Velocity Fall 2023

37 What’s in a Name? Turns Out — Everything! Outstanding Young Program of the Year Continues to Build Upon Success With SAM Framework

41 AVI-SPL: A Model of Excellence in C-suite Support and Engagement

47 Artificial Intelligence in Strategic Account Management: Applications, Benefits, & Risks

V ELOCITY ®

A PUBLICATION OF THE STRATEGIC ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION

Publisher: Denise Freier | Editor-in-chief: Harvey Dunham | Associate Editor: Nic Halverson

Creative Director: Aimee Waddell | Advertising: Ashley Davis

The Strategic Account Management Association is a global knowledge-sharing and networking organization devoted to developing, promoting, and advancing strategic customer-supplier value, collaboration, and learning.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission. Copyright © 2023 by the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA). The SAMA ® logo is a registered trademark of the Strategic Account Management Association.

Velocity ® is published three times a year. The annual subscription rate is $65. Changes of address, suggested articles, and requests for extra copies of this publication should be directed to: SAMA, 4740 N. Cumberland Ave., #389, Chicago, IL 60656. Tel: 312-251-3131 Fax: 312-251-3132 Internet: www.strategicaccounts.org

For membership information or to join SAMA, contact Chris Jensen at 312-251-3131 x10 or jensen@strategicaccounts.org

SAMA Corporate Members

Abbott

ABM Industries Inc.

Agilent

Ainsworth Inc.

Air Liquide

Airbus Defence and Space

Amgen Canada

Arcadis

Astellas

AVI-SPL

Avient Corporation

Axis Communications Inc.

Bailey International

Bayer AG

Bellevue University

bioMérieux

Boehringer Ingelheim

Brenntag Specialties Inc.

Buckman North America

Bunge

CAS

Ceva Santé Animale

CH Robinson

Cisco Systems, Inc.

Clarios

Cox Automotive

Danaher Companies

DHL

Donaldson Company, Inc.

Ecolab

Eisai, Inc.

Elanco Animal Health

Emerson Automation Solutions

Endress+Hauser

Expeditors

Formerra

Freeman

GE Healthcare

Genmab US, Inc.

Greene, Tweed & Co.

Hays

Henkel

Hilton Worldwide

Honeywell

Hovione

Hyatt

IDEXX Laboratories, Inc.

John Deere

Johnson & Johnson Lilly USA, LLC

LP Building Solutions

Lubrizol

Medtronic

Merck+

Michelin

Mölnlycke Health Care

New York Power Authority Inc.

Nilfisk

Novo Nordisk Inc.

O-I

Optum Inc.

Otsuka America Pharmaceutical, Inc.

Owens Corning

Pfizer, Inc.

Premier Inc.

Rockwell Automation

Saint-Gobain

Sanofi Vaccines

Sensata Technologies

Schneider Electric

Sidel

Siemens

Solecta, Inc.

Solenis

Sonoco

supplyFORCE

The AAK Group

The Sherwin-Williams Company

TÜV SÜD

UL Solutions

United Airlines

Veolia

VSP Global W.L. Gore & Associates

Wajax Corporation

West Pharmaceutical Services, Inc.

Wheels Inc.

Xylem Inc.

Zurich Insurance Group

SAMA Board of Directors

Steve Andersen President and Founder PMI

Dino Bertani

Executive Director, International Strategic Account Management AbbVie

Anju Birdy Strategic Account Management Excellence, Vice President Schneider Electric

Noel Capon R.C. Kopf Professor of International Marketing Columbia Business School

Mauro Cerati Senior Vice President, Global Customers Bunge

Dominique Côté Owner and Founder COSAWI in/Sprl

Ron Davis Executive Vice President, Head of Customer Management Zurich Insurance Group

Jim Ford Chief Executive Officer Solecta, Inc.

Chairman of the SAMA Board

Denise Freier President and CEO SAMA

Eric Gantier President, Global Engineering, Manufacturing & Energy

DHL Customer Solutions and Innovation (CSI)

*John F. Gardner

Retired - President, Global Strategic Accounts

Emerson Automation Solutions

*Rosemary Heneghan Retired - Director, International Sales & Operations, Worldwide

IBM

Gerilyn Horan Vice President, Group Sales & Strategic Accounts Hilton

Denise Juliano Group Vice President, Life Sciences

Premier Inc.

Renae Leary

Chief Commercial Officer –

Americas

Ansell

Mike Moorman Managing Principal, Sales Solutions

ZS

Geoff Quinn Director, Key Account Management Center of Excellence

Pfizer Biopharmaceuticals Group

Dr. Hajo Rapp SVP Strategic Account Management & Sales Excellence TÜV SÜD AG

Kevin Reilly Global Sales Development Leader, 3M Healthcare Business Group 3M Company

Tony Stanich VP Global Corporate AccountsFood & Beverage for Water and Process Services

Nalco, an Ecolab Company

Jennifer Stanley Partner McKinsey & Company

*Dr. Kaj Storbacka Retired - Hanken Foundation Professor Hanken School of Economics

Geoff Williams

Vice President, Global Accounts Danfoss

*Distinguished Board Advisors (lifetime contributors; nonvoting members)

Publisher: Denise Freier

Editor-in-Chief: Harvey Dunham

Editor: Nic Halverson

Creative Director: Aimee Waddell

Advertising: Ashley Davis

October

Academy

SAMA Staff Executive

President & CEO: Denise Freier

Finance/Operations/Meetings

Director of Finance, Meetings and Operations: Fran Schwartz

Senior Manager, Meetings and Events & Individual

Member Liaison: Rhodonna Espinosa

Finance & Operations Manager: Jaclyn Such

Registration Manager: Shannon Feeney

Customer Solutions

Director, Customer Solutions: Christopher Jensen

Corporate Account Manager: Michael Johnson

Corporate Account Manager: Dina-Marie Farrell

Sr. Corporate Solutions Manager: Ed Zupanc

Salesforce Analyst/Administrator: Erin Pallesen

Sr. Account Manager, Business Leader - AMS: Stephanie Fahey

Knowledge, Certification & Training

Director, Knowledge, Certification & Training: Libby Souder

Assistant Director, Knowledge & Training: David Schweizer

Knowledge and Training Manager: Brad Maloney Research

General Manager, Research & Customer Experience: Joel Schaafsma

Strategy, Marketing, & Communications

Managing Director, Strategy and Marketing: Harvey Dunham

Creative Director: Aimee Waddell

Editor: Nic Halverson

Marketing Manager & Sponsorship: Ashley Davis

October-December

November

November

Nic Halverson Editor Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA)

Last fall, I was walking with my family through a corn maze when I discovered the deceptively simple solution for finding the one true path. After randomly choosing trial-and-error routes with dead ends, I changed course, looked down, and studied the trails of those who came before me. As I zeroed in on all the possible directions I could take, a well-trodden path clearly stood out. It was darker, deeper, and obvious, like an answer rising to the surface — the sum average of people choosing wisely. As the correct way revealed itself, I shared my findings with others and led everyone to the exit for some celebratory hot apple cider.

This experience reminds me of the logic found in James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds,” which explores the notion that large groups of people are smarter than a select few — better at problem-solving, cultivating innovation, and making wise decisions.

“If you ask a large enough group of diverse, independent people to make a prediction or estimate a probability, and then average those estimates, the errors each of them makes in coming up with an answer cancel themselves out,” he writes. “Each person’s guess, you might say, has two components: information and error. Subtract the error, and you’re left with the information.”

Essentially, this is how I found the correct path: by harnessing the wisdom of the crowd, studying their footprints, and applying their best practices. As the world’s foremost knowledge exchange on strategic account management, this is exactly what we do at SAMA — share and apply best practices. And there’s no better reflection of this collective wisdom than SAMA’s Excellence Awards, whose 2023 winners we highlight in this issue.

But first, Pete Morelli, Vice President at Holden Advisors, takes us on a valiant quest for “The Holy Grail of Retention & Growth: Pricing?” — to prevent SAMs like you from negotiating against yourself. “The key solve,” he says, “is taking

EDITOR’S CORNER

a close look at your offerings to ensure they’re aligned to the value your customers are receiving, and more importantly, the value they’re looking for.”

Next, Janssen — Excellence Awards winner for Systematic Enablement of the SAM Program: Learning & Development — teaches us how to build an enterprise-wide, lean and agile L&D center of excellence to systemically enable, activate, and sustain SAM excellence.

In his article “Medtronic’s Innovative Approach to Value Co-creation,” Max Walker, Director of Strategic Account Management, writes about how engaging strategic customers in traditional ways and expecting transformational results “simply wasn’t a recipe for success.” Read what he and his colleagues cooked up instead, and why their cuisine earned them an Excellence Award for Innovative Value Co-creation. Next — for more value co-creation — read how CAS and Dow teamed up to create a smart solution that revolutionized the search process for chemicals and materials.

Be it in a corn maze or at a manufacturing company, changing courses can add value, as LP Building Solutions can attest. Read how the Excellence Awards winner for Outstanding Young Program of the Year introduced a SAM framework and went from a commodity-driven mindset to who they are now: a value-added building solutions company.

Baseball season may be winding down, but perennial Excellence Awards slugger AVI-SLP just hit for the cycle with their win for C-suite Support and Engagement for the SAM Program and Strategic Customers. Every year since joining SAMA, they’ve won an award in a different category, so any SAM rookies would be wise to take notes while reading our article about these veteran all-stars.

Our last piece outlines the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence, but as a final note, Surowiecki reminds us that we humans are hardwired with natural wisdom.

