Charles Besondy, President of Besondy Consulting & Interim Management, writes…
The attitude your company has and the processes your company employs for its strategic accounts can be an indicator of the degree of alignment between Sales and the rest of the organization…
This thought struck me last night while enjoying drinks with a former client. He was recounting how a new CEO and CMO at his company had very refreshing views about the handling of strategic accounts. Previously, the five major accounts identified as strategic were “owned” by account managers in the sales department. The company’s attitude was essentially that Sales owned the customer relationship, especially for strategic accounts. Not unusual.
Correctly, the new CEO and CMO insisted that the entire company owned strategic accounts. Everyone in the company should look at what they could do each day to better support those customers.
Now my friend says the company is taking a team approach to nurturing and growing each strategic account. In short, they are aligning the organization behind Sales and aligning with the customer.
In your experience when a company looks at strategic account management as the sole responsibility of Sales isn’t there a high degree of misalignment in the organization?
Charles Besondy is the President of Besondy Consulting & Interim Management, and an accredited align.me Funnel Coach. To read more of his insights, go to The Sales Funnel Fanatic blog.
