Valuable Accounts

One of my mentors always said that you can learn a lot about a person’s character over the course of 18 holes of golf. Lately, I have learned a few other things from golf that translate into the business world.

A few weeks ago I found myself in Georgia at the Augusta National Golf Club watching a practice round before the Masters tournament. I have watched the Masters on television every year for as long as I can remember. On television, the course looks amazing. From the dogwoods and azaleas that are always blooming at the right time to the greenest and perfectly manicured fairways, Augusta appears to be perfect.

So as we parked our car and started walking towards the grounds, I started to wonder, “Are my expectations too high? Will I be disappointed because reality cannot possibility meet my expectations?” I was just about to get a big dose of what I am now calling the “Augusta Experience.”

Augusta National blew me away. Even with my sky high expectations, it simply blew me away. What I witnessed was perfection. And very customer focused. Here are a few things that contributed to my experience:

1.      An apparent lack of greed exists at this event. I bought one of the famous Pimiento Cheese sandwiches (had to do it, had to experience it!) for the whopping price tag of $1.50. They realize there is no need to gouge the patrons (there are no customers at Augusta, just patrons), because the experience is so great that patrons will keep coming back for more. More of the golf course, more souvenirs, more pimiento cheese sandwiches.

2.      The main product, the main attraction, is the golf course itself and the history that is part of its make-up. Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and many others have created history on this course. But in this case, the canvas might be more important than the paint and the artists. The course is hard to describe using any word other than…perfect. It is beautiful with strategically planted trees (for which each hole is named) and flowers. The grass (Bermuda, overseeded each fall with rye) is thicker and greener than any other course. There is no trash anywhere. Even leaves and pine cones that drop from trees are quickly scooped up by the grounds crew. It is a great product with a well-deserved reputation.

3.      The patrons form a community. Any given day of practice of the tournament there will be somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 patrons on the course. Yet, if you place your chair in a spot you like and wander away for a while (even a long while, even the rest of the day), when you return, your chair will be there waiting for you. No exceptions. The patrons respect each other because they know they are all there to witness the best golfers in the world playing one of the best golf courses in the world.

4.      Augusta National is a patron-friendly experience. Yes, there are rules. Actually, there are many rules and they are enforced. But the little things that together make up the experience are all done to ensure that each patron walks away having had an incomparable day.

So here is the challenge that August National presents for the rest of us. Would your patrons, your customers, say their expectations of you are very high and you consistently blow them away? That is what I have started to call the Augusta Experience. It may be a lofty goal, but just think how loyal your patrons would be if you were to achieve it.

While the stock markets appear to be somewhat stagnant, the Walker Index has continued to climb, reaching an all-time high.

The Walker Index is a hypothetical stock index comprised of Walker clients. The Walker Index is a decent proxy for an index of customer-focused companies, companies that really want to use the voice of the customer as an important management lever.

Over the past 10 years, the Walker Index has generated a compounded annual growth rate of 11.52% compared to just 0.88% for the S&P 500. Why the difference? There are probably many reasons, but here is a couple to consider:

1.      Focus on Outcomes. Companies in the Walker Index listen to their customers with the appropriate outcomes in mind. These companies are focused on driving success for their customers because they know that will result in the right outcomes for them as well. Help your customers, help yourself. Many companies in the S&P 500 are focused on keeping score, not on taking the right actions to drive results.

2.      Customer Choices. You’ve probably heard this more than you care to, in part due to a dramatic lack of sincerity, “We know you have a choice of airlines when you travel and we thank you for choosing us.” But customers do have a choice, even if that choice is doing nothing. When the economy is sputtering (and it still is), customers get choosier. Companies that are focused on helping customers meet their challenges will more likely win over those focused on making a customer a “promoter” or improving some other score for the sake of the score.

There are many lessons to be learned from the Walker Index, but none is more important than learning to listen to your customers for the right reason—to create world class outcomes for your customers and your company.

Companies are forever in search of a defensible competitive advantage, one that cannot be replicated or substituted. Sounds like a monopoly? Sounds like a terrific way to build shareholder value. And, if done right, to build a sustainable, valuable business.

Strategists at most companies are visionaries, capable of complex thought and analysis that help to identify competitive opportunities. But, companies generally fail in four areas and those failures result in watered down competitive parity.

Failure 1—Not Understanding What is Important to Your Customers

If you don’t understand what is really important to your customers, it is a roll of the dice as to whether or not you are building a competitive advantage. You can be very different from your competitors, but if those differences are in areas that are not important to your customers, well, that makes you different, but not better. Inherent in this is understanding who your customers are and what drives them. When was the last time you saw Ferrari advertising cash rebates?

Failure 2—Overestimating Your Performance

Knowing where and how to invest your resources depends in part of how you perform in areas that are important to your customers. If you overestimate how well you do in a particular area, you might be apt to under-invest causing your customers to see no discernible difference between you and your competitors. In fact, your customers might perceive your competitors to have an advantage over you. It is also a mistake to think that these perceptions are static. Notice that Toyota has been advertising about safety? Those ads are in direct response to the number of safety recalls that inundated Toyota over the past few months.

