transforming account managers (115.427Kb) - DOWNLOAD

Good account management, an approach which firmly locks in your largest retailers, dealers or alliance partners, can have a massive impact on sales. With a large partner, the rewards can stretch to hundreds of millions of dollars.
 
Yet to achieve this, your account team needs to adopt a new philosophy. They need to look beyond the intermediary at how to reach the consumer. They need to fully understand the partners’ business model and lock it into partnership. They must start measuring return on investment at a micro-level on, for example, the individual promotions carried out with the partner.

“HP expects to have $350 million of incremental sales at RadioShack alone.”

As many large companies have found, making any of this happen often feels all but impossible. You encounter resistance from the account team, who think they are already doing a good job.

Even if you manage to persuade them that change is a good idea, they will face huge internal resistance from other divisions. Logistics, finance, product marketing will all want to know why change is necessary. All this before you win over the partner to new ideas and a new modus operandi!

Yet it is possible and extremely worthwhile. This article charts how this journey was successfully undertaken by a team of HP managers at HP, working with VIA International.
HP’s huge Imaging and Print Group (IPG) division had a problem. The company wanted to move from an antagonistic, buy/sell relationship with large retailers, to one where both sides worked together cooperatively to meet consumer needs and improve efficiency.

In fact, HP had spent four years researching and formulating a complete strategy to achieve this aim. Together with VIA, HP had developed the Account Management System (AMS) - what HP vice president Phil Darnell called "a new philosophy." This meant changing the whole mindset to focus on building relationships which deliver a win/win result to HP and to the retailer.

At the core of all this was a new professionalism. HP wanted to stop thinking about its largest retailers as so many pipelines down which products could be pushed. Instead, it wanted to get under the skin of the retailer, to develop an intimate partnership.

Many question whether retailers are really prepared to move away from an aggressive, confrontational mindset.

But Kevin Kussman, director of sales and marketing Workforce Development for IPG HP,  was intimately involved in the development of AMS during his previous job in sales in Europe. He says retailer reluctance wasn’t the root of the problem. "Top management in large retailers know that they have to compete on something other than just price. They are ready and willing to cooperate with suppliers to develop a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Yes, they will always have confrontational buyers, but most know they need to look beyond the buy/sell, price/item relationship. This is a consistent message we hear from almost all the senior managers we speak with at our accounts."

The trouble for HP was getting account management teams to actually change their behaviour. Institutional resistance was far higher than expected. Even transmitting new skills proved problematic.