“With most things, the average is mediocrity,” he writes. “With decision making, it’s often excellence. You could say it’s as if we’ve been programed to be collectively smart.” n

The pursuit of SAM excellence is a journey that requires commitment and resolve, typically undertaken by organizations that have realized the importance of becoming more strategic to their most important customers. Those that succeed gain competitive advantage by equipping their account teams with proven best practices that support effectiveness in each of the primary account planning and management impact zones.

Value: Today’s strategic and key customers expect their providers to understand their business pressures, objectives and challenges, and deliver solutions and value that address them. Top performing account managers and teams understand what matters most to their customers, and co-create mutual value that enables their accounts to realize the business outcomes that drive success.

Alignment: By engaging cross-functional team members in the deployment of SAM best practices, stronger internal alignment and enhanced customer value co-creation are realized. When account managers and teams understand customer pressures, objectives, and challenges, and align on how to address them, the result is heightened collaboration and value realization with the customer.

Relationships: Strategic customers expect to build trust-based relationships with their providers. Deploying and adopting SAM best practices equips and enables account managers and teams to evolve relationships with key and strategic customers into partnerships, with dramatic impact on how they engage, co-innovate and co-create value together.

Growth: Driving proactive growth is the essence of SAM excellence, and when account managers and teams develop and implement strategies to facilitate expansion of strategic customer partnerships, growth can be accelerated. By building growth strategies collaboratively with customer stakeholders, your approaches to value co-discovery, co-creation and realization provide you with powerful differentiators.

PMI

Congratulates

all of the winners of the 2023 SAMA Excellence Awards™, with special recognition of our clients Boehringer Ingelheim and LP Building Solutions! The SAMA Excellence Awards™ honor B2B companies who achieve unparalleled success at elevating relationships with key customers by solving their most critical business challenges.

MEASURING UP: DEI SCORECARDS AND REPORTS CAN HELP TRACK PROGRESS

Gauging by the round-table discussions and executive forums at the 2023 SAMA Annual Conference, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives remain a vital, top-ofmind component of the modern C-suite’s blueprint for future success. However, as Sophia Wu writes in Senior Executive DEI, “While businesses continue to stress the importance of DEI at work, it poses the question of how to do so quantitatively.”

As corporate leaders pledge to implement DEI efforts in recruiting, retention, and promotion practices, how can senior leadership track data-driven results to prove business impact and hold themselves accountable?

The answer, as Wu suggests in her article “25+ Examples of DEI Scorecards and DEI Reports,” is an Equity Scorecard model developed by the University of Southern California Center for Urban Education, used to measure DEI metrics at various organizations.

“Diversity or DEI scorecards, also known as diversity dashboards, are visual snapshots of an organization’s progress with their DEI goals, tracking their representation using data,” Wu writes. “Leaders can interpret this data to determine what strategies are working and to determine what key performance indicators have room for improvement. Scorecards can be used to evaluate how diverse their workforce is and to inform future business decisions. Having a comprehensive DEI scorecard allows you to identify areas of inequity so that you can develop functional strategies to address them.”

Most organizations choose to publish their DEI reports in the spring, as a way to track their yearly progress toward achieving their DEI goals. Some organizations, however, opt to publish more nuanced, one-off DEI reports. No matter the timing, the key is laying the groundwork and putting systems in place.

But where and how to get started? As this issue’s editorial suggests, the “wisdom of the crowd” often yields the best solution — so let’s start there. Fortunately, for inspiration, Wu created a list of DEI reports and scorecards from companies such as Boeing, Google, and Microsoft, to name a few. Scroll through the list and see how the best of the best are tracking their DEI initiatives or compare your own company’s report and see how you measure up.

“Studying sample diversity scorecards and DEI reports from a variety of organizations can help DEI leaders like you develop and improve your own system for measuring your progress on DEI goals,” Wu writes.

It’s easy, however, to feel overwhelmed by the potential data to measure and include. Wu advises that “it’s important to narrow down your company’s scorecard to the specific metrics and key performance indicators [KPIs] that are most useful for reaching your specific DEI goals.”

Natasha Miller Williams, Head of Diversity & Inclusion for candy manufacturer Ferrara, agrees — but she stresses that

companies should remember to focus on strategic goals that drive substantive change.

“The most important best practice is to ensure you have impactful strategic goals,” she told the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). “Too often, DE&I is reduced to tactical programmatic efforts or tracking, when it should be a strategic function. The tactics should only be executed if they will help you advance toward your goal.”

After you’ve identified your SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based) goals and dedicated time to studying a variety of DEI reports to see what good looks like, it’s crucial to refine your company’s scorecard by focusing on the precise metrics and KPIs. When it comes time to create your own DEI dashboard, consider focusing on the following areas.

Begin with qualitative metrics, then advance to quantitative metrics. Start by soliciting coworker feedback via surveys or listening sessions, then advance to quantitative metrics on representation, such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, and even neurodiversity, which may include individuals with dyslexia, attention-deficit disorder (ADD), or autism. After all, the backgrounds and experiences of employees help inform HR matters, such as healthcare plan options or work hour flexibility. Plus, these metrics will be the first stats that prospective partners, job candidates, and/or customers will look at when assessing your organization’s DEI strengths.

Leadership demographics reflect the diversity of an organization and set the tone for equality and inclusivity for future employees and leaders. Having a scorecard that demonstrates diverse leadership shows a commitment to your DEI goals and creates a lead-by-example scenario for those looking to follow suite. As Wu points out, “Adidas made a commitment to prioritizing women leadership when creating their goals and objectives. Since then, the percentage of women in management positions increased to 37%, just a few percentage points shy of their target of 40% by 2025.”

Measuring DEI in HR practices — including recruiting and hiring, retention, and compensation — is really where the rubber meets the road. Quantitative metrics in these areas can help establish DEI benchmarks, while qualitative surveys can, for example, reveal why diverse groups are leaving the company. Are candidates from underrepresented groups being recruited and/or hired for leadership roles? Are diverse individuals being promoted; what are their retention/

turnover rates? Are there pay gaps for underrepresented groups? Answers to these questions and more become very clear when analyzed through the human resources department.

“Having a diverse supply chain is essential to expanding economic opportunities and creating cohesive communities,” Wu writes. “This can look like securing suppliers from underrepresented groups such as minority- or woman-owned enterprises and increasing financial spend in those communities.” Having a track record of diverse suppliers not only validates your company’s DEI commitments, it also provides an accurate representation of where your organization is heading. “For example,” Wu states, “General Electric has a Supplier Diversity & Inclusion Statement, in which they assert they only will conduct business with suppliers who follow the GE Integrity Guide for Suppliers and do not engage in discrimination.”

Keeping a record of these metrics may seem daunting, but industry experts assure there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Start small and use what you have.

Diane Primo, CEO at PR firm Purpose Brand, told SHRM that organizations should consider basic tracking software "to jump-start your scorecard […] or start by using an Excel spreadsheet to specify the KPIs you need to track, optimize it, develop processes around it and then work with your IT team to automate it."

Alana Elston, Chief Operating Officer and Head of People at LGND, also told SHRM that existing company software likely holds the capability to capture DEI data.

“There’s no need to start from scratch,” she said. “In fact, most payroll software and [human resource information systems] have a diversity feature making it easy to implement. There are many tools in the marketplace that provide diversity scorecards for your organization.” n

Adapted from “25+ Examples of DEI Scorecards and DEI Reports” by Sophia Wu, Senior Executive DEI, May 5, 2023, https:// seniorexecutive.com/diversity-scorecards-dei-reports/; and “How to Create a Diversity Scorecard” by Matt Gonzales, Society for Human Resource Management, August 2, 2022, https://www.shrm.org/ resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/global-andcultural-effectiveness/pages/how-to-create-a-diversity-scorecard. aspx

2023 REPORT ON STRATEGIC ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT COMPENSATION PRACTICES

SAMA Research once again teamed up with ZS Associates to conduct the 2023 Report on strategic account management compensation practices.

This study is the most comprehensive survey of strategic account management compensation practices available today and is designed to establish benchmarks and track market trends related to:

• Profile, responsibilities, and job scope.

• SAM program practices.

• Market compensation levels and incentive mix.

• Pay plan type, structure, components, and metrics.

• Performance measurement and sales crediting practices.

• Frequency of performance measurement and payouts. Data highlights from the study include:

• Plan prevalence has shifted back to quotas (51%), similar to pre-pandemic levels. Pandemic plans reduced quotas in favor of management by objectives (MBOs), often driven by the uncertainty at the time.

• While SAMs are expected to focus on strategic goals,

sales results in assigned accounts (39%) remain a prominent metric.

• As sales and revenue forecasts become increasingly reliable, 78% of SAMs had quotas assigned to them.

• Companies have been cautious of keeping SAMs motivated while ensuring company performance. 76% of SAMs had thresholds for some or all of their plan metrics, whereas the median performance threshold was at 74%.

• Keeping the SAM objectives intact, account planning and activity-based metrics (53% each) were the most common MBOs for SAMs.

• To maintain motivation, companies have opted to pay incentives more frequently; 50% of the companies paid incentives at least four times a year. Consistent with this, 57% of companies are opting for quarterly plan periods.

• Companies increased long-term incentives by over 20% in 2023 to retain talent during the “great resignation.”

• Pay levels and comparative pay remain the most important factor to the SAMs followed by controllable metrics and availability of data to track performance.

