that I think are worth applying to our everyday work.

1.      Teamwork. The thru-hikers are all on their own or in small groups. But they all help each other and work together to achieve their common goal—to summit Mt. Katahdin. They even give each other “trail names,” nicknames to be used only on the AT.

2.      Resourcefulness. Out in the wilderness, you get real resourceful, real fast. You learn how to find and filter water, how to find a safe place to sleep, how to dry wet clothes, how to keep the bears out of your food (and therefore out of your campsite!), and so on. Mostly, the thru-hikers use the many natural things at their disposal to accomplish these tasks.

3.      Self-Awareness. Thru-hikers go off the trail occasionally to go into town and buy food, medicine and other supplies. I won’t sugarcoat this—after a week on the trail, a hiker is hardly civilized. They smell, they are disheveled and they are dirty. But they recognize that and either spruce themselves up first or go to places that are known to cater to thru-hikers. Back on the trail, they rarely take risks that they are not capable of handling. Trying to climb a rock that is over your skill level is a quick way to injure yourself and require a trip home.

4.      Persistence. The hikers that make it from Springer to Katahdin are persistent. There are times they want to go off trail and go home and take a warm shower, have a drink and watch TV. But they know that the only way to achieve their goal is to stick with it. They trudge on in the rain because they know that the next day will be a sunny, dry 20-mile trek through beautiful terrain.

All of these traits can help us achieve our goals too. Work together as teams all pulling in the same direction to achieve the same goal—success for your customers. Be resourceful and find new ways to serve your customers and help them, especially during these challenging times. Know your strengths and leverage them. Know your weaknesses and compensate for them. And be persistent, relentless, uncompromising.

Take a thru-hiker approach to hitting your goals.  Think about how the sense of achievement that a thru-hiker must feel at the top of Mt. Katahdin.

If your business is like most, you have some problem customers (See my last post, Firing Customers to Increase Profits) and those customers could be harming your profitability in many ways, the worst of which might be by distracting you from properly serving your best customers.

So before you fire those problem customers, what steps should you take?

The first step is to make sure that you have correctly identified the customers that are hurting your profits (again, see last post and the study by Kaplan—check out the graph!). These customers are ones with which our mutual value equation is off kilter. We use a tool we call Value Mapping to understand the mutual value equation—what we are getting from the relationship and what do our customers think they are getting. When both halves of that equation are low, the customer will likely be in that 5% of customers that cost us 20% of our profits.

The second step is account planning with open communication. Sit down with your problem customers and have an open dialog with them about the difficulties you are having serving them in a mutually beneficial way. Just make your points clearly. Keep their perspective in mind while you are doing it, but still be firm in your communication. Then listen. And as hard as it is, let them vent. Let them be defensive (they probably will be). Don’t argue, just listen. Make a point to write down the things they are saying and points they are making. Even though they are arguing or being overly defensive, they hear you.

If you think the second step was hard, you might not like the third step. Find something in the notes you took that you can make point of “giving” on. Find an adjustment you can make. Make that adjustment publicly with them and make a big deal of it. Major mea culpa. Then expect some changes in their behavior too.

Give them a chance to change, but don’t wait too long. If they have had opportunities to come around and haven’t shown any willingness to do so, you are going to have to hike up your proverbial pants, take a deep breath and confront them. Work on the relationship and transform them into a profitable customer.

You might have to fire them if they are simply a bad customer (especially if they continue to push the ethical or moral boundaries discussed briefly in my last post), but work hard to avoid that. Just don’t ever think that it is out of the realm of possibilities.

And don’t let your problem customers destroy your relationships with your good customers.

Revenue is the life blood of business. I absolutely abhor the thought of giving up any revenue or suggesting that any business should do so. But sometimes, it is simply the right thing to do. Businesses are quick to deal with problem employees, but employees are a vital part of the value equation just like customers. Shouldn’t we deal with problem customers similarly? Problem customers, just like problem employees, harm our relationships with good customers.

The profitability equation is simply out of whack with some customer relationships. Some customers just cost too much to serve. See if any of these sound familiar…

·         The customer that starts your relationship with their procurement department negotiating all the value added components out of the relationship—then the customer accuses you of bringing no value. In order to deliver the value that you are accustomed to providing your customers, you add more resources, do more work, all under the contract and price negotiated originally. Profitability suffers.

