Maturing into a trusted advisor in record time

MATURING INTO A TRUSTED ADVISOR IN RECORD TIME

AVI-SPL: 2022 SAMA Excellence Awards™ Co-Winner for Mature Program

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

In November of 2016, I had the privilege of flying to Tampa, Florida, to visit AVI-SPL, a provider of collaboration and audio video technologies. I was there to address the inaugural meeting of AVI-SPL’s SAM team to introduce them to SAMA and share strategic account management best practices.

From that first meeting on, it was evident to all of us at SAMA that AVI-SPL was on a mission to build a great SAM program — period. Not only did they do so, they did it in record time.

Even before our first meeting, their goal was crystal clear: to learn how from the best practices of others. Impressively, AVI-SPL learned so well that they have been creating and implementing new best practices and sharing them with the SAMA community since joining.

For proof of their meteoric rise, look no further than AVI-SPL’s familiar presence at our annual Excellence Awards™. Every year since joining SAMA, they have won an award in a different category, leading up to this year’s coup de grace when their SAM program reached the five-years-in-existence minimum to apply for this prestigious category.

Congratulations to AVI-SPL for being a co-winner of the Outstanding Mature Program of 2022! Read on to learn more about how they did it.

First, let’s look at what they set out to achieve. AVI-SPL said their strategic account management program “was established to drive long-term value through strategic alignment with our most valued global clients.”

Their mission was to establish and maintain a trusted-advisor business partnership that produces mutual innovation, value creation, and measurable outcomes for their global strategic accounts.

To accomplish this, they oriented their program around three core pillars:

1. Creating a customer-centric culture.

2. Delivering on the promise of strategically aligning as a trusted advisor with global strategic accounts.

3. Continually optimizing and scaling in their global delivery model to drive consistent client experience and exceed expectations worldwide.

With this clarity, focus, and resolve they achieved measurable growth, relationship equity, and strategic engagements with their accounts, leading to increases in sales, profitability, and wallet share expansion far exceeding their industry’s standards. This equates to a 55% growth over projected revenues had they not created a strategic accounts program.

To accomplish their mission, the SAM program leadership team employed a product management philosophy, i.e., they treated their SAM program as a product to offer to an exclusive group of customers who agreed to engage with them in this new way.

Their approach proved so effective that AVI-SPL has expanded their SAM program within their existing customer set and leveraged their SAM program to win new customers with whom they had never done business.

Many of us, myself included, think that you must start as a vendor in the eyes of the customer and toil for years to achieve the privileged status of becoming a trusted advisor in the eyes of the customer. AVI-SPL has shown that it is possible to start as a trusted advisor with a newly acquired customer and stay there.

So, what did AVI-SPL do for their SAM teams to bring to each of their strategic accounts that made their SAM program value proposition so successful?

By programmatically equipping each SAM team with automation and centralized processes, they can keep each SAM team and the whole of AVI-SPL’s extended business focused on fulfilling the promise of being a trusted advisor to each customer. This started with in-depth mapping of the customer journey, which then led to identifying key points of friction that negatively impacted the customer, thus causing the SAM team to spend an inordinate amount of time reactively addressing issues instead of implementing, refining, and improving enhanced customer experiences. This gave the SAM team more time and bandwidth to do things right and look for new opportunities to improve the customer experience — a win-win for everyone involved.

As a result of this focus, here are some specific enhancements that AVI-SPL made to their strategic account approach:

• They added a Global Program Manager role to each SAM team to unify the customer’s experience globally.

• They assigned a single senior engineer to each strategic account who knows the customer’s technology standards and insures they are applied globally on behalf of the customer.

• They created a new analytics dashboard that enables the SAM team and the customer to globally track progress.

It pays to proactively focus on continuous improvement of value creation processes. Giving each customer and SAM team the ability to see what each other is doing improves customer satisfaction, increases employee satisfaction, and opens the doors to new avenues of value co-creation.