Disclaimer: This survey report is published by the Strategic Account Management Association, Inc. and ZS Associates, Inc. and contains information based on input from companies or individuals engaged in the strategic account management profession. The information published in this report was developed from actual historical information and does not include any projected information. SAMA and ZS do not recommend, encourage, or endorse any particular use of the information contained in this survey report. SAMA and ZS make no warranty, guarantee, or representation whatsoever and assume no liability or responsibility in connection with the use or misuse of this report.

Type of MBOs in 2022 incentive plan: (All account managers)

Account planning

Activity-based metrics (collaborative meetings, etc.)

Business expansion

Expansion of customer relationship*

Customer relationship metrics (NPS, loyalty, etc.)*

Customer innovation*

Customer coverage

Expense management

Contract signing

New accounts

Other

*Options introduced in 2023.

My incentive pay was based on the following:

Sales results in assigned accounts

Achievement of personal goals/objectives

Division/BU/company performance

Profit results in assigned accounts

Management discretion/judgment

Account penetration metrics

Metrics with deal/pipeline management

Account planning activity metrics

Customer engagement in key activities Number of new account conversions Account relationship metrics

Source: 2023 Report on Strategic Account Management Compensation Practices; SAMA Research. Strategic Account Management Association and ZS Associates, 2023.

SALES RESULTS IN ASSIGNED ACCOUNTS

WAS THE MOST COMMON METRIC IN PLACE FOR ACCOUNT MANAGERS.

ACCOUNT PLANNING AND ACTIVITY-BASED METRICS CONTINUE TO BE THE MOST COMMON MBOs FOR SAMs .

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THE HOLY GRAIL OF RETENTION & GROWTH: PRICING?

By Pete Morelli Vice President Holden Advisors

Let’s face it, selling is tough, and the current deal environment is dishing out both new and familiar headwinds. Elevated interest rates, persistent inflation, and supply chain disruptions have led to uncertainty at global and organizational levels. For most, this presents as hesitant spending patterns, longer sales cycles with an increasing number of decision makers, and overall stagnant growth with strategic accounts. After two years of reluctant price acceptance, customers are now pushing back on increases or threatening to switch vendors. Procurement is playing hardball during new logo negotiations, and renewals that previously sailed through are being analyzed carefully with proactive requests for loyalty consideration.

When it feels like we operate in a price-first world, the temptation might be to sharpen our pencils when we’re developing proposals, essentially negotiating against ourselves. Don’t do it! The call is coming from inside the

house! The key solve is taking a close look at your offerings to ensure they’re aligned to the value your customers are receiving, and more importantly, the value they’re looking for. Once you’re confident in your value, the process of price setting and price getting become far easier. Say it with me: price-value alignment .

Price-value alignment is a beautifully simple concept. High value = high price, low value = low price. I’d call it a law of physics, but it doesn’t take an Einstein to understand it.

As sellers, for any given solution or customer we want to either raise prices or grow/protect volume. If your goal is to raise prices, at the most basic level we need to pump up the value . Alternatively, if you’ve got a budget-constrained customer that is credibly threatening to leave for a lower-cost competitor, let’s give them an option to stay with us at a lower price by removing value .

This value addition or value subtraction concept probably feels like something you think about all the time. Because it is. It’s just that in the business world, this process has a far more intimidating word — innovation . But, it doesn’t take a scientist or an entrepreneur to innovate, and if you can appropriately price your valueadded or value-subtracted solution, you’ll create new opportunities for product-market fit (or price-value alignment) that enable you to achieve your ultimate goals of growing price, growing/retaining volume, or both.

Changing the conversation: choices, choices, choices

Ok, so I’ve made the case for innovation, but how do we do it? There are two paths for innovating within your accounts: up or down. Think about it like creating options for customers to consider what would be most valuable to them. To create new growth paths with tapped-out accounts, consider “innovating up.” This could look like combining existing products or creating a high-value offering that is a new extension to your current solution portfolio. When innovating up, seek solutions that may involve co-creation.

When customers are budget-constrained, “innovating down” can protect business and retain accounts who would otherwise seek a low-cost alternative. This can look like stripping services or features out of an offering to keep customers from leaving by creating a basic version of your solution. It can also serve as an entry-level option for new customers who may not have otherwise been in your target market.

The possibilities for creating solution permutations pile up quickly once you start thinking about it, and might even become overwhelming. To make our lives easier, there is an easy-to-follow, structured process we can use to ideate, finalize, and price our innovative business ideas. Let’s get into it.

Pricing for new innovations: a four-step process

1. Discovery: Understanding customer pain points

The number one problem I see with price setting is that people don’t understand the truly important problems that customers want to address. It’s my starting point for any pricing or sales project. When this step is poorly executed or entirely skipped, it starts our pricing journey with a weak foundation that results in uninformed list prices and rate cards, misaligned negotiation and concession planning, money left on the table, and, ultimately, less value delivered to your customer and therefore less opportunity to share in that value

via a price. You need to understand the issues and pain points customers are dealing with, particularly for accounts at risk of attrition.

Think about this process like a “value hunt.” Start with your strategic relationships and look for characteristics that can take the relationship to the next level. In some cases, it may feel odd to have these more formal conversations with your close connections or everyday partners. In those situations, consider asking a colleague in product, marketing, or technology to sub in on your behalf instead of conducting them yourself.

Those colleagues may get access to a different decision maker or user than you’d normally deal with. You may also find problems that you hadn’t heard of. Have them talk about it like a needs or performance assessment, where they’re looking for guidance from customers on where to invest in improvements in your offerings.

If you decide to have the conversations yourself, make sure you are listening closely! You may have to think more broadly than an opportunity-focused conversation.

A few sample discovery questions:

• What’s the biggest obstacle preventing you from hitting growth goals?

• Where are you facing the most pressure internally to deliver?

• Tell me about a recent project that went poorly (e.g., a customer complained).

• Where are competitors most challenging you, and how are you addressing it?

• How do you measure success and what would improve that process?

At this point, the goal is to document a long list of pain points and generate potential ideas (one or more per pain point) that might solve customer issues. This is the starting point for our innovation pricing journey.

2. Quantify value: Size the prize for solving identified pain points

To price things properly, your solution to these pain points must be tied to concrete financial outcomes for your customer. That financial impact should be quantified in up to three ways:

1. Increased revenues

2. Reduced costs

3. Minimized risks

Value is best quantified by extending traditional feature and benefit descriptions to measure financial improvement through the FeatureBenefit-Impact-Value (FBIV) framework.

3. Price: Assign a directional price target

There are two ways to think about assigning price.

Category 1: Price level

Ultimately, assigning a price is a function of the amount of financial impact you deliver to customers. This is where art and science collide, but determining a fair price comes down to answering a few basic questions:

The more your answers fall to the right-hand side of the above questions, the more value you should share in via your price. To see this in action or generate prices for your innovations, download our Innovation Pricing Tool.

Category 2: How to charge?

Scaling your price level happens with metrics. You’re familiar with this concept from

FIGURE 2. HEALTHCARE SAAS EXAMPLE FBIV

Reposition. Easy to deliver for you but e ort required to demonstrate value to your customers

Move slowly. These opportunities are low value to all parties and will not be high impact

all aspects of your personal and business life, with examples including $/lb at the grocery store, or fee/month on Netflix, or users/month for business software. For deals that vary in size, complexity, and type of customer, a price metric is a good way to consider how to charge differently. While not a requirement, price metrics can enable scaling beyond a monolithic offering, with things like customer revenue, data usage, or number of users.

4. Prioritize: Pursue opportunities based on impact

Think about which innovations will be most financially impactful to your customer and to your company. I typically put them on a map to help visualize expected value (revenue, cost, risk!) and associated revenue opportunities. Creating this simple visual can go a long way as you’re communicating with colleagues and working cross-functionally with product, billing, technical, and account teams. The common understanding and simple framework help to get teams on the same page.

Think about your innovations in four categories:

• Quick wins: Start here as the highest priority. High-value innovations that are relatively easy to implement for both you and your customer.

• Need to reposition: Easy to deliver for you but requires effort to demonstrate value to your customers.

Quick wins. High-value innovations that are relatively easy to implement for both you and your customer

Improve capability. Opportunities with high customer demand but you need to find ways to deliver them more e iciently

• Improve capability: Opportunities with high customer demand but you need to find ways to deliver them more efficiently with fewer internal resources.

• Move slowly and consider carefully: These opportunities are low value to all parties and will not be high impact.

Pricing is not just about retaining scope or selling more volume. It serves as a powerful lever for growth and can shape the conversations and relationships with your customers when price is aligned with delivered value. By implementing the strategies outlined above, you can navigate the challenges of the current selling environment and drive meaningful results for your business and your customers.

As always, keep it simple! n

Pete Morelli is a Vice President at Holden Advisors and leads the company’s sales consulting practice. With 20+ years of experience in procurement, sales, pricing transformation, and deal coaching, Morelli has helped clients grow and retain $100M+ of annual business. He can be contacted at pmorelli@holdenadvisors.com, or connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ petermorelli/.

