Valuable Accounts

Companies treat prospects inordinately better than they treat customers. This might be understandable since we all know that good prospects come at a real premium today. But is it acceptable?

It reminds me of the story of the person who dies after living a life that confused those that were to make the decision about where he would spend the afterlife. Confused them so much that they decided to give him a “look-see” at his options. So the sent him first to spend a day in hell.

He arrived to everything he enjoyed during his life on earth—great food, beautiful golf courses, terrific music played in perfect venues, and on and on. And the guy in charge? He was terrific too—welcoming, charming, adaptable, the perfect host.

Day 2 arrived and his decision-makers started to send him in to see heaven for a day.

“No thanks,” he said. “I am good with hell. It’s everything I could ask for, so just send me there.” Space being at a premium, they complied with his wishes.

He arrived to find quite a different setting than the day before. It was horrible! It was worse than everything he had been taught to expect—hot, everyone toiling, no food (let alone the great food he was treated to just one day earlier). He found his host (who displayed none of his grace from the day before) and confronted him.

“Hey, yesterday, there were golf courses, great meals, the music was inspiring. Where is all of that? What happened?!?”

With a wry smile his host said simply, “Yesterday, you were a prospect. Today, you are a customer.”

It happens in real life too. Think about businesses like mobile phone carriers. Who gets the best deals? The new customers. If you are already a customer, you are still paying rates from the time you signed your contract. And unless you know to ask about new services and offerings, you don’t enjoy them.

Another way this pops up is with what I think of as “campaign promises.” When chasing a prospect, companies make all kinds of promises. Once the prospect becomes a customer, are those promises kept? Or are they as fleeting as campaign promises made by politicians?

Think hard about the way that customers are treated. Revenue earned from customers is far more certain than revenue that might be earned from prospects. Shouldn’t they be treated at least as well?

Last month was SAMA’s (Strategic Account Management Association) 46^th Annual Conference. Like all before that I have attended, it was spectacular. Great sessions, terrific networking time and lots of professional development for SAMs and those in the role of managing SAMs. The SAMA staff, led by CEO Bernard Quancard, does a terrific job of pulling this together.

If you are an account manager or you manage account managers and you aren’t a member of SAMA, you should definitely check it out.

Here you go...SAMA.

The difference between first and everyone else at the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race is so slim that even the tiniest of adjustments can make the difference. In fact, the difference between the qualifying run for this year’s winner of the pole position, Helio Castroneves, and Will Power who starts in the second position was .392 miles per hour. The qualifying run is 10 miles, so that difference translates to total time difference to run those 10 miles of just .27 of a second. The difference between the time it took to cover 10 miles for a great qualifying run and the coveted pole position and a horrible run ending in qualifying in the 33^rd and last spot was just 3.622 seconds.

How do the best teams eke out these precious tenths of seconds? A walk along the lanes' pits gives some insight into this question. All the teams are equipped with telemetry stations that allow instant feedback from the cars and drivers to be analyzed. The better teams have clearly more sophisticated telemetry. The teams that outperform are collecting and analyzing more measures and more sophisticated measures. They are also focused on the measures that are relevant to achieving their goal—making the car go faster in the conditions under which they are driving. More sophisticated and relevant measures, more speed.

Along the pits you will also see the teams focusing their attention on the measures and how to react to what the measures are telling them. The teams that develop and execute strategies that are very focused on the relevant measures, and are responsive to the current state of the measures will find more speed. The teams that take a more random approach, and try anything and everything are likely to struggle to qualify fast. More responsive and focused strategies, more speed. 
  

 
Our businesses are no different. We need to develop metrics that are sophisticated and relevant. Measuring complex relationships with simplified metrics will give you a score, but likely not more performance. Developing strategies that are frequently changing and not responsive to the right measures is, at best, inefficient. And, it might be harmful. To succeed and outperform our competitors, we must put in place the right measures—sophisticated and relevant—and adopt strategies that are focused and responsive to those measures. That’s the way we will hit our goals.

I am from from Indianapolis, the Racing Capital of the World.  It is the month of May when the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race, The Greatest Spectacle in Racing, is held. Fast cars are on my mind. And we tend to use some racing analogies once and awhile in this city. Here’s a couple that apply to managing key accounts.

There are no pit stops in account management. When something is wrong with an Indy car, the driver pulls it into the pits, stops and lets the crew make the appropriate changes. Sort of like a time out except that the rest of the cars are still making lots of left turns at 200 mph.

When we are managing key accounts, we don’t have the luxury of stopping to make the appropriate changes. We have to make them on the fly, sort of like changing the engine while the car is still flying around the track. Without the ability to make a pit stop, your changes need to be well orchestrated and executed. And they had better be consistent with the needs of your customers. The more responsive you can be to the needs of your customers, the more likely you will be to execute a significant change without pulling into the pits.

Strategy follows measurement. Indy-car racing has become so scientific and fact-based that the racing teams have a terrific amount of capital invested in information systems that are linked to the performance of the cars. The computers feed all kinds of performance information to the crew chief who sets strategies based on the measurement. The teams that win, measure the right characteristics in a sophisticated way and set strategies that are responsive to the measurements. The race is run for 500 miles at speeds in excess of 200 mph and sometimes the winner is separated from second place by less than the length of a car!

Our businesses operate the same way. Understand your customers by listening to them in a sophisticated, validated way (no serious racing team EVER tries to take a simpler approach that gives them less information). Then, use what you have learned in your strategic and account planning processes.

Just like in racing, the difference between growing our market share and losing can be created by a very slight performance difference. Assuming you know enough about your customers will ensure your competitor takes the checkered flag.

