SAMA's Excellence Award™: Mature SAM Program co-winner of 2022

SAMA’S EXCELLENCE AWARD™: MATURE SAM PROGRAM CO-WINNER OF 2022

By Harvey Dunham, Managing Director, Strategy and Marketing, Strategic Account Management Association

Any person, team, or company who embarks on building a successful SAM program soon realizes that this is a long journey. It is analogous to creating a great red wine. Many ingredients must come together in the right proportions at the right time to create the wine, and then it must age for many years to reach a point of excellence.

From SAMA’s perspective, here are examples of the challenges we expect a Mature SAM Program applicant to address — just to be considered by our board of independent judges — much less selected:

• Maintain and evolve strong executive leadership and governance of their SAM program.

• Adapt to changing competitive, economic, societal, and digital disruptions.

• Continually improve SAM processes and enablement tools.

• Accelerate the drive for innovative, mutual value co-creation with their strategic accounts.

In 2022, our judges deemed that two companies — AVI-SPL and Brenntag — overcame these challenges better than the other applicants and tied for the top honors in this prestigious category.

To understand how each of these companies succeeded, let’s start by examining the history, highlights, and lessons learned from Brenntag, a German chemical distribution company founded in 1874. The company is headquartered in Essen, Germany, and has operations in more than 78 countries worldwide.

In 2009 Brenntag formally established their Global Key Account (GKA) program following a strategic review of their major customers. A Brenntag Board Member sponsored this initiative, and an external consultant performed the analysis.

The outcome of this analysis was to select and focus on a double-digit number of key accounts by assigning them to a small team of Global Account Executives.

By 2015 the number of key accounts grew by 29% and their total revenue doubled. The financial benefits of establishing the GKA program were clear; however, the GKA program suffered growing pains as their key accounts wanted Brenntag to consistently serve them globally. This was mainly true outside of North America and Europe where there were not enough qualified support people and processes to cover the rest of the world.

In 2020, Brenntag announced the hire of a new CEO and a business transformation. The comprehensive program included their go-to market strategy, site network optimization, and the introduction of business services. The most visible change was to transform the operating model from a full-line, regionally managed distributor into a business with two global divisions with a differentiated steering approach: Brenntag Essentials and Brenntag Specialties.

For their existing Key Accounts, Brenntag’s organizational changes had a relatively low impact as their Key Account Executive continued to be their single point of global contact.

However, the changes provided the impetus to reimagine the future with each key account by:

• Addressing the historic internal challenges of managing regional differences and complexities.

• Making it easier to deliver consistent value to each key account anywhere in the world via standardized processes.

• Discovering new ways to co-create value with each key account.

To make this happen the new Global Key Account leadership created and launched a new GKA program with the following targets and objectives to:

• Achieve full organizational clarity.

• Harmonize best practices globally.

• Implement clear decision-making rules.

• Empower enhanced accountability.

• Accelerate organic growth through doubling Brenntag’s wallet share.

• Meet growth targets for their new global divisions.

To address these new strategic objectives the GKA leadership team started by re-evaluating their existing key customers to establish and confirm those with the best strategic fit and scope for development. This gave rise to repositioning each key account in one of three categories:

1. Core

2. Developmental

3. Coordinating

For the Core and Developmental Key Accounts, the role of the GKA Program Leadership, each Key Account Manager (KAM) and their supporting team members were redefined to have a global scope, a new job description, and KPIs.

At the GKA program leadership level, a Senior VP was appointed with a VP assigned to lead the Key Account sales organization and five regional VPs to create consistent global processes and procedures.

At the Key Account Manager level, every global customer was assigned:

• A global Executive Sales leader

• Regional KAMs

• A local KAM in each country where the customer had critical assets

In addition, a Global Commercial Excellence Manager was appointed to develop, implement, and harmonize all the GKA commercial excellence initiatives and execution.

To evaluate, decide upon, and implement the anticipated accelerated growth opportunities and significant contracts, Brenntag created a Board Approval Request team comprised of members from finance, legal, compliance, tax and ESG, plus the Key Account Board member. This team empowered the KAM to lead the process of growing their account while giving them direct access to their top management experts when required.

Finally, a Key Account Service Group, developed in North America, was replicated in Europe to help efficiently and effectively respond to Key Account requests. (Herein lies another best practice of identifying and implementing best practices within your own company!)

The outcomes of this new organization included:

• Enabling each KAM to spend much more time on customerfacing development activities.

• Enhanced visualization and measurement of each key account and the entire program via a visual dashboard.

• Creation of more targeted and realistic growth objectives for each Key Account in line with each customer’s strategic direction.

• The ability to spot and share innovation and best practices.

All these changes proved to be incredibly successful and timely, and really distinguished Brenntag in their customers’ point of view. Their ability to respond to their customers’ global supply chain issues, connect them with new suppliers, and create entirely new processes and procedures helped keep their customers’ production lines running globally. Many of their customers swiftly “promoted” Brenntag from being classified as a vendor or preferred supplier to being trusted advisors — the ultimate goal of strategic account management.

Other unanticipated innovations included:

• Re-imagining their Executive Sponsorship program thanks to a SAMA best practice case, as there were not enough executives to individually cover each key account.

• Leveraging the power of virtually managing a customer to effectively and efficiently discover and develop new key relationships within each Global Key Account.

• Using Brenntag’s global reach and expertise to identify new sources of supply.

Along the way Brenntag’s key accounts rewarded their “reimagined”148-year-old supplier with double-digit growth, yearover year.

In addition, their Excellence Award submission includedexamples of glowing, unsolicited thanks from some of their keyaccounts for taking such good care of them in their time of need.

In terms of lessons learned, Brenntag’s quick pivot from inpersonto virtual selling enabled them to implement their newGKA program at triple speed. Who among us could have imagineda threefold improvement in their ability to help their largest andmost important customers while working from home?

The final lesson learned is proof that Winston Churchill wasright when he quipped, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Customer-excellence research carried out following past crises— including the “dot.com” crisis from 2002–2005 and theglobal financial crisis from 2009–2011 — show that companies likeBrenntag, who invest, focus on, and prioritize their customers duringa crisis, take significant market share from their competitorswho elect to cut costs and ride the crisis out. Brenntag clearlytook market share from their customers during the overlappingCOVID-19 and supply-chain crises because they dared to investin their customers during a crisis. It pays to be focused and brave.Could this be how a company lives to become 148 years old?

Congratulations, Brenntag. Well played. Thank you for sharingyour amazing story with the SAMA community. May the next 150 years bring you even more success than the past 148 years!