The acumen sextet: An evergreen framework for account management and customer success

THE ACUMEN SEXTET: AN EVERGREEN FRAMEWORK FOR ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND CUSTOMER SUCCESS

By Noel Capon, R.C. Kopf Professor of International Marketing Columbia Business School, New York and Gus Maikish, Retired IBM executive, guest lecturer, and sales consultant

Can the lessons of past account management excellence supercharge today’s — and tomorrow’s — customer relationships?

Absolutely!

Over the past fifty years, business-to-business (B2B) technology sales have seen frequent disruptive change, from mainframes primarily performing back office functions to online transaction processing (OLTP); distributed computing on (still relevant) mainframes, servers, desktops, and laptops; the World Wide Web and the internet of things; mobile computing on smartphones and tablets; artificial intelligence (AI); the cloud; and, most recently, consumption-based pricing of anything-as-a-service (XaaS) software.

Throughout these changes, one constant difference maker endures — the customer relationship.

Customer need changes, technology changes, competition changes, and the larger economy changes as one business cycle follows another. And, of course, the firm must address evolutionary changes in the political, socio-cultural, legal/ regulatory, and physical environments.

But the dynamics of human interaction and decision making haven’t changed in recorded history and probably not since our species first evolved. And nothing indicates that these fundamental human dynamics will ever change.

Pat Finn, President and General Manager Americas of SS&C Blue Prism, a leading maker of intelligent process automation software, told us, “Every aspect of technology has been disrupted.

The customer relationship is the one thing that can never be disrupted or replaced."

The familiar heading for discussion of B2B supplier-customer relationships is account management (AM), especially regarding key, strategic, and global accounts. As our title hints, there is a trend, especially in technology sales, to adopt a new heading — customer success management (CSM).

We don’t object to the new terminology; it puts a healthy emphasis on the customer and customer value. But we don’t believe that, in substance, customer success management can usefully be distinguished from account management. It is primarily a semantic distinction, and firms should not imagine that customer success management represents a new way of doing things, rather than a new way of describing what successful B2B selling has always required, and what great account managers have always done.

But fashions do change, and Pat Finn also told us, “In tech today, customer success organizations often play the account management role."

Call it what you like, managing relationships with important customers remains a core challenge for B2B suppliers. Exemplifying the 80/20 rule, relationships with key regional, strategic, and global customers make a critical difference in every business sector, but nowhere more so than in the high-stakes arena of technology sales.

In Customers Win, Suppliers Win: Lessons from One of IBM’s Most Successful Strategic Account Managers,¹ we share and analyze enduring best practices and principles of account and customer success management. We do so from our respective career perspectives as a researcher, teacher, and consultant (Noel) and an expert practitioner (Gus). Although account management has received significant attention — and is the rationale behind the growth of the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) — because of its obvious importance, our book takes a different tack by trying to understand what made one highly accomplished account manager consistently successful across more than three decades of change in technology, business trends, and boom and bust in the wider economy. What emerged were six skill sets, or acumens, that made this success possible. We believe our Acumen Sextet captures what account managers must master to do right by their own firms and their customers.

• Strategic acumen: See the big picture for both the firm and the customer; engage in high-level resource-allocation decisions — for the firm and the customer — for both long and short-term objectives. Strategic acumen requires a deep understanding of both organizations.

• Organizational acumen: Develop a deep understanding of the customer’s organization, along with navigation skills to identify and address opportunities. Identify the various decision makers/influencers and decision-making units for all potential deals. Understand and influence the purchase decision-making process.

• Business acumen: Essentially, this dimension is the ability to make deals, using a deep understanding of the needs of both customer and the firm to deliver value, along with the competence to make necessary financial calculations regarding both revenue and profit. Understand how both the firm and customer make money, in the short term and long term, and know what makes a good deal for both parties.

• Team-building acumen: Assemble — recruit, select, train, coach — a team with the required skills. Optimize team member placement where specific skills are required, making success likely in the short and long term. Lead and manage the account team: direct reports, dotted-line reports, those with other reporting relationships, and their own goals and objectives. When complex deals require sellers to ally with partner firms, the ability to manage and lead without direct authority becomes especially important.

• Resource acumen: Identify and secure firm (and partner) resources needed to deliver customer value. Resource acumen is especially important for account managers in large complex organizations where pockets of expertise may reside in all sorts of unlikely places. Resource acumen requires the ability to be discriminating, to secure only necessary resources and not squander them.