As you contemplate AVI-SPL’s approach, notice how they are getting strong support from their whole company. At this point, you might be wondering how AVI-SPL does this, as getting and sustaining internal alignment for strategic customers is always rated as the biggest obstacle a SAM team has to overcome. The answer is clear. The advancement and growth of their SAM program is truly an organization-wide effort, starting at the very top.

Before the program even launched, it was first proposed by the senior leadership team and sponsored by AVI-SPL’s Board of Directors. As the program grew, the Board and the entire executive team — including the CEO, COO, CFO, EVP of Technology & Innovation, and EVP of Sales and Marketing — have remained actively involved in supporting the vision, growth, and resource development for the program.

Another new feature of AVI-SPL’s SAM “product” is a Customer Advisory Board (CAB), comprised of senior technology and employee experience leaders from some of the world’s largest companies across multiple industries. This forum allows these leaders to discuss issues like how to prepare for employees’ return to the office, how human behavior has changed as a result of the pandemic, and how will that affect them at work.

Each of their designated Global Accounts is invited to participate in this exclusive feature of board members to advise on strategic direction, peer-to-peer learning, and community building.

If you want to become a trusted advisor to your strategic account, you must be seen as one from your customer’s C-suite. A CAB approach makes this happen at scale. Unsurprisingly, AVI-SPL recognized this and is making it happen.

The key point to highlight is that the C-suite members don’t just sponsor the program, they personally engage in it. Decisions like funding and sponsoring the new analytics dashboard, adding centralized engineering resources to their SAM Center of Excellence, and meeting directly with executives at Customer Advisory Boards require executive commitment, buy-in, money, and time. When internal employees see examples and hear stories of executive leadership actively making a difference with their customers, support for the SAM program increases. Everyone wants to play on a winning team.

As for third-party validation, AVI-SPL provided plenty of it from the leadership ranks of their strategic accounts. Several well-known global firms praised them for their efforts to bring the community into consideration with the Customer Advisory Board and cited specific examples of exemplary customer-centric behavior.

“I just wanted to send a quick email to make sure you knew how incredible the support was from your team on our virtual Annual Stockholder Meeting on Monday,” said one happy customer. “They executed a flawless meeting for us no matter how complex we made it and how many curve balls we threw their way. We could not have pulled it off without their diligence and dedication. So, a big thank you to you and your entire team for their efforts and support.”

In addition, AVI-SPL hired Forrester Research to help quantify the total economic impact of the AVI-SPL Digital WorkspaceSolutions for their strategic customers. Some key findings include:

• Total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of $8.4 million (present value) up 52% from $5.5 million.

• Productivity increase of $12.4 million (present value) up 4%from $11.9 million at program launch.

• Time savings for the average client of 141,500 hours per year because meetings start on time and conference technology is more intuitive (up from 122,500 hours at program launch).

Their impressive list of findings goes on, but you get the idea.With glowing third-party validation like this, it is no wonder thatAVI-SPL’s customers and SAMA’s independent judges rated theirSAM program so highly.

From launching their SAM program late in 2016 to winning the SAMA Excellence Award in their first year of eligibility, AVI-SPL’s ascendance has been impressive. Here are some stand out examples of lessons they learned:

• Determine how to make the customer impacts of your program tangible.

• Ensure there are key measurements which track your investment in building the program. If anyone questions it, you can prove that the true business value/returns are there, and they will not get distracted by the costs.

• Continually ask yourself questions like, “How do we make that promise to customers real?” or “How can we give them something distinct to point to as a difference maker?”

To sum this point up, AVI-SPL highly recommends “taking the time to understand the product management process and understand how you can implement its principles to develop your program. Doing so will help your team innovate in meaningful ways with your customer as your program grows and matures.”

Achieving excellence in strategic account management is the result of putting the customer at the center of your strategy.Continuously finding new ways to deliver value, and transparently and thoroughly quantifying the investment and the return on investment for each customer and the program, as a whole, makes a world of difference. Doing so takes 100% commitment from everyone in your company, including your board. From there, it becomes the gift of growth, innovation, and pride in a job well done. Congratulations, AVI-SPL! We cannot wait to see what you think of next.