Joji Tokunaga

Executive Partner, Managing Director APAC

T h e S u m m i t G r o u p i s p r o u d t o a n n o u n c e t h e a d d i t i o n o f J o j i T o k u n a g a t o o u r t e a m . A s a f o r m e r c l i e n t , w e h a v e e n j o y e d a l o n g a n d s u c c e s s f u l w o r k i n g r e l a t i o n s h i p a n d a r e e x c i t e d h e h a s c h o s e n t o p a r t n e r w i t h u s i n t h i s n e w p h a s e o f h i s c a r e e r

J o j i w a s p r e s i d e n t a n d C E O o f R i c o h N o r t h A m e r i c a ( U . S . a n d C a n a d a ) , a n d m o s t r e c e n t l y h e a d e d A s i a P a c i f i c a n d L a t i n A m e r i c a m a r k e t s ( 3 c o n t i n e n t s a n d 2 3 c o u n t r i e s ) . H e h a s l e d b u s i n e s s t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s , o p e r a t i o n a l t u r n a r o u n d s , m u l t i b i l l i o n - d o l l a r a c q u i s i t i o n s , a n d p o s t - m e r g e r i n t e g r a t i o n s , s e r v i n g a s a c h a n g e a g e n t g l o b a l l y . J o j i c o n s i s t e n t l y p o s i t i o n e d o r g a n i z a t i o n s f o r s t r o n g , s u s t a i n a b l e r e v e n u e a n d p r o f i t g r o w t h , a n d b r o u g h t a s t r a t e g i c v i s i o n t o a l l a r e a s o f a b u s i n e s s . H e l e a d s w i t h a b e l i e f t h a t b u s i n e s s m u s t b e p r o f i t a b l e , p r o f i t m u s t b e s u s t a i n a b l e , a n d t o a c h i e v e b o t h , y o u m u s t h a v e a n e n g a g e d t e a m c o m m i t t e d t o d e l i v e r i n g a n e x c e p t i o n a l c u s t o m e r e x p e r i e n c e .

J o j i i s b a s e d b e t w e e n t h e U S a n d J a p a n a n d w i l l l e a d o u r b u s i n e s s i n t h e A s i a P a c i f i c r e g i o n H e c a n b e c o n t a c t e d a t : j t @ s u m m i t v a l u e . c o m .

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ARPEDIO's simple user interface, the SAMA framework, and the high level of customizability made it extremely easy to implement. The implementation has improved our understanding of our clients and focused our efforts in the areas where we can make the biggest impact

- Denise Juliano, Group VP of Life Sciences, Premier Inc.

JANSSEN: FUELING SAM EXCELLENCE THROUGH LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

By Mandie Kaminski Director, Account Management Leadership & Development Janssen

Relevance, mattering more to what matters most , and growing with your most important and strategic customers requires an innovative and agile approach to SAM talent development. Effective collaboration, creating value, and being regarded as a trusted advisor will require that organizations continually evaluate and adapt how they develop SAM talent, enable crossfunction account teamwork, equip their leaders to sponsor and coach, and embed and sustain organization-wide change.

Recognizing the implications of these dynamic realities and rising complexities of the healthcare ecosystem, Janssen identified the need and opportunity to deepen SAM capabilities and establish a more holistic approach to account management across North America by investing in and committing to an enterprise-wide SAM Learning and Development center of excellence (COE), known as JAMx.

The imperative was clear: design and deploy innovative and integrated learning strategies and approaches to equip Janssen’s SAMs to:

• Distinguish organizational and people account management capabilities that accelerate the go-to-market strategy.

• Differentiate the customer experience to drive growth and access in a highly regulated, value-based healthcare ecosystem.

• Accelerate and deepen SAM’s enterprise-wide strategic account management mindset and capabilities.

The house that JAMx built

Leveraging the diverse perspectives and expertise of consultants and internal leadership, Janssen implemented a range of initiatives and practices to help enhance Janssen’s strategic account management capabilities.

The company’s center of excellence — JAMx — is a critical success factor and accelerator of SAM effectiveness.

Janssen made the strategic decision to establish a lean and agile L&D COE with deep expertise in account management, organizational behavior, leadership, project management and instructional design, to systemically enable, activate, and sustain SAM excellence by focusing on five key pillars.

• Process: Customer engagement framework — a Janssenwide process that guides a common yet distinguishing approach to engaging customers.

• Competency model: A universal model was launched in 2020 to ensure consistency in competency development across the enterprise. All training content is aligned to these competencies.

• Talent development/capability build: Focus on developing the mindset, critical skills, and processes consistently across the enterprise to facilitate the movement of account management talent.

• SAM leadership and coaching: Specific content targeted at account management leaders to facilitate learning transfer and ensure concepts and skills are applied in the field.

• JAMx strategic consulting: Early-stage collaboration with business partners to provide strategic insights from an account management point of view to inform decisions on deployment models and training design.

Recognizing that one size does not fit all

It turns out that the principles of relevance that we externally benchmark SAMs to are equally important, internally, when it comes to architecting and delivering a highly effective and valuable SAM learning and development program. Understanding the unique and current business realities, complexities, success factors, strategic imperatives, and critical capabilities for each SAM role comes with challenges and opportunities. Creating a world-class SAM-centric learning experience in a highly matrixed organization is a delicate balancing act between having agility, flexibility, and innovation while also ensuring integrity and consistency of the learning experience and objectives.

Delivering the training experience SAMs need and want

The architectural design of the house that JAMx built was influenced by the reality that each individual SAM and SAM team are in different places in their SAM careers and development journeys. JAMx offers diverse development experiences and resources designed for new-to-role SAMs, tenured SAMs,

and

SAM people leaders to:

• Fuel the systemic enablement of new-to-role SAMs through JAMx Foundations.

• Elevate the skills and capabilities of tenured SAMs.

• Equip people leaders to coach SAMs to excellence and drive learning transfer.

• Own their development with on-demand development and microlearning.

• Build and sustain SAM communities of practice with dedicated SAM networking tools.

Fueling systemic enablement of new-role SAMs with JAMx Foundations

A 13-month apprenticed development journey is designed for new-to-role SAMs to help:

• Elevate and distinguish their customer engagements.

• Employ an outside-in approach to insight activation.

• Equip SAMs to effectively lead and influence high-performance teams and strategies.

This learning journey features synchronous and asynchronous content, regular coaching, and community of practice engagements to reinforce learning. JAMx Foundations are two distinct phases — the first focuses on external engagement and the second focuses on building business acumen and teaming skills to better align on the inside. SAMs also complete two capstone events, one at the end of each phase, where competencies and skills are assessed, leveraging rubrics and professional coaches.

Expanding and deepening the systemic enablement of tenured SAMs through JAMx Advanced

The JAMx Advanced curriculum was designed for and with the tenured SAM in mind. Offerings consist of half-day, elective, competency-based development courses, curated and designed to:

• Invest in the growth and development of in-role, tenured SAMs.

• Elevate critical thinking, account management capabilities, and skill sets.

• Differentiate Janssen SAM stakeholder engagement and leadership.

• Advance business acumen, account teaming, and strategic execution.

Course topics range from storytelling and negotiations to executive presence and leadership influence. The JAMx Advanced curriculum has consistently exceeded the highest Metrics That Matter benchmark scores across the board against other organizations and similar L&D programs.

Driving learning transfer and activation SAM excellence — the critical role of SAM leaders

Aside from the SAMs themselves, the SAM leader is the most important person in the organization helping to drive learning transfer and the pull-through of sustainable strategic account management capabilities. SAM frontline leaders are an important extension of our L&D COE. JAMx’s investment in SAM leaders consists of coaching-centric tools and resources such as the Coaching Guide and Videos, Coaching Discussion Guides, and People Leader Orientation Calls — all offered to equip SAM leaders with the critical information and resources to enhance coaching effectiveness and accelerate learning activation.

Fueling Janssen’s account mindset through microlearning experiences

Microlearning has been shown to be five to 10 times more effective than conventional learning techniques, has a higher completion rate, and is proven to boost retention by anywhere from 25% to 60%. The Account Mindset Challenge is an on-demand, competency-based microlearning series designed to deepen and elevate the acumen and capabilities of account managers. The challenge covers 10 topics over 10 months and is a 10-minute monthly investment.

The impact: Build a culture of learning, foster a growth mindset, and have fun! SAMs compete to complete their Account Management Mindset Passport by earning all 10 Account Mindset Challenge stamps and effectively applying key learnings with internal and external customers.

Who said summer camp is just for kids? In 2023, JAMx kicked off the Summer Camp for SAMs focused on strategy and execution to help bridge strategy and execution gaps. Leading and influencing high-performance teams and strategy is a critical strategic account management capability and competency. It turns out that even “big kids” love a good learning adventure and opportunity to unleash their strategic leadership and influence potential.

Keeping Janssen’s SAM community connected

In Q2 of 2022, JAMx launched the JAMx Account Management Hub, a SAM dedicated website that connects Janssen’s account management community to the information, events, people, news, and training impacting and influencing their world.

The JAMx Account Management Hub provides SAMs across Janssen North America with 24/7 access to the following:

• Current account management news, hot topics, events, and trends

• Internal/external links and resources related to account management

• Janssen’s account management Yammer community

• Quarterly account management newsletters: The JAMx Jabber

• Internal and external account management best practice ideas

• Account manager and account team spotlight stories

• Account management specific learning and development opportunities

Making a difference: the organizational impact of JAMx

Program growth: The organizational and business impact of JAMx programming has been significant. To begin, participation and enrollment has quintupled in the three years since its inception. In 2023, new enrollments in JAMx Foundations alone will grow 160% over 2022. This explosive growth is being driven by an increase in perceived value and business relevance of the SAM role due in large part to JAMx’s programs that have helped to distinguish and elevate customer engagement.

Talent development and expansion: Participants and graduates of the JAMx curriculum are twice as likely to be considered for and hired for more advanced strategic account management roles across the organization. Among JAMx graduates and advisors, 25% have moved to a different therapeutic account management role or have been promoted to Janssen’s strategic customer group in an enterprise-wide account management role. Hiring managers across the enterprise continue to share the difference they see in how JAMx graduates articulate and differentiate their skills, experience, and business impact throughout the interview process.