• Personal acumen: A potpourri of individual characteristics, anchored by leadership by example, that support and provide the basis for all other acumen dimensions. Personal acumen includes leadership, integrity, personal drive, hard work, creativity and risk-taking, managerial courage, and a passion for the business. It is a managerial and leadership style that rejects micromanagement, but embraces flexibility, empathy, unselfishness, listening and communicating, patience, and humility. A critical element of personal acumen is a sense of responsibility for completing tasks/ projects. Account managers possessing this attribute feel responsible for outcomes and ensuring that promised customer value is actually delivered. When things don’t work out, they never blame others for failure. Rather, they try to figure out what went wrong, and what they could have done to secure a better outcome. Relatedly, they have the courage to take risks and/or unpopular decisions when circumstances demand.

Account managers who excel in the critical firm/customer boundary role possess all six kinds of acumen, although of course they will be stronger in some dimensions than in others. Great account managers always keep striving to improve in each dimension, enhancing their relative strengths and bolstering their relative weaknesses.

Customers Win, Suppliers Win brings out these six dimensions of account management excellence through Gus’s experiences as an account manager and sales executive at IBM from 1972-2009, and subsequently as a consultant to other firms and mentor to younger colleagues, plus Noel’s experiences as a researcher, teacher, and consultant specializing in account management, also from the 1970s to the present. As we survey the current business landscape, and advise and learn from younger colleagues and students, we are confident that the Acumen Sextet and the findings in our book have robust, continuing relevance.

The proponents of customer success management are certainly singing our song. When Deloitte² heralds a “holistic customer success strategy [that] enables organizations to shift to a customer-centric mindset, resulting in satisfied customers who drive long-term growth and profitability,” it rephrases a central tenet of account management at its best.

Likewise, a 2019 Harvard Business Review article³, “What Is a Customer Success Manager?,” asserts a good customer success manager “brings [the customer] ideas about how ... [to] use products better,” advocates for the customer with the supplier, keeps the customer informed about what’s coming, and regularly spends time onsite with the customer. Day by day, “[t]his individual acts as the coach of the customer relationship, bringing in technical experts, trainers, and others as needed.” Highlighting the supplier customer boundary zone, the article lists the “balancing acts” that a customer success manager must perform:

• "Mission: Customer success or company success?” As we and the article’s authors argue, it must be both — a consistent win-win outcome.

• "Profile: Salesperson or consultant?” Again, the answer is both: consultative selling based on deep understanding of the customer’s business needs and an unwavering commitment to delivering customer value.

• "Metrics and incentives: Customer satisfaction or company revenues? Bonus or salary?” Once more, the answer is both, in order to support follow-through efforts to deliver customer value along with efforts to maintain and increase revenues. Different firms will have different ideas on how to weight salary and incentive pay/commissions.

The ultimate goal of a customer success manager, the article argues, is “Building Customer Trust,” so “customers invite the supplier to participate in more internal conversations.” That, in turn, enables “customer success managers to unlock more value for their customers, creating a virtuous circle that ensures mutual success.” All in all, it’s a good description of the responsibilities and goals of an account manager.

However you slice things, B2B sales success continues to depend on deep understanding of the customer’s business (strategic acumen) and strong relationship networks at both the customer (organizational acumen) and the supplier (resource acumen). Frequent turnover in account management roles significantly limits the development of customer understanding and the building of effective relationship networks. The traditional paradigm of only two years, or less, on an account before moving to a new assignment is unfortunately still commonplace. Two years is far too short a time to start and sustain a win-win relationship with a large, complex enterprise customer.

For this reason, we argue strongly in Customers Win, Suppliers Win for longer account tenures. As supporting evidence, we cite the extraordinary results — a tripling or more of account revenue — that Gus achieved in tenures of around eight years each on three accounts with strategic importance for IBM regional, national, and global organizations.

In the 1970s and 1980s, as IBM’s account manager at National Bank of North America (NBNA), a New York metropolitan area regional bank that became the core of National Westminster Bank USA (subsequently acquired by Fleet Bank and now part of Bank of America), Gus sold and oversaw installation of automated teller support and customer-facing ATMs in the bank’s 157 branches. This success was the first time a bank installed both technologies simultaneously; the deal became a benchmark for larger banks and an important reference sale for IBM.

In the 1990s, Gus won the deal for IBM to install a new infrastructure for Merrill Lynch’s brokerage network despite intense competition from rival technology firms and equally, if not more, intense rivalry among IBM’s divisions. Gus envisioned IBM’s approach as the Total Integrated Solution and began to pursue this approach, even before Lou Gerstner arrived as IBM’s CEO and famously faced a decision on whether or not to let a planned breakup of the firm proceed. The Total Integrated Solution that Gus sold Merrill, on which he followed through assiduously to ensure it succeeded, became one of the early proof points for Gerstner’s decision to keep IBM intact and reposition the firm as a general contractor/integrator for large customers’ technology needs. With updates, the infrastructure, known internally at Merrill as the Trusted Global Advisor (TGA) initiative, continues to serve the enterprise well as part of Bank of America.