Strategic Account Managers, SAMs, in general are unique individuals that are able to succeed in many settings. They have to succeed because your company probably depends on their success. SAMs are responsible for managing our most important customers, the loss of any one of which could be devastating. (I use the term SAM interchangeably with terms like GAM, NAM, RAM, etc., meaning those who manage your most important relationships.)

What are the traits that make a good SAM? Based on Walker’s experience and a study we performed for the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA),  we have developed a list of the traits displayed by successful SAMs.

But before I get into the list, I want to refer to a “rule” developed by a friend of mine. He says that in any list (say a list of the SAMs at your company or the winners of some awards show) 30% of those on the list don’t really belong. They aren’t qualified or they don’t perform to the appropriate level. And unless you can identify the 30% that don’t belong, you are probably one of them. By the way, my experience supports this rule. With that cheery thought, here are the traits that we identified.

Business Acumen—this trait includes the ability to think strategically, to be intuitive and to be a visionary. Bring results to your customer. How can you help them succeed?

Leadership—successful SAMs display terrific leadership skills and are driven to succeed. They are described as persistent, self-motivated and tenacious. They are the clear leaders of all those supporting your customers.

People Skills—the skills that allow SAMs to build and defend these important relationships include listening, communication, networking and the ability to catalyze and drive collaboration.

Integrity—the best SAMs are very good at treating others the way we all want to be treated, with honesty, sincerity and reliability. They do what they say they are going to do.

You might look at this list and say something like, “What else is there? That looks like a complete list for any job.” And you would be right. That simply reaffirms the importance of the SAM role.

You might also say something like, “That’s motherhood and apple pie. There is nothing to learn from there.” Maybe, but before you throw this list away and fail to challenge yourself to improve in these areas, ask yourself one question. Who are the 30% that don’t belong on our team?

Better hope you can come up with a good list.

Ted Williams is by nearly all accounts the greatest hitter ever in baseball. He was the last player to hit over .400 for a season and his career average was .344. That means that he hit safely about a third of the time that he came to the plate. Lots of things have to happen at just the right time and in just the right place to hit a baseball solidly. It just isn’t that easy to make sure that your bat is on the same plane as a baseball being thrown in excess of 90 miles an hour with wicked spin causing the ball to curve or drop dramatically. And, that all has to happen just when your wrists are snapping the bat to its maximum velocity.

Sounds just like strategic account management to me. Our value proposition and the way we articulate it has to be on the exact same plane as our customers’ needs. And, we have to be conveying that value at the exact right time for them. Otherwise, we will strike out. Here’s the sobering reality: we don’t have the luxury of succeeding only 34.4% of the time like Ted Williams. We must succeed nearly 100% of the time to be successful.

When our value is not aligned with the needs of our customers, we fail. We fail to help them succeed; we fail to help our own companies succeed because we fail to grow our business with our customers. In fact we might even lose customers by being so oblivious to their needs. There is clearly no collaboration or synergy between our companies and our customers. We might even be working at odds.

But when you truly understand your customers and what is really important to them you can tailor your offering to help them meet their objectives. This is the real magic in strategic account management: ensuring that your value proposition meets the value requirements of your customers.

The most objective way to make sure that we are in alignment with our customers is to understand the feedback we have from them. If your company does not have a sophisticated and validated way to listen to your customers, you’d better think about getting one (The Economist predicts that by 2013, the primary competitive differentiator between companies will be the ability to gather and analyze customer information). If your company has a customer listening program, dig into the results and see what understanding you can gain, especially in the area of the value you bring. Be open-minded. Just because you don’t agree doesn’t mean the customer is wrong. After all, their perception is more important than yours.

Understand your customers’ requirements and perception of your value. Then, and only then, you can get your value proposition and timing aligned with your customers. Then, you should expect solid hits.

Customer-focused companies hammer the competition. Measured as many different ways as we can come up with, every time, companies that are customer focused beat those that aren’t. And not by a little either. They hammer them.

For the last 15 years, we have maintained the Walker Index. The Walker Index is a stock index comprised of our clients—companies that are customer focused and use that focus as a lever to generate better performance. Over the last 15 years, these companies have outperformed the marker by a multiple of 5 to 1!

Sort of begs the question, “What are these companies doing differently that allow them to consistently be high performance companies?” Here’s their secret. There are three areas that make them different, but all three are characteristics that are simply part of their culture, they are subconscious and second nature.

The first characteristic is their customer-focused leadership. All the leaders in the company put the customer first, starting with the CEO. And it isn’t lip service. They really mean it, they demonstrate it with their actions. The importance of customer relationships is part of all internal business reviews. It is discussed on earnings calls. It is viewed as a competitive advantage within the company, not an area to score once in a while.

The second characteristic is the infrastructure built to accommodate customer-focused initiatives. This infrastructure makes customer insights part of the management information system, no different than financial or operating data. It also ensures that the customer perspective is part of every strategic plan or critical decision made by the company. Customer focus is part of the culture of the company, its built into the processes that all employees use every day.

The third characteristic is also part of the culture. These companies are never satisfied that they have done enough to help their customers succeed. They have an insatiable thirst for action to improve the value delivered to their customers. Some call this a bias for action. Call it what you want, but it is a game changer. The companies that use customer focus as a differentiator are constantly listening to customers and acting on their learnings in a quest to help their customers achieve their goals.

We all strive to be high performance companies. And who doesn’t want to hammer the competition? Our companies can use the perspectives of our customers to leverage an effective competitive advantage, grow our market share and improve our margin structure. But only if we have these critical characteristics in place.

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?