Field directors, brand teams, and national sales directors from across the enterprise have shared the positive impact JAMx programming is having on the strategic thinking, executive presence, and executive communication capabilities of their SAMs. Additionally, the enterprise continues to validate the importance and value of the SAM through its investment in and expansion of SAM roles across the organization.

internal and external stakeholders.

Organizational impact (Janssen and Johnson & Johnson): The Phase 2 Third Box Business Case Capstone has been instrumental in helping account managers strategically articulate and position voice of customer and innovation opportunities for Janssen and key customer organizations. SAMs continue to challenge customer organizations and Janssen alike to rethink strategic partnerships, co-innovation, and “business as usual.”

Making a difference for healthcare impact: SAMs have embraced a “play big or go home” approach to strategic account management. More than 100 account managers have served up compelling cases and business asks to key internal stakeholders at Janssen that have had local, regional, and national impact on healthcare priorities such as health equity (where programs were developed to address the disparity in prostate cancer early detection), DE&I (where a solution was brought to health systems to assist them in recruiting diverse talent), transitions of care, supply chain, innovative contracting, patient engagement, limb salvage, patient engagement, and patient experience, to name a few.

The best views come after the hardest climb

The JAMx team continues to lead, engage, create, and facilitate programs and partnerships anchored in authenticity, relevance, and actionability. This continues to accelerate the speed to trust and our organizational capabilities to shift from intelligence to relevance with strategic customers throughout a complex and sophisticated healthcare ecosystem.

Where the rubber

meets the

road: the impact of JAMx Capabilities impact: JAMx graduates continue to share how JAMx capstone experiences have been instrumental in helping expand and deepen their executive presence, strategic business acumen, influence without formal authority, and, ultimately, their success in leading high-performance teams and activating account strategy. JAMx has helped Janssen SAMs expand, deepen, and effectively leverage critical skill sets and capabilities to be seen as trusted advisors with both

The JAMx curriculum has been an influential catalyst for the continued evolution of Janssen’s mindset, skill sets, capabilities, and cultural norms relative to account management. The JAMx team continues to be instrumental connectors and champions in helping to expand and deepen the account management capabilities at Janssen, to evolve account management beyond the role to seeing account management as an organizational strategy. n

Mandie Kaminski is the Director, Account Management Leadership & Development, at Janssen, where she is responsible for the shaping, leading, and implementation of Janssen’s enterprise-wide key account management development programs and platform. Connect with her on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/mandie-kaminski-83364b39/

MEDTRONIC’S INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO VALUE CO-CREATION

By Max Walker Director, Strategic Account Management – EMEA Medtronic

Almost all industries have had to pivot in the face of a post-Covid era, increasing geopolitical uncertainty, and supply chain disruptions. Developing novel innovation approaches was central to Medtronic’s growth strategy against this challenging external landscape. Healthcare around the world continues to struggle with major, almost insuperable, challenges: to deliver better patient care and, at the same time, lower cost with the same or less resources to a growing (and aging) population. Doing so within a post-pandemic environment added further pressure from increasing backlogs of patients waiting to receive elective care that was constrained during the height of the pandemic.

Medtronic realized this fundamental healthcare mission — to deliver better care at a lower cost — could not be solved by one organization alone and required collaboration across the ecosystem to co-innovate and deliver relevant and sustainable solutions.

Medtronic also recognized that continuing to engage strategic customers in traditional ways (with a product/therapy sales approach) and expecting a transformational result simply wasn’t a recipe for success. The team set out to consider innovative, differentiating ways to create value with customers and their customers (patients) by applying processes and skills acquired from SAMA’s Certified Strategic

Account Manager (CSAM) program and Medtronic’s own SAM leadership program.

Three customer co-creation stories are featured below, demonstrating how Medtronic took a bold, structured, and innovative approach to engaging strategic accounts in solving three different customer problems. Importantly, in all stories:

• A structured co-creation approach had never been applied before, to address these previously unresolved customer problems.

• New customer engagement strategies were developed to be replicable and scalable to co-innovate solutions addressing complex healthcare problems with other clients in the future.

Innovative value-based care business model in Italy

What was the opportunity? Medtronic enabled a large Italian hospital to shift purchasing cost pressure by co-designing a novel outcome-based business model and delivering better patient outcomes.

The Italian hospital client had previously been served through conventional volume/ price contracting. This approach had reached its limit on how, together with the customer, Medtronic could cost-effectively deliver transformational care to patients.

The SAM and cross-business account team led a multidisciplinary approach both internally within Medtronic and externally with the customer’s key stakeholders:

• With the customer: Insight gathering through Third Box Thinking™ and value-chain analysis, involving key stakeholders, identified the opportunity to alleviate cost pressure by co-designing a novel outcome-based business model while simultaneously delivering measurably better patient outcomes. The SAM developed the value proposition and secured CEO approval for moving ahead.

• Within Medtronic: The SAM aligned stakeholders across several departments (Health Economics, Policy, & Reimbursement; Government Affairs; Finance; and our business units) to construct a holistic growth strategy and consider how to differentiate ourselves from the competition. In the current conventional Italian hospital purchasing system, outcome-based business models are rare, and this was the first of its kind to be considered across multiple therapies. Change management was needed across many stakeholders. Technical challenges of how to measure outcomes with robust data using innovative digital technology presented themselves, and internal senior Medtronic leaders needed convincing of the rationale to assume greater risk in an innovative outcomebased business model. Furthermore, a dedicated legal framework was required, and the impact of potential payouts had to be aligned with European pricing policy.

A series of structured meetings was essential to gather information and co-design a new business model, develop a way of measuring outcomes, and create an invoicing approach

based on value. These meetings involved customer stakeholders (C-suite, chief medical officers, purchasing, and cardiology heads of department) and an array of Medtronic stakeholders.

The vision required significant change from standard commercial models and a willingness to accept higher risk by Medtronic’s business unit and SAM leadership. Clear financial modeling showing the growth available through the offer of an outcome-based model was key, alongside quantifying the likely customer impact using their metrics.

Medtronic deployed a new hospital clinical service that enables quality data collection (using digital technology), which delivers accurate and transparent measurement of customer outcome. In this case, the customer shifted the purchasing cost pressure to a new model reliant upon outcomes, and patients are receiving better care. It’s a win for our customers’ customer (patient), the hospital (our customer), and Medtronic.

The Italian story demonstrates the value in jointly exploring new business models, and it has become the first example of a multi-therapy, outcome-based business model for Medtronic. It’s a new commercial model that focuses on the customer’s customers (patients) and moves the healthcare industry from a supply-driven healthcare system to a patient/customer-centered system of value creation.

Patient outcomes have improved with 58% reduction in hospitalization for heart failure, better patient communications via technology, and improved patient experience. The customer has been able to shift purchasing cost pressure and focus on outcomes, thereby enhancing its reputation. The customer also reduced hospital length of stay by 42% through the use of our suite of digital technology.

In parallel, Medtronic identified additional business in the multimillion range, through share gain, while simultaneously delivering better patient care. The approach and resulting new commercial model differentiated Medtronic and moved the needle from a pure negotiation on price to a discussion on clinical patient outcomes. The customer outcomes have become a lighthouse for others in Italy and across Europe.

Delivering step change in cardiovascular care effectiveness in the Netherlands

Through collaboration with new ecosystem players, Medtronic improved patient outcomes and reduced workload at a major Dutch hospital without increasing hospital spend/ budget by employing digital technology (remote patient monitoring and management) and jointly developing a new business

model involving a tripartite (Medtronic, hospital, and insurance companies) approach.

The team at Medtronic already enjoyed a strong and broadbased strategic relationship with key stakeholders at a Dutch customer and had delivered significant value over time. However, a fundamental review of their business model was needed to uncover new ways of creating value through a broader ecosystem approach. The strong relationships had earned the trust for the team to jointly explore novel approaches.

The structured, SAM-led, joint co-creation sessions mapped the customer’s customer needs and value chain, and, more importantly, included new ecosystem partners not traditionally in scope for commercial focus — the health insurance companies. New proprietary digital technology created the realization that a novel approach could deliver better care, at lower cost, with an enhanced patient experience.

By jointly mapping the broader ecosystem using valuechain analysis and Third Box Thinking™, the SAM and account team uncovered possibilities for our novel approach and developed a quantified value proposition to present to the insurance payer system and hospital C-suite stakeholders. Deploying new digital technology also brought the need to identify and engage new customer stakeholders (e.g., CIO and IT leadership).

The move to embrace new ecosystem partners in the sales process and payer model required executive sponsorship inside Medtronic and personal involvement in high-level customer meetings, especially with identified new insurance companies. Legal and finance stakeholders were also key to securing the right approach.

With this novel ecosystem strategy, the team wanted the project to benefit all stakeholders, so outcomes are calculated and reported, including a cost comparison of the new approach versus the previous one. In this case:

• Our hospital customer increased capacity thanks to the application of technology (managing patients remotely).

• The hospital agreed to a lower reimbursement fee from the insurers, who are benefiting by seeing fewer hospitalizations with the better patient care (digital, remote patient management), thereby reducing overall risk exposure.

• The overall system savings across the ecosystems are enabling better care, more capacity, and reduced risk.

This new co-creation business model is projected to deliver between 20% and 30% improved patient outcomes, 25% saving

in hospital technician hours, and over 50% improvement in the number of hospital visits, which, combined, are improving hospital capacity and efficiency while treating patients with better care/outcomes at a lower total cost of care. By innovating with new ecosystem partners and reducing insurance risk exposure, Medtronic validated a new, scalable business model to fund innovation in care, together with health insurance companies.

