Systematic enablement propels AVI-SPL SAM program to extraordinary business results

SYSTEMATIC ENABLEMENT PROPELS AVI-SPL SAM PROGRAM TO EXTRAORDINARY BUSINESS RESULTS

AVI-SPL: 2022 SAMA Excellence Awards™ Winner for Systematic Enablement

By Danielle Matteson, Vice President, Strategic Accounts, AVI-SPL

AVI-SPL continues to gain significant new growth through improvements to our strategic account program. Over the last four years, our SAM program grew 33% compared to our industry, which only saw a modest growth of 8%.

We identified systematic enablement as being a critical success factor that propelled our SAM program office and our strategic account teams. Without a holistic strategy and precise tactics to equip our teams for success, we realized our key initiatives would only achieve marginal performance.

AVI-SPL invested in a center of excellence, which allowed our SAM program to incorporate and optimize many best-in-class practices that any organization can adopt if you have longterm commitment from senior leadership. We have broken down the components of a successful enablement program into seven elements.

Seven Elements of SAM Enablement

1. Structure and Process

AVI-SPL has over 100 full-time dedicated resources within our SAM program to plan, execute, and deliver upon our trusted advisor commitment to our designated strategic accounts. Reporting directly to the executive level, our core leadership and account teams utilize a standardized global structure to provide consistency and strategic partnership to clients across all geographies and lines of business.

Creating a Customer-Centric Culture: Our SAM Program Office has also made significant resource investments beyond the SAM role. Since the launch of our program, our core focus has been on creating a customer-centric culture and global consistency to achieve trusted advisor status — to guide our customers in their digital workplace journey. To accomplish this, we structured our program around our clients’ core needs in a way that was demonstrably different from their previous interactions with AVI-SPL.

Focusing on the key elements that we needed to support and enable these clients, we created a three-element structure at the account level, consisting of account strategy and planning, global deployment, and service delivery.

A Line of Business Leadership

• Sales and Engineering: These teams conduct all pre-sales activities and provide technical thought leadership to customers. This team includes an Account Manager in each region, as well as global and localized engineering resources.

• Program Management Office: Each account has a Global Program Manager who oversees regionally dedicated Project Managers. This team handles internal alignment and risk mitigation, and serves as the single client point of contact for our project delivery line of business.

• Account Services: Each account has a dedicated Customer Service Director, who oversees Service Delivery Managers in each region. These teams are responsible for integrity and internal alignment, and serve as the single client point of contact for our service line of business.

Moving Away from Transactional Business

By providing an individualized level of attention and orientation to our clients, we change the equation from their expected vendor-level engagement. Beyond the benefit of dedicated resources, we expect each member of our core team to operate as the CEO or COO of their individual organization. They are empowered to make changes and customize the organization to fit the needs of each individual account.

By molding our operations to our clients, instead of expecting them to fit our regional structures, we have created multiple layers of value. We begin with thought leadership and exploring organizational needs to deliver to our customer’s customer. Next, we examine how the digital workplace can enable the workforce to meet those needs. On-time delivery and performance from our dedicated global team simplify the global procurement process, saving time and money while enabling their workforce to move faster. The service teams ensure that technology is functional and an asset for enabling communications, rather than a roadblock.

2. How We Disseminate Knowledge

We feel that communication is the best tool we have as a SAM program. This communication occurs at both leadership and peer levels. To best communicate throughout the organization with the least amount of communications fatigue, we split our customer accounts into our Global and Enterprise account tiers. This provides a better peer account context for comparison. We similarly verticalize our many internal communication sessions to enable peer learning and sharing.

Continuous Improvement: The leadership team of our SAM program regularly attends SAMA conferences, webinars, and other continuing education activities. As we gain best-practice knowledge and other account planning structures that provide better methodologies for strategic accounts, we workshop ways to apply these items to our current practice. We communicate these regularly throughout our team through a variety of standing communication sessions.

CSAM Certification: Each of our Global Account VPs has either completed or is in the process of completing their SAMA CertifiedStrategic Account Manager (CSAM) certificate. Giving all our team members the same framework and language not only improves their relationships with their clients but provides a consistency of ideas and framework for the entire team.