In the 2000s, Gus took on global responsibility for the Citigroup account, then IBM’s worst performing major financial services customer, and turned it into the firm’s best performing account in the financial services sector.

Throughout these account tenures, and in between at IBM corporate sales roles, Gus observed that frequent account manager turnover hobbled the firm’s performance in other major accounts across all business sectors. Short account tenures made it impossible for many of his account manager contemporaries to acquire a difference-making understanding of their customers’ businesses, build sufficient relationship networks within customer firms, and become trusted partners in customers’ internal discussions. Noel has frequently observed the same issues as a researcher and consultant. Simply speaking, these account managers’ tenures were of insufficient duration for them to fully develop their competence levels on each element of the Acumen Sextet.

Pat Finn, who started his sales career at IBM and who served in a succession of increasingly senior sales executive roles at Cisco from 1996 to 2016, recalled for us, “When I joined Cisco’s New York office, account managers were changing every two years, even every year. Customers very clearly said they did not want that. We instituted a global accounts program at Cisco, and I had Gus come in to talk about the value of staying longer on an account."

As President and General Manager Americas of SS&C Blue Prism, Pat has delegated “regional vice presidents to own the customer relationship” to ensure continuity, as “the tenure of an account manager on an account is probably three years now, if not longer.” As SS&C Blue Prism account managers achieve improved results, their scope of responsibility increases, “but they also maintain their existing relationships with customer executives."

Gus’s youngest son, Walter Maikish, has followed his father in pursuing a consultative sales career. Currently Vice President, Federal Sales, at Pure Storage, he previously spent fifteen years at Cisco, mostly as an account manager selling to the same federal agency.

In his early years in federal sector sales, Walter sold mainly to the federal agency’s headquarters campus in the Washington, D.C. area. As he developed a better understanding of the agency as an organization and its dedication to its public service mission, he also built a network of contacts among IT decision makers and influencers. Walking the halls whenever possible, while staying within the bounds of the agency’s protocols, Walter became a familiar presence in its IT laboratories. These efforts contributed to his ability to eventually make sales not only to the headquarters campus, but also to the agency as a whole, as part of its drive to centralize IT purchasing to achieve greater efficiencies and better support its mission — a goal all federal agencies were pursuing in line with new legislation known as FITARA (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act). The results were win-win-wins: greater efficiencies for the agency in performing its public service mission; increased account profitability for Cisco; higher value and long-term cost savings for taxpayers.

One incident Walter shared is especially revealing. Cisco was adding a new product line, its first server — a best-of-breed by third-party measures. Walter recognized the new server would advance his federal customer’s IT goals. To pursue a deal, he was working in partnership with a sales rep and an engineer from a Cisco reseller. Although the reseller also carried registrations for rival IT firms, including the incumbent server provider, the sales rep assured Walter that Cisco’s server would have the reseller’s full support.

The reseller’s rep and engineer had contacts within the federal agency’s IT organization, but not at the level of the decision makers and influencers with whom Walter had developed good relationships. Walter had already shown his contacts the benefits for the agency of switching to Cisco servers. But the IT engineers who would be working with Cisco servers everyday were changeaverse. Long-term, system-wide benefits aside, changing to Cisco servers would increase the short-term workload for the engineers.

Walter set up a meeting for the reseller’s engineer that included both IT engineers and higher-level IT managers at the customer. Walter chose not to participate because he knew his contacts wanted to hear what the engineer would say when he wasn’t present. Regardless, seeing Walter walking by on his way to a separate meeting, a senior CIO staff member left the meeting and pulled him into his office. He told Walter that the reseller engineer was pushing the incumbent server rather than supporting the move to Cisco.

Walter thanked his contact for the information, but did not join the meeting. Afterwards, he asked the reseller’s rep and engineer why they weren’t supporting Cisco’s server, as they had promised. It emerged the engineer simply wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the new Cisco server to be entirely comfortable recommending it to his contacts among the federal agency’s IT engineers. Somewhat later it came to light that the engineer’s bosses were not happy about what had occurred and wanted better cooperation with Cisco.