Strategic co-creation delivering a new world-class neuroscience center

A sizeable investment in a state-of-the-art neuroscience center was a new strategic initiative being taken by a customer, which afforded the opportunity to develop an innovation partnership through a structured co-creation process.

The SAM, in collaboration with her cross-business account team, identified the opportunity for strategic co-creation upon uncovering plans to invest in a new neuroscience building project. Given the multimillion scale of investment required, the SAM took the initiative to propose a structured co-creation process with the customer to accelerate project delivery and identify mutual areas for a potential public-private innovation partnership.

Aligning our customer stakeholders was the easier part. Aligning and securing agreement on the inside of Medtronic was harder and took longer. To avoid losing focus, we implemented a structured co-creation process and framework (see below).

The strategic co-creation approach required C-suite support and involvement from the outset. The customer CEO and senior team attended a co-creation session that involved approximately 15 people from hospital leadership and 15 people from Medtronic. We mirrored key stakeholders to ensure effective ideation and co-creation combined with commitment to outcomes. Hospital stakeholders included the CEO, the director of the neuroscience center, professors of neurology, the hospital’s innovation team, and project leadership for the new neuroscience center of excellence (COE). Medtronic stakeholders included the regional VP, the SAM, core account team members, relevant business unit leaders, the director of hospital solutions (internal consulting and services), the SAM COE lead, and an external facilitator of the structured co-creation process.

The SAM spent much time with her team in developing strong value hypotheses where Medtronic felt they could bring maximum impact and strategic fit. She socialized the significant financial growth opportunity and ROI through the co-creation process with business unit and functional leaders over a three-month timeframe. Her biggest challenge was aligning our global R&D expertise with investment areas our customer desired. Identifying where the customer interest intersected with Medtronic’s own R&D roadmap took time and was instrumental in avoiding overpromising.

The structured co-creation process led to joint agreement on

projects for ongoing implementation across a variety of areas, supported by a joint steering committee (involving C-suite leaders from the customer and Medtronic) that meets regularly to review progress, track results, and approve funding.

The approach demonstrated the value in a disciplined, structured, and planful co-creation framework and tool set. Medtronic is co-developing a center of excellence that utilizes the newest technology and state-of-the-art infrastructure. Joint teams (overseen by the joint steering committee) are working on several areas of development spanning artificial intelligence (AI), data & analytics, and a new innovation lab.

Outcomes have led to shorter development times for the multimillion investment, and customer perception of Medtronic has been raised significantly. This was the first time a supplier engaged with the hospital leadership with a structured approach to co-create and innovate between industry and the public healthcare system. As a result, Medtronic has identified significant, potential new business by earning higher trust and by strengthening our relationships and establishing broader connections across the customer’s operations.

Critical success factors

In all the above stories, application of the following were critical success factors in enabling these co-creation initiatives to advance:

• Stakeholder analysis mapping and influencing strategies were applied both on the inside of Medtronic and across customer stakeholders.

• Face-to-face structured, joint ideation sessions facilitated collaboration among stakeholders.

• Specific, relevant value propositions had to be designed, tested, and validated with key customer stakeholders, especially in the Italian and Dutch examples, where the teams delivered new, innovative procurement (outcome-based) business models and involved new ecosystem partners (insurance companies) in the co-creation process.

• The structured co-creation process required significant planning and validation with all key stakeholders to ensure alignment on the “big fit” areas of strategic co-creation.

• SAMs leading high-performance teams were critical to the above, and aligning with relevant Medtronic marketing resources was also highly beneficial.

• The SAM and team also collaboratively developed:

º Internal, quantified business cases (including success factors, quantified value/outcomes, and risk assessment/risk mitigation strategies).

º Structured “storytelling” to engage and align with internal stakeholders across business units.

º Account strategy and action plans (with joint customer-Medtronic resourcing) to activate and execute each co-creation initiative.

All three approaches come with the added benefit that they are replicable across Medtronic and will lead to transformation in how to engage healthcare customers to deliver better, cost-effective patient care.

Overall, Medtronic achieved a fundamental shift in how to show up with our customers and co-create, which is as important — if not more important — than what to show up with and has enabled innovative and scalable approaches. The Medtronic team is now applying the co-creation strategy with customers internationally to address meaningful opportunities and play a leading role in tackling the prevailing and fundamental healthcare challenges that exist.

Max Walker is the Director of Strategic Account Management, Europe, the Middle East and Africa region at Medtronic. He can be reached at max.walker@medtronic. com, or connect with him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin. com/in/maxwalker1

CREATE A SMART SOLUTION THAT ACCELERATES R&D DISCOVERY

How CAS empowered Dow researchers to analyze large data sets of scientific information to influence value-driven decisions

By Nora Cannon Global Strategic Account Manager CAS

Dow, a global materials science company, has long been known for its innovative and customer-centric approach. CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society and the creator of CAS SciFinder,n has an extensive history of building scientific information solutions that make the scientific discovery process faster and more efficient. In 2022, the two organizations united forces to create a breakthrough solution for the scientists at Dow.

It all started with Dow needing to replace a catalyst for a customer with a compound of similar cost and performance. The search for compounds was cumbersome and timeconsuming, and Dow had been working on the issue for over a year prior to engaging CAS.

After months of collaboration between Dow and CAS, the result was “Smart Search for Dow powered by CAS” — a scientific information solution that revolutionizes the search process for chemicals and materials with specific properties, with a focus on reducing health and safety risks. The solution makes the search process 100 times faster. Now, Dow scientists can search 250,000,000 compounds and reduce them to 12 in minutes based on seven discrete chemical, physical, hazard, and economic criteria. An innovation that would have taken six months to uncover can now be achieved in a few hours.

Below, I will explore the collaboration between CAS and Dow that made this innovation possible, through the lens of strategic account management, notably the role of the strategic account manager (SAM) in the project.

Addressing specific customer problems

With hundreds of millions of known chemical substances, each having unique structure, feature, performance, and environmental impact properties, assessing the most relevant innovation opportunities was a monumental task for Dow researchers. Manual searches required sifting through countless data and using intuition to make complex scientific connections among similar compounds. Some searches produced results that were so cumbersome, they were quickly disqualified.

CAS wanted to empower Dow researchers to analyze large data sets of scientific information efficiently, so they could make effective, value-driven decisions. To tackle this challenge, CAS and Dow collaborated to identify ideal compounds for R&D innovations from worldwide data. The solution — Smart Search for Dow powered by CAS — enables instantaneous search of global data with multivariate optimization to identify ideal candidates. This solution is unique in that it combines the world’s largest scientist-curated

data collection from CAS with an intuitive user interface that speeds discovery for Dow researchers.

Now, even the most complex searches can be done in minutes via specialized technologies that extract a multitude of attributes about a complex compound and its 3D structure with both precision and specificity.

SAM discovery: the opportunity for joint value creation

CAS strategic account managers (SAMs) foster deeper customer relationships aimed at better supporting customer needs. In this case, the CAS SAM worked closely with Dow key contacts and leadership to develop a thorough understanding of Dow’s goals and business needs. CAS incorporated SAMA principles — including holding executive business review discussions to align around objectives, fit, and value propositions — and teams across both organizations connected to ensure the right resources were engaged in developing the joint solution. Through human-centered design processes focused on discovery, analysis, and knowledge-sharing, CAS was able to identify where it might add the most value in solving highimpact scientific challenges for Dow.

Challenges to overcome in developing and executing a solution

CAS’s initial challenge was reimagining an effective client engagement model during a global pandemic. As this evolved, CAS had to assemble the right working teams and understand Dow’s short- and long-term strategic business and

environmental health and safety (EH&S) challenges.

Another key element was integrating the right scientific content and designing an intuitive user interface that would serve Dow’s scientists’ needs. The team worked on achieving alignment across Dow’s cross-functional organization and collaborated with leadership to lean into the value co-creation model for mutual success. A key component of the project was articulating the value of the proposed solution to executives across diverse business teams and scientific functions, and achieving alignment on how to measure success. Finally, collaborating with Dow on global adoption plans across thousands of Dow scientists ensured a farther-reaching solution with a positive impact. Today, a dashboard continues to measure that success.

The SAM influenced key stakeholders to move the project forward

True to SAMA principles, the CAS SAM developed and leveraged a strategic account playbook, a strategic account plan, and organizational mapping while also cultivating relationships across Dow business units and R&D groups to co-develop a solution plan. The SAM then fostered alignment with the CAS Custom Solutions team and CAS leadership before bringing all the key individuals at CAS and Dow together to brainstorm. The goal was to identify and map all relevant stakeholders, influencers, and decision makers across Dow who might benefit and ultimately invest in the enterprise solution. The SAM and the Dow key contact partnered well to build relationships across each other’s organizations.

These efforts were instrumental in driving a shared vision and value proposition. Working from the user level up enabled joint development of meaningful plans for onboarding and training, empowering researchers, and increasing the value of the solution for Dow. The SAM worked internally with several groups, including the CAS marketing team, to develop messaging and materials Dow leadership could use when championing and promoting the solution across their business. SAMA processes to secure buy-in at both organizations, prioritize commitments, scope problems, frame solutions, and continuously focus on mutual needs were driven by the CAS SAM.

How the SAM created internal alignment around the project

First, the SAM researched organizational priorities and

drivers and worked together to map the customer’s organizational impact at the business levels with relevant leaders, influencers, and budget owners of the areas with highest impact potential.