Weekly Check-In: Many of our best ideas come from hearing how peers are solving similar challenges. This weekly session allows SAM Program Office management and Global Account

Management VPs to raise issues, brainstorm solutions, and hear how other accounts are solving the challenge at hand.

Executive Briefings: To drive executive sponsor engagement, we brief the executive sponsor teams on the growth, alignment, and execution of operations in each account. This preparation forces each team to evaluate their actions and program status, and allows them to address their needs to the highest levels of our organization. As a SAM program management organization, we develop unique questions and angles of presentation for each event, encouraging and elevating the strategic thinking of each team.

Annual Team Summit: As a team with global geographic distribution, we see the value in face time and team building when possible. Our team members convene at a variety of global trade shows and industry events, but we bring all team members together once each year for a unique event focused solely on our SAM program organization. This summit includes a strong focus on growth enablement and account planning, and challenging our team members to elevate their thinking through mini-training sessions and workshops with product-line leaders.

3. Personal Development

SAMA Certification: We have dedicated a variety of resources to continue the personal and career development of every member of our SAM team. Since our program’s inception, our SAM Program Office has invested in sponsoring all of our account leaders to earn their SAMA CSAM certification. This year, we embarked on a special learning and development program with SAMA to provide core trainings to a second cohort of SAM program team members to further advance SAMA methodologies

and capabilities across our teams. Outside of SAMA, we also incentivized team members to gain functional certifications, such as Project Management Professional (PMP), that are relevant to their job roles. AVI-SPL further offers tuition reimbursement programs to support team members’ higher education pursuits.

Mentoring Program: Our corporate organization sponsors a formal mentorship program in which we pair aspiring junior team members with a senior leader in the organization. The mentorship program provides a structured charter, templates for goal identification, discussion topics, and research articles to help guide monthly one-on-one conversations between mentor and mentee. Our mentorship program has enabled our team to better connect with colleagues and offers opportunities for meaningful professional development.

Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiative is highly relevant to our SAM team members, and our customers. We have created Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) across a variety of topics designed to enrich our company culture and create stronger, authentic bonds across disparate teams of people. Many of our SAM team members have been actively involved in these groups, which not only yields personal fulfillment through a sense of connection but also dramatically improves internal alignment.

4. Organizational Alignment Tools

Customer Advisory Board

Our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is highly rated by our clients and viewed as one of the best benefits of our program. Each of our designated Global Accounts is invited to participate in this exclusive group of board members to advise AVI-SPL on our strategic direction as well as to engage in peer-to-peer learning and community building. Our CAB is comprised of the senior technology and employee experience leaders of some of the world’s largest companies across multiple industries. We leverage our CAB as a key source of voice of customer input to influence our SAM program roadmap.

Internal Communication Plan

Internal communication plans include prescriptive expectations for several touch-points ranging from weekly global account team huddles to review near-term strategy execution, to internal executive business reviews in which the SAMs provide an account plan briefing to all AVI-SPL executive and regional senior leadership. In these sessions, our regional and business unit (BU) leaders have an opportunity to learn about each account’s strategy, how it impacts their region/BU, and what they can do to best support client outcomes.

External Communication Plan

Our external communication plans ensure a superior experience for our designated accounts and include many SAMA methodologies including client “Careabouts,” “Them, Us, Fit, Proof” presentation style, and a joint partnership scorecard included in our Quarterly Strategy Session templates. We’ve found that standardizing our external communication plan and content structure helps solidify our SAM program’s brand value within our customer base.

Analytics Dashboard

We’ve introduced Strategic Accounts Dashboards as a program asset to aggregate global data at the account and program levels, providing our team with actionable performance information to improve efficiency and ensure a globally consistent experience for our customers. Each account’s dedicated regional project manager and service leads provide weekly reporting on any risks or opportunities within the account globally and assign a red/amber/ green status. These statuses are reported on our analytics dashboard for program and executive review and allow our team to efficiently identify where to best apply risk mitigation.