Walter arranged for the engineer to learn more about the Cisco server. In Walter’s words, “The engineer then felt able to assure his customer contacts, not in a disingenuous way but in a more informed way, that he had done additional due diligence and that Cisco’s server was indeed best-of-breed, that migration to it would go smoothly, and that it would achieve the system-wide efficiencies the customer wanted."

Walter added, “Without that relationship with the senior member of the CIO’s staff, I never would have learned the reseller’s engineer was inadequately briefed on Cisco’s server. I never would have been able to help the engineer do more due diligence, so that he could help his contacts prove out the server’s benefits in the customer’s IT lab. None of that would have happened, and we certainly wouldn’t have won the deal, if my customer hadn’t pulled me into his office to tell me what was going on. The pandemic has made it a lot more difficult, but being present within the customer’s community will always be an important part of sales, whether you do it by walking the halls or through social media such as Zoom."

A final word from Walter: “The human interactions may be challenging at times, but they’re ultimately what makes sales fun.” That speaks to the personality types best suited to account management, a subject we devote considerable attention to in Customers Win, Suppliers Win.

An ex-student of Noel’s, Vijay (pseudonym), had an equally pertinent story to share about the dual need to understand the customer’s business thoroughly and to have effective relationships throughout the customer’s organization. Vijay worked for a digital storage provider, and he learned that one group at his customer, Verizon, wanted to issue an RFP for a digital storage purchase. Knowing that other parts of Verizon also regularly needed to purchase additional digital storage, Vijay canvassed his contacts and turned a six-figure deal into a seven-figure deal.

With regard to the pandemic’s impact on access to customers, the problem will likely remain, even though it is subsiding as the most lethal stages of the pandemic seem to have passed. The problem also has an impact on giving customers access to a supplier firm’s resources. However, social media technologies like Zoom can furnish new, sometimes better ways of fulfilling the perennial demands of good account management.

Gus is a volunteer at the Fortune Society, which helps the formerly incarcerated reintegrate into society. Because of his IT background, Gus was invited to attend a recent presentation to the Fortune Society by the prospective provider of a new CRM system. Gus has been in countless such meetings during his career, but for once he was on the buyer’s side of the table.

The CRM software maker sales rep was physically present in a conference room at the Fortune Society. Via Zoom, three colleagues provided backup: a software developer, a financial person, and a sales manager. The sales rep and his three colleagues all played roles in the presentation and answered questions. To bring all four supplier people together to share their expertise with the customer in person would have been much more expensive, time-consuming, and complicated in a pre-Zoom world.

Again, technology and the business environment keep changing, but the importance of the customer relationship, and of account management best practices and principles, will endure. If you make the customer — the enterprise and the individuals

you deal with — successful, they will buy more of what they need from you rather than from your competitors. So, understand what your customer is trying to accomplish, help it be successful, and make your firm deliver what you promise.

The Acumen Sextet highlights how to do that. Our book offers many examples of each acumen dimension in action. In addition, we recommend following the 80/20 rule to identify where account managers are under supported and guide investment to bolster them, including better training and coaching, to maximize win-win returns for both supplier and customer success.

How can firms that rely on strategic account management for profitable relationships with their most important customers inculcate the skill sets in the Acumen Sextet? And, how can individual aspiring account managers acquire those same skills? Programs like the global account manager program run by Noel at ColumbiaBusiness School, or the strategic account manager program offered by SAMA, can provide the foundation and guidance for additional learning by experience. Over the long run, there is no substitute for cumulative experience in the human dynamics that shape the progress and outcome of B2B sales efforts.

Although few firms have the patience, sales organizations seeking to leverage account management excellence should ideally practice career planning for their account managers that combines structured learning, informal mentoring and coaching, and accumulating experience on increasingly larger and more complicated accounts. Individual account managers can plan their own careers with the same attention to a combination of structured and experiential learning. For both organizations and individuals, the Acumen Sextet provides a robust framework for setting goals and checking progress on the path to account management and customer success. n

1 Available at www.wessexlearning.com. For SAMA executive HarveyDunham’s interview with Noel Capon and Gus Maikish, see https://podcast.strategicaccounts.org/customers-win-suppliers-win-with-gusmaikish-and-noel-capon/.

2 https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consulting/solutions/customersuccess-strategy.html

3 Zoltners, A.A., Sinha, P., Lorimer, S.E. (November 18, 2019). WhatIs a Customer Success Manager? Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2019/11/what-is-a-customer-success-manager.

Noel Capon is the R.C. Kopf Professor of International Marketing at Columbia Business School, New York. Noel can be contacted at nc7@ columbia.edu. Gus Maikish is a retired IBM executive, guest lecturer, and sales consultant. Gus can be contacted at gusmaikish@gmail.com.