CAS and Dow co-developed and shared information about measured outcomes, proofs of concept, and feasibility studies on the potential solution. The impact of these studies ultimately ensured buy-in from the top down across the Dow enterprise. Throughout the process, the SAM shared relevant information about Dow with internal stakeholders and the working team. She ensured alignment within CAS and secured executive commitment to the mutual objectives, the client engagement model, the proposed solution, and the necessary resources.

After the solution was developed, the SAM pulled together

Innovation pushes the envelope

The Smart Search solution is a force multiplier for Dow R&D by combining CAS’s world-leading content and technological expertise with intuitive new search capabilities.

The Smart Search solution utilizes the CAS technology and content that has empowered researchers worldwide for over 100 years, with innovations tailored specifically for Dow’s research needs. The customized solution includes new filter capabilities that are seamlessly built on top of existing workflows. This elegant design improves the learning and change management curves while providing a powerful new capability that dramatically improves both the speed and efficiency of scientific discovery. Dow has seen strong initial success with Smart Search and is continuing to find new areas to accelerate research.

internal customer success and marketing teams who co-developed messaging and materials with customer technical and communications specialists to reach thousands of users for effective onboarding at Dow. These efforts were successful, with Dow getting full support of the new solution from the top down, and researchers adopting the solution.

Measuring success: how the pie gets divided between customer and supplier

To measure success of the Smart Search solution, CAS and Dow agreed on usage metrics and relevant use cases. Adoption of the solution continues to grow in terms of the number of users, search frequency, and value of new use cases. The parties have an ongoing dialogue to continually improve the solution and have established training processes to increase the solution’s use and effectiveness among Dow researchers. Awareness and enthusiasm about the Smart Search solution continue to spread as it changes the speed of innovation.

Smart Search for Dow powered by CAS allows Dow researchers to search substances by properties, structures, hazard phrases, and commercial availability in order to select the most sustainable materials. With health, safety, and sustainability being top of mind for innovators across industries, the solution may impact the industrial and agricultural chemistry space, materials, drug discovery, and many other industries in the future.

You can find additional information, including visual representations of the solution, as well as testimonials from the team at https://www.cas.org/smart-search-for-dow n

Nora Cannon is the Global Strategic Account Manager at CAS. She can be reached at ncannon@cas.org, or connect with her on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/nora-k-cannon-a60b742/.

The parties have an ongoing dialogue to continually improve the solution and have established training processes to increase the solution’s use and effectiveness among Dow researchers.

WHAT’S IN A NAME? TURNS OUT — EVERYTHING!

By Nic Halverson Editor SAMA

Five years ago — long before they took home SAMA’s 2023 Excellence Award for Outstanding Young Program of the Year — Nashville-based manufacturer of building materials LP Building Solutions, then known as LP Building Products, was at a crossroads. While they enjoyed sizeable market share and brand recognition, they often wondered why they weren’t gaining more traction with their larger accounts. Turns out their name — LP Building Products — reflected more than just what people called them.

“LP was product and price driven,” said Lori McWain, Director of National Accounts. “Our roots as a commodity forest products company led us to operate with a fixed mindset. We sold based on price and availability, not through a mindset of delivering solutions or value co-creation.”

In this commodity-driven environment, internal teams didn’t collaborate as much as they could. “At the time, LP operated in silos, creating communication gaps between sales, production, and other functional areas,” McWain said.

Structurally, LP’s national accounts sales team had a mix of product and geographic focuses, with team members each managing multiple customers. This meant that LP did not have a single point of contact for their largest customers.

However, the wheels were already in motion to solve these issues by creating a strategic account management program, which McWain cited as a critical element of the company’s growth strategy that was introduced in 2018 to transform LP from a commodity-driven mindset to who they are now: a valueadded building solutions company.

“LP changed our company name from LP Building Products to LP Building Solutions in 2018, which has taken us on a journey away from being simply a manufacturer of products to a specialty solutions provider, co-creating value for our customers,” McWain said.

Blueprint for transformation

In late 2017, the company’s Senior Vice President (SVP) of Sales and Marketing began to champion the need to transform LP’s national accounts strategy and relationships. To lead this change, he hired the company’s first Director of National Accounts to build the organization and lead the team on their transformational sales journey. In addition, LP established strong relationships with third-party consultants to assess, train, and coach the team according to SAMA best practices. This included an initial assessment by interviewing key LP cross-functional leaders as well as many of LP’s largest customers.

“This assessment helped define our SAMA journey, leading to a shift in our customer strategy, sales organizational restructuring, and new SAMA training for many of our LP team members,” McWain recalled.

For starters, LP redrew the map and created a focused national accounts team. Instead of having national account managers who oversaw multiple key customers each, they expanded the team and gave each person one strategic account.

Next, they created a unified front by establishing crossfunctional teams, effectively connecting sales, business

Outstanding Young Program of the Year continues to build upon success with SAM framework

development, marketing, the supply chain, and customer service to support their largest customers.

“The SAM program has heavily influenced our five-year sales strategy. It is critical to our approach as we focus on what is needed to grow the business,” McWain said. “Instituting SAM has created a cultural shift throughout our sales business, including adjusting LP’s approach to staffing and talent acquisition, training, retention, and career pathing.”

Key components of LP’s SAM program

Executive sponsorship: Like many flourishing SAM programs, LP shares a similar hallmark of success — executive sponsorship.

“Executive sponsorship is critical to the success of the SAM program. Having executive support is fundamental in driving strategy and culture, and ultimately providing resources to support continued growth,” McWain said. “Gaining executive sponsorship requires a consistent cadence of communication around results and an intentional effort in building executive relationships between LP and our strategic customers.”

When LP’s SVP of Sales and Marketing presented the shift in the company’s sales strategy to their Board of Directors, the new, customer-centric approach was positioned as key to growth — implementing a SAM structure and planning process aligned with the long-range business objectives of LP’s partners.

Organizational structure: Internal alignment is also critical to success. LP aligned their structure to meet the needs of their most important customers, driving mutual growth around common strategic opportunities. Two national account directors now oversee teams of cross-functional members to meet the needs of their largest accounts.

“Aligning priorities across all internal stakeholders and establishing metrics to support overall customer growth objectives is key,” said McWain. “This includes establishing joint business plans and goals, and then rewarding customers

and team members with compensation such as rebates and bonuses that reinforces strategy-driven performance.”

Business Development Managers (BDMs): Newly created regional account managers penetrate locally and extend national agreements to the regional level. These BDMs align with the growth strategy for each strategic account in their region and collaborate between the strategic national account manager (account vision and strategy) and the territory sales manager (execution and tactics).

Dedicated account-based marketing: This support includes custom marketing managers, plans, and resources that create targeted marketing for LP’s most essential customers.

“Successful selling has only been possible through a focused co-creation strategy with our customers,” said McWain. “We are no longer selling to our customers, but instead are working with them to identify their key challenges and then bring solutions to help them transform the market using LP solutions.”

Cross-functional teams: Core and extended cross-functional teams were assigned to support each strategic account, including the creation of additional account-specific roles in customer service, technical support, analytics, and programming support.

“As we have grown in our SAM capability, we have recognized the value and need of cross-functional participation across our accounts,” McWain said. “Focused sales are great, but the only way to get to true account management is a full cross-functional approach.”

Process: LP’s creation of best practices centers around becoming more strategic to their most important customers and is based on principles and practices from inside the SAMA community.

“Cultural and behavioral change is much more difficult yet absolutely required for sustainable growth,” said McWain. “If strategy is set by executive leadership but does not get full support and buy-in throughout the organization, then it is worthless. We know and consistently emphasize the need for

ongoing buy-in across the organization to support and elevate the needs of our strategic customers. Building and maintaining a culture of partnership has been critical for our success on our journey toward transformational results.”

Technology: LP began implementing changes in Salesforce that aligned to the customer engagement roadmap. These include heatmap and dashboard capabilities that create a common language around LP’s key customers, as well as visibility and growth opportunities, organized by customer, geography, and product line/solution.

Collaborative account planning: LP facilitated collaborative planning sessions with their most strategic customers to drive co-creation of growth strategies, shifting from a quarterly business review to annual and quarterly joint business planning.

One specific example is a recent meeting where LP hosted five of the key divisions of one of the largest building products distributors in the U.S. to discuss how LP and this customer can grow together in the market. This meeting created several new work streams, and plans are in place to jointly address market challenges in sales, marketing, and logistics.

Training: All of LP’s national account managers have been (or are being) trained through SAMA’s CSAM program, enabling them to fully understand and execute the frameworks of co-creating value, account planning, leading with influence, and coaching on SAM behaviors. The entire field sales team began value engagement training in 2022 and continues to do so as an integral part of LP’s onboarding and sales training.

Results

As a SAMA Excellence Award winner, LP’s sales journey from transactional to transformational is yet another testament to the power and value of strategic account management. This holds true especially for organizations that have either just launched their SAM program or are laying the groundwork to start their own SAM journey.

LP’s return on investment of SAM practices is undeniable. Their business results are measured both by individual customer growth goals and by their strategic customers’ impact on LP’s overall growth goals and objectives. A few results include:

• Significant revenue growth with their largest customers, which doubled their market share with their strategic customers across targeted product growth metrics.

• Increased digital marketing presence with their largest

customers’ websites, including LP being the top searched siding brand on their largest customer’s website and the most active e-commerce brand on the website of one of their strategic dealers.

• Collective growth and sales with the company’s strategic customers, including expanding their mix to include LP’s premium value-added oriented strand board (OSB) portfolio, known as LP Structural Solutions. LP’s OSB business segment has shifted from 38% of total sales volume being value-added OSB (62% commodity) in 2018 to 48% of total sales volume being a premium value-added product (52% commodity) in 2022.