5. Execution of the Strategic Accounts Roadmap

Our SAM leadership team drives execution of our strategic accounts roadmap through a commitment to being responsible to our team members and clients. Utilizing collaboration tools to maintain visibility and accountability, we move forward in step. When developing roadmaps, we explicitly review and incorporate the voice of the customer in every decision.

Historically, AVI-SPL has been a geographically siloed organization combined with highly matrixed technical teams, providing a challenge to organize into a single global structure. Of great value to us are tools that look across boundaries and provide the information we need at a glance. By developing individual account dashboards, we are further focused on building data visualizations. We are currently working with a variety of internal stakeholders to build further unified, global, financial, and program management dashboards — items that our larger business is recognizing as necessary through the past achievements of our strategic accounts roadmap.

We track our roadmap progress in a centralized view providing the full team with access. Showing individual tasks in a calendar view with color-coding makes it easy to see responsibility and deadlines. Effective planning enables new feature enhancements and dependencies as needed. Our SAM program leadership team meets weekly to review roadmap feature status, new feature enhancement recommendations, and action plans for implementation, including launch communication. Also included in this meeting are senior and executive leaders of our two core lines of business to ensure internal alignment between what our customers need, what features we’re planning in our SAM program roadmap, and how we can strengthen our global product strategy.

Bi-Annual Qualification Process

We created a standardized, life-cycle process to review new candidate accounts and assess the strategic fit and performance of existing accounts in the program. To support this process, we created a standardized ROI algorithm and benchmarking assessment for Value, Strategic Alignment, Relationships, and Growth Potential. Using this standard set of criteria for all accounts, we refresh the data set every six months for new and existing accounts and review using a committee method in which each of our executive and regional leaders have an opportunity to participate.

Client Playbooks

We require a personalized client playbook for each of our designated Strategic Accounts designed to document each customer’s preferred processes, preferences, and needs. We use this internally to ensure internal awareness, buy-in, and knowledge transfer of voice of customer to all AVI-SPL employees that support Strategic Accounts.

Strategic Account Plan Automation

We treat our account plans as living and evolving assets. The use of a strategic account plan-focused platform tool allows us to better communicate key client information across our BUs and regions as well as provide continuity and efficiency of knowledge transfer should we experience churn in any team member positions.

Product Management Automation

Our SAM Program Office leadership team utilizes a central roadmap with associated tasks to maintain vision, execution, and evolution. Using voice of customer inputs, like our Customer Advisory Board, we’re able to document, plan, and execute program feature enhancements across a matrix organization to better serve our customers. Showing individual tasks in a calendar view with color-coding makes it easy to see responsibility and deadlines across contributing roles. New feature enhancements and dependencies are easily created and adjusted as needed.

Standard Meeting Platform

We utilize Microsoft Teams as the main communication platform across AVI-SPL. Beyond enabling our team to communicate, we utilize the Teams feature of this platform to maintain a real-time inventory of all documents, communication plans, presentations, and other related documentation for our entire program. Individual account teams enable each account-based team to easily communicate and find documentation they need including client global playbooks, contracts, etc. New and existing team members across regions and BUs have efficient access to everything they need to best support each Strategic Account.

6. Co-Creating Value with Our Clients

Through many in-depth conversations with our clients, we recognized that they highly value transparency from partners. We are continuing to develop new tools to improve both our management and the client experience. We create joint value by first listening to our Customer Advisory Board (CAB).

Our Return to Office Initiative: In 2021 and 2022, the board’s focus has been on Return to Office and supporting the employee experience as they move into a new hybrid work world. Given the complexity and uncertainty of this conversation, we saw an opportunity to offer the power of community sharing across our customer base as an exclusive benefit of the program.

We organized several client work sessions focusing on individual aspects of struggle in defining what return to office and the hybrid work environment mean to technology leaders. In these virtual sessions, we facilitated discussions in which each client member could speak to questions such as:

• How are you preparing for RTO?

• How do you plan to enable Meeting Equity between in-person and remote meeting participants?

• Beyond technology, what human behavior elements do we need to consider in the RTO design?

• How has human behavior changed as a result of the pandemic and how will that affect them at work?