·         The customer that negotiates your contract to the bare minimum level of acceptability, effectively commoditizing your business, yet continues to ask for more and more and more. Then, when you present or suggest a billing for the additional work, they accuse you of “nickel and diming” them. You don’t bill them, profitability suffers.

·         The customer that is so difficult to work with that none of your talented people wants to work them. Someone is assigned, tries to power through the combat duty and eventually you lose a good employee that you have invested in training and developing. Your profitability suffers.

·         The customer that continually pushes your people to cross ethical or moral boundaries. Your people can respond several ways to this dilemma (hopefully acquiescing is the way they refuse to respond!), none of which is generally healthy for the customer relationship (although taking the high road is always the best answer, but this is a more in depth topic for another time). Regardless, profitability suffers.

In all of these cases, your company might be better off without these customers. But companies often feel they are not in a position to do without and, therefore, they live with the drain on their business.

In a study done by Robert S. Kaplan of The Balanced Scorecard fame, he found companies have a few unprofitable customers that could be costing as much as 20% of the profits of the company. The following chart was published in that study.

Remember, the objective is to serve our customers in a way that helps them be more successful. Some of these problem customers prevent us from helping them and our other customers that aren't problems. That simply cannot be a customer-focused way of doing business.

So, should we fire these customers? Maybe, but as a last resort. There are many other things we should do first. That’s the topic for next time.

Do you have any scenarios of customers that drain profitability?

Wait a minute, what curse?! I thought we were supposed to be customer-driven…isn’t that a good thing? Everything I read says that customer-driven companies are more successful, not less. Nope, being a customer-driven company is detrimental to creating value for your company and your shareholders.

So, if not by our customers, how should our companies be driven? We have to drive our own companies. If we let customers drive and make our decisions for us, our companies would all be commoditized. Who would really make decisions for us? Procurement. Now, you’re starting to see things my way, huh?

So, just ignore the customer and run things our way, right? Hardly. We should be running our companies in a very customer-focused manner. It might sound like a fine line between customer-driven and customer-focused, but simply put, run your business by bringing your customers' perspectives into your decision-making and strategic-planning processes, run your business to help your customers succeed, run your business with customers in mind and always to deliver value to them; just make sure you are running your business and not your customers.   
     

The above chart is a great analysis of the impact of taking a good thing too far. In Customers at the Core by Schieffer and Leninger, they discovered that companies that were customer-driven (“customer controlled” in the chart) were far less profitable than those that were customer-focused (or, “customer insight controlled”).

Two good indications of being customer driven can be seen in how your company responds to price pressure and how certain account managers act during confrontational moments with customers.

When price pressure arises, does your company sound an alarm and figure out what you need to do to buckle to the pressure? Is it a foregone conclusion that you will acquiesce to the demand for a lower price? Or does your team work to better understand what your customer is trying to achieve and design a better solution then work to describe and document the value being delivered to your customer?

What about those confrontational moments or courageous conversations with your customers? Do your account managers handle those like they work for the customer, or like they work for you with the intent of helping your customers succeed? Ever say, or hear someone say, “Sometimes I wonder whether he works for us or for the customer”?

It may be a fine line, but working to help our customers succeed is a recipe for mutual success. Letting our customers drive our businesses and make decisions for us is one that will surely result in failure for our companies.

Every once in a while I come across another phenomenon of nature that reminds me of how incredible our world is. Nearly always, these little tidbits have interesting applications to our business world as well.

This summer my family was on vacation in South Carolina, spending most of our time on the beach. One morning, there were a few cannonball jellyfish washed up on the beach. I surprised my kids when, first I picked one up (these jellies, which have a rather solid body that is well-formed in a spherical shape, don’t really sting humans) and second when I predicted that the jellie did not live alone.

Sure enough, when I picked up the jellyfish and turned it over, inside was a longnosed spider crab. It is pretty common that small crabs live inside these jellies. Why? Because they work together to make each other’s life better—the scientific name for this relationship is symbiosis. The jellyfish attracts and kills more food than it actually eats. This provides a rich source of food for the spider crab. The crab, by eating every little crumb it can find, helps the jellie to keep clean, enabling it to live a healthy life and attract more food. The crabs also protect the jellies from other sea creatures that happen by to feed off the jellie, and the crab is protected from its predators by living inside the jellyfish. Working together, both are better off.