Failure 3—Underestimating Your Competition

Just as most of us are likely to overestimate our own performance, we are likely to underestimate the performance of our competitors. Remember, it doesn’t really matter what you think, it only matters what your customers and prospects think. Your job is to figure that out. Suddenly, Hyundai is on the luxury car scene. Maybe they were on the radar of the other luxury brands and maybe they weren’t. Either way, underestimating the impact they might have could be costly. And in this economy, their message just might resonate—A luxury sedan for those with money to burn but the good sense not to.

Failure 4—Poor Investing

It’s a simple recipe—invest in areas that are important to your customers and let your competitors invest in areas that are not. Don’t spend foolishly trying to be the best at everything. Identify your target customer profile, understand what is really important to them and be the best at it. Build that reputation and you have built a competitive difference that will be effective. Think Volvo spends more R&D dollars on safety or speed?

How can these failures be avoided? Simple. Bring your customers into your planning. Not literally, but by gathering insights about them and from them to really understand what is important to them, to really understand how well you perform in those areas and how well your competitors perform, and invest accordingly. The recipe is simple—invest in areas critical to your customers. Let others invest in the noncritical areas.

Traditions are out. Gone. Kaput. With the limited exception of family events this time of year, traditions in the modern world are really not much more than convenient crutches, allowing us to live our busy personal and professional lives without too much thinking. And they can harm our relationships with customers. Worse yet, they can get in the way of helping our customers succeed.

Most of our companies have customers from many parts of the world (or our customer have customers). In today’s economy that is a very important diversification. According to the International Monetary Fund, forecasted growth in Gross Domestic Product for 2010 and 2011 is expected to continue to improve nicely over the declines of 2008 and 2009.

The IMF expects most of that growth to come from emerging and developing markets, including the so-called BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China. In fact, the growth for the U.S. and the European region is expected to be 1.5% and 0.3%, respectively. Contrast that with a healthy 6.4% for India and a whopping 9.0% for China.

Companies that succeed in capturing the most growth in the coming years will need to have a solid approach toward emerging and advanced countries around the world. That provides some very real challenges for companies, starting with trying to get a handle on differences in markets and customers on those markets.

An easy trap to fall into is thinking of customers as a homogenous, impersonal group. Customer-focused companies go the extra mile to understand their customers and the differences in those customers. Customer from different cultures might want or need different solutions, they might judge you differently, they might have ready access to different competitors.

Customer-focused companies understand all their customers and design products, services and solutions to respond to various needs. They also target customers whose needs are consistent with their most valuable offerings. They also make the right adaptations to not only their products, but also the ways in which they do business, making their company easy for people of various cultures to interact with.

One of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is “Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood.” Understand your customers, wherever they are, and then seek to provide them with the value they deserve from you.

It’s tough being a chief marketing officer. The role of the CMO is so varied that it includes creative responsibilities such as advertising and managing ad agencies and analytical responsibilities such as understanding quantitative research (and at least a thousand things in between).

Relief is on the way in the form of learning from and sharing with other CMOs. The CMO Club is tailored specifically to top marketing executives and is designed to promote an open environment in which CMOs can learn from each other.

The CMO Club is sponsoring the CMO Thought Leadership Summit November 3-4 in San Francisco. The agenda is killer with breakout sessions and conversations with a number of CMOs and other executives. I am on a panel with Al Maag, Global Communications Officer of Avnet and John Dragoon, CMO of Novell. Our panel will discuss driving growth and innovation by creating a “Voice of the Customer” infrastructure. I think of it as, What CMOs Must Know About their Customers.

If you are a CMO, check it out. The Summit will be a great opportunity to talk to others about the challenges that you are encountering.

Most companies would be quick to tell you just how customer-focused they are. Most of their customers might beg to differ. In fact, in a recent study we found that 90% of executives feel that their company is customer focused, yet not even two-thirds of them use customer insights in making strategic decisions.

Many companies seem to be like ostriches, choosing to put their heads in the sand and not listen to their customers. It’s better to know! Many of the most successful companies are more like owls, using a very keen sense of hearing to listen to their customers and react accordingly. (An owl can hear a mouse step on a twig from 75 feet away.)

Companies spend huge marketing budgets to attract new customers, yet sometimes can ignore their existing ones. Another example that comes to mind is the way in which cities spend their economic development dollars. Cities give tax breaks and all sorts of incentives to attract new businesses. What is done to retain businesses that are already there providing jobs? What are companies doing to listen to their existing customers and build on the relationships that they have worked so hard to develop?

Remember, it’s better to know! If you don’t currently have various listening posts in place to really understand what your customers think, do it now. Waiting or procrastinating or trying to convince yourself that you are customer-focused only causes a delay in enjoying the rewards of being customer-focused. Most companies have a significant percentage of customers that are ready to leave them and they don’t even know who they are.

Want an uptick in your business performance? Be an owl. Listen to your customers and build customer strategies that are good for them and good for you. You will notice the difference quickly.

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.