These sessions provided each client member with not only rich discussion and thought-provoking debate but, more importantly, a sense of community and solidarity during a time where so much uncertainty exists. Members rely upon AVI-SPL to connect them with peers, not just to discuss approaches to solving common problems but also to establish and grow peer relationships that could be leveraged in the future.

Strategic Account Dashboards: We have deployed Strategic Account Dashboards, capturing operational (program management) statuses. Populated with real-time updates regarding quote statuses, delivery lead times, and current project installation details, the dashboards enable clients and our management teams to easily find critical information and see trends. This insight allows clients to make educated decisions regarding when to provide AVI-SPL information to receive a quote by their deadlines and allows AVI-SPL teams to better focus on the systems at hand. This expectation setting continues through project installations, providing clients with the assurance that we are busy working to meet their goals. These dashboards reduce the need for tactical reactions and enable our SAM program leaders the “privilege of focus” to further grow our program.

We’ve repackaged our new Strategic Account Dashboards as an exclusive client benefit of program designation. Our customers can now use these global analytics to document performance and track their own corporate goals for their management team and peers. We have created heroes simply by repurposing a tool that helped our team do their jobs better into a tool that helps make our clients successful.

7. Business Results

Our SAM Program Office has built the vision, plan, and infrastructure to enable our team to achieve exceptional outcomes for our clients. We’ve seen dramatic, tangible results in our top KPIs compared to our pre-program state with existing strategic accounts. Highlights of the comparative analysis include:

• Customer Satisfaction: 127% increase of average Net Promoter Score.

• Loyalty & Expansion: 280% increase in wallet share.

• Diversification: 70% increase in the mix of services.

• Relationship Equity: $150M+ in new business won with references from more than 15 strategic accounts.

Leveraging Successful Account Relationships: We crafted a way to measure objectively the impact of the relationship equity we’ve gained as a result of the program’s past proven value. One way we measure this is how frequently our strategic account customers are willing to serve as an AVI-SPL advocate and promoter to potential new clients. We currently track the monetized relationship equity of the program by quantifying how many of our accounts are willing to be star references, how often they are willing to be references, and what incremental business AVI-SPL has earned as a result of strategic account customer references.

When we first launched the program, we struggled to identify client references, let alone capture new business as a result of client experience sharing. Five years into our program, we can directly attribute $150M+ won in incremental total contract value as a direct result of strategic account clients advocating on our behalf.

Account Retention: A significant business result of the program is the retention value of our strategic accounts, especially during the uncertainty and instability of the pandemic. In our industry, losing a major account because of poor performance or lackluster relationship requires a minimum of two to three years to earn back the business. Further monetizing the value of the program and the preservation of these relationships, we’ve calculated the retention value of our accounts using an algorithm that considers the time to earn back lost business, the value of both run-rate business and renewals, and the assumed risk factor of the percentage of business lost. Even with a conservative risk factor, the result quantifies the retention value of the program to be vital to AVI-SPL’s total company revenue.

Benchmarking Initiative: In addition to our individual KPIs, we’ve introduced a new benchmarking exercise in which we compare our KPI scores to average scores in the same categories in both our industry and non-SAM AVI-SPL customers. This exercise helps us provide tangible evidence of the impact ourSAM program has on key business metrics, including growth, diversification of spend, and profitability. The below results show the stark difference in performance resulting from our SAM program investment:

Growth: We recognize a significantly higher compound annual growth rate than our industry, and more than double that of our nonstrategic accounts.

Diversification of Spend: We recognize significantly better product mix in our core lines of business. This metric is a key corporate-level KPI as we aim to increase high margin service revenue as a long-term business strategy.

Profitability: Significant increase in individual account, project, and service contract profitability.

By investing in a center of excellence — through thought leadership, analytics, and the pursuit of ambitious goals — our strategic accounts team demonstrates to the rest of the company what is possible when the customer is at the heart of the conversation.

Danielle Matteson is Vice President of Strategic Accounts at AVI-SPL, where she leads strategic program development and operations for the Global Accounts Program. Danielle can be contacted at danielle.matteson@avispl. com.