Relationships with our customers should work the same way. Good relationships are mutually valuable. We benefit and they benefit. Working together, we should both be better off.

We generally know when we are receiving the right level of value from a customer relationship. We know whether we are enjoying the appropriate level of profitability (contribution to fixed costs, gross margin, customer profit…whatever we measure), share of wallet, growth rate and other financial measures that are pretty easy to measure. We also know if we are getting good referrals or references from the customer, and we have a good sense as to whether they are good partners for us. We usually measure how good of a partner they are by thinking about things like: Is this customer a good strategic fit? Are they easy to work with? Do they challenge us and work with us to co-create?

We should also be clear in terms of the value we are providing them. The best way to determine that is to ask them. Many companies sit down with their customers and interview them about the value they are receiving. Some do it in a very formal scorecarding exercise and others do it informally as part of executive visits. Another way to determine the value they are receiving is to determine how loyal they are. There is usually a strong relationship between customers’ perceptions of the value you are delivering and how loyal they are to you.

In the best relationships, there is not a winner and a loser. There is not a supplier and customer. There are partners. Cannonball jellies and spider crabs. Who’s driving that relationship? Who knows. They work together constantly for the good of them both. I think that’s a good lesson for all business relationships.

OK, here it is straight up…one of my colleagues bet me that I could not write a meaningful and relevant blog entry about the world’s largest pumpkin. So I figured it is October (autumn in Indiana) and that seemed like a timely topic. Actually, that’s not at all true. I just can’t pass up a challenge like writing about the world’s largest anything, even a pumpkin.

If you watch the video—which is not very exciting, but it is mercifully short—you get an idea of the lengths that these gourd farmers go to in the effort of growing big pumpkins. This couple knows what they are doing and they compete against each other. There are a few things they do that I think we can learn from to grow big accounts.

First, they pick seeds that are genetically predisposed to grow large pumpkins. Makes sense, right? We should be choosing prospects that are “genetically” predisposed to be successful customers. That means we should understand the profile of our best customers well enough that we choose to chase prospects with similar profiles. What makes our most valuable customers strategic for us? What separates them from those that aren’t as valuable?

They second thing that the gourd growers did was nurture their pumpkins. They prepared the soil with compost, coffee grounds and other fertilizer and they diligently kept the weeds out of the pumpkin plants. We need to constantly nurture our strategic accounts too. Fertilize them with new ideas, new products or service offerings, their involvement in our innovation activities and flawless relationship management. As for the weeds, you probably can’t totally eradicate the weeds, but you can pull them before they become problematic. Same for service or quality issues. They might occur, but take care of them quickly before they fester and become serious issues.

Good healthy competition among account managers or pumpkin pushers is always effective too. It may not be as easy in account management as in pumpkin growing to watch the fruits of your labor each day, but creating ways to track how well we are doing against each other does stoke the friendly competitive fire in each of us. And that can drive results.

Lessons learned from the Great Pumpkin. Wonder what Linus and his blanket could offer?

Toyota is “grasping for salvation,” according to Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the founder of Toyota and the current leader of automotive titan. He also is quick to say that the way they turn the business around is by making better cars, cars that people want.

An article in Business Week details Toyoda’s comments from a recent press conference. It also discusses that he has reams of customer satisfaction data at his disposal. Reading this, I instantly recalled my most recent car-buying experiences and the customer satisfaction surveys that came with them.

First, the discussion of satisfaction vs. loyalty. With the exception of financial services and automotive industries, most companies are way past that. Satisfaction is simply a low standard that has no correlation to the outcomes we are trying to achieve. I’m sure Toyota scores very high on customer satisfaction surveys. Maybe this is the latest proof that satisfaction is not an adequate management tool.

Second, how are Toyota and other carmakers using their customer satisfaction surveys? I see automakers advertise satisfaction levels everywhere—magazines, television, billboards, etc. Yet, after completing several of these surveys, I have yet to be contacted in an effort to resolve or further understand any of my complaints.

Third, every survey I have taken after buying a car has been accompanied by “strong-arm” tactics from the salesperson regarding the scores that I intend to give them. Let’s face it…they don’t want to know how we feel! They simply want high scores.

General Motors is now controlled by the U.S. government. Toyota is teetering and forecasting an $8.4 billion loss for this year. Maybe it’s time the car companies get serious about listening to us (their customers) and really get customer-focused. Maybe we are the salvation that Toyota is grasping for.