Advice for other young SAM programs

As LP hits their stride, with success under their belt, McWain has a few words of wisdom for organizations that are just stepping onto the path of strategic account management.

“This is a journey! Do not expect internal and external stakeholders to understand immediately,” she said. “You must invest the time and energy into establishing the value over time. Both patience and courage are critical.”

But above all, collaboration and value co-creation are key.

“Focusing on joint needs will always lead to stronger, more sustainable growth than individualized needs,” McWain said. “Sales cannot do this alone. Cross-functional participation at LP and our customers has unlocked significant growth opportunities and strong partnerships. All levels of the organization need to understand why SAM is important and know how their role contributes to the success of the relationship.”

When there is need for guidance, McWain added that both veteran and newly minted SAM programs can always tap SAMA, the world’s foremost knowledge exchange on strategic account management.

“For what you don’t know how to do, seek out resources from SAMA and SAMA consultants, to help fill in the gaps as you learn your way there,” she said. n

Nic Halverson is Velocity's editor, and he's always looking for new, engaging articles about best practices in strategic account management. Please submit article ideas and pitches to him at halverson@strategicaccounts.org.

AVI-SPL: A MODEL OF EXCELLENCE IN C-SUITE SUPPORT AND ENGAGEMENT

By Erin Belenky Director, Global Strategic Accounts Program AVI-SPL

AVI-SPL’s Global Strategic Accounts Program (GSAP) has seen significant, quantifiable growth since our initiation in 2018. Our GSAP accounts now routinely exceed standard AVI-SPL account growth, often tripling the industry compound annual growth rate (CAGR). This success has come — in no small part — thanks to the understanding and leadership of our executive team, who championed the program from day one. From initiating the program through its maturation, our executive team provided significant stewardship, mentorship, and support to both our program and our customers.

While AVI-SPL benefited from GSAP growth, customers benefited, more so, from the heightened focus and enhanced resources. Providing formal, open channels for check-ins, communications, and problem solving, our executive sponsors serve our most important customers while also channeling voice-of-customer insights back to our business leaders. This dialogue helped AVI-SPL win deals, expand our global operations, and grow wallet share with existing customers. Most importantly, this dialogue shows customers their influence on our business and demonstrates our willingness to be the company they need us to be.

AVI-SPL's strategic account success reflects the clear delineation of responsibility within our GSAP. We defined the roles of our leadership and account teams, and held everyone accountable for their responsibilities to our clients, including:

• Create and build a customer-centric culture to support the strategic account methodology.

• Broaden and elevate client relationships.

• Challenge and coach account plan strategies.

• Eliminate internal barriers and advocate for resource allocation.

• Serve as executive voice of the customer to shape and drive company strategy.

The specific roles of each team member and their relation to the executive team create distinct roles and responsibilities. From

program leadership working to create an environment conducive to ROI creation, to strategic account managers (SAMs) working together with executive sponsors to deepen our relationships, to executive sponsors and the customers working towards their strategic vision — each of these has unique qualities that highlight the different roles our executive sponsors execute.

The executive sponsor team and program leadership

Key to our GSAP approach is reliability and accountability. Our clients are global brands with multinational operations, and standard, repeatable processes are crucial to success. As program leaders, we set a schedule of key checkpoints of value to both our executive sponsors and customers, and hold all SAMs and other program stakeholders accountable for executing each of these.

The programmatic approach to predictable, standardized communications ensures that executive sponsors are consistently engaged and informed. This creates executive sponsors aware of each client’s business, careabouts, challenges, and goals. A schedule of regular check-ins includes quarterly reporting and an annual account plan review with a midyear status check. Consequently, executive leadership anticipates these engagements as part of AVI-SPL’s proactive culture.

As program leaders, it’s our job to ensure these activities are adding value to both the SAM and executive sponsor. Regular communication to review program direction, develop

roadmaps, and validate of potential changes ensures that we receive the value of their knowledge and higher-level insights, so we can quickly course-correct any changes or respond to requests that the executive team needs to make smart business decisions.

Program activities include:

• Quarterly strategic reviews (both virtual and in-person)

• Industry trade shows and associated VIP events

• Marketing-sponsored events in various locales (AVI-SPL VIBE)

• Individual location site visits

• Customer Advisory Board meetings (both virtual and inperson)

Beyond these client contacts, the SAM and executive sponsor are involved in conversations, including:

• Quarterly internal business review

• Account planning

• Coaching: info-gathering sessions with the SAMs

The executive sponsors with their accounts

We set the stage for our relationships through careful matching of executive sponsor, SAM, and client. As leaders, we carefully align personalities and personal values of our executive sponsors and their assigned accounts to drive commitment and prioritization of the sponsor with their accounts. While some of these are obvious, like innovation or environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals, our deep knowledge of account stakeholders and executive sponsors has generated significant relationship value. These distinct, almost personal connections — such as our commitment to clients in northern Minnesota — inspired executive sponsors to proactively reach out to chat, just for fun. And, quite honestly, these conversations mean just as much as business.

Beyond the variety of program-prescribed interactions and communications cadence, our executive sponsors build relationships by enabling the alignment and change that customers desire of AVI-SPL. As digital workplace experts, we’ve been (and continue to be) a rock for customers throughout the last few years. Providing technical expertise, pivoting services, and sourcing products and creative alternative solutions to keep them working has been crucial, as with every client. The ability for customer stakeholders of our strategic accounts to pick up the phone and have reassurance from the very top that they are valued, significant, and a priority has

created very deep relationships. Reaching out to our strategic accounts in 2020, the executive team set the stage for open communication and a team effort to meet the hour-to-hour change of the pandemic. As frustrations around returnto-the-office have persisted, our executive team has commiserated, advised, and brainstormed to successfully maintain customer relationships.

Our leadership believes the program directly supports their roles and provokes engagement from the team with client stakeholders.

“Our industry is transforming rapidly, challenging account teams to comprehensively articulate the company’s current service catalogue, vision for future offerings, and associated win strategies,” states Tim Riek, Executive Vice President of Technology Solutions. “Leveraging the structure of the GSAP to enable executive interaction with potential customers during the sales process is reciprocally beneficial. The end user engagements bring invaluable feedback to our business and ensure AVI-SPL is leaving nothing on the table in positioning its value proposition.”

Executive sponsors also receive significant voice-of-customer insight through our Customer Advisory Board. Providing peer networking and collective problem solving for select client representatives, this board meets four times a year. In this setting, our executive sponsor teams observe the conversations from our customers strategizing their technology, and are able to adapt our organization to be the provider the customer needs.

The executive sponsors and the SAMs

Our SAMs enjoy a unique position with, and access to, the executive leadership team. Far from being yet another person asking for more resources, more time, or more attention, the SAM team comprises mature business leaders. This leads to frank conversations about what’s possible, what’s needed, and what can be done.

Our SAM team meets with the executive sponsor of each account annually to develop an account

Real-world case studies Major global financial institution

Executive sponsors have provided significant value when targeting new clients, even before they’re a member of our strategic accounts program, such as when a global financial firm underwent a request for proposal (RFP) to choose a new global supplier. By leveraging our executive sponsor relationship, we presented a much more unified, cohesive strategy and improved organizational representation. Combining expert-level knowledge of individual products with the total solution the customer sought, we have achieved nearly $30M in global sales in under two years.

“The ability to have a combined, expansive solution view, technical expert, and high-level negotiator able to make binding business agreements at the table all at one time significantly reduced the time to close while greatly improving our organizational reputation,” says Account Manager Steven Mason. “Tim Riek’s (EVP, Technology) thorough understanding of the bank’s goals and continued engagement have made his executive sponsorship immensely more valuable to our success.”

Global defense contractor

We had great success when aligning an executive sponsor’s careabouts to an executive sponsor’s personal careabouts. Army veteran John Murphy, Chief Operating Officer (COO) at AVI-SPL, brings firsthand military experience to his engagement as executive sponsor of a global defense contractor account. His understanding of the defense department and enlisted experience, as well as technical and operational expertise, enables AVISPL to provide a better strategic partnership to our defense clients.

Large defense organization accounts are lucrative, but challenging clients to fully capture. John Murphy uses his veteran status to connect with these clients. John’s involvement confers credibility to our team and instills confidence in the customer, so they can engage with our team with the full weight of our executive sponsor behind us. This credibility kickstarted our relationships, allowing us to cut years from our path to being seen as a strategic partner within their organization.

Additionally, John instills a sense of urgency while working in our individual offices. This helps overcome process challenges and internal hurdles to provide the customer with the best possible experience — once again, gaining confidence and credibility with the customer. This led to AVI-SPL winning a substantially higher percentage of opportunities than we believed we would win in 2022. This past year included five new large experiential spaces projects representing 40% of our overall revenue for the customer for the year. This also earned us a C-level-to-C-level crossdivision recommendation — a huge nonfinancial win.

plan, and then regularly schedules status checks to gauge progress. This cadence enables the executive sponsors to be ready for quarterly reviews with the client, while not being bogged down in the day-to-day management aspects of each account.

The SAM team states that the most important aspect of their executive sponsor relationships is the ability to quickly make an impact when a customer is facing frustration. Quickly connecting to an executive leader, the SAMs don’t waste time explaining a customer’s landscape, challenges, or current project. The executive sponsor’s inherent knowledge of the client, their contacts, and our history with them enables quick, decisive action to immediately save relationships as well as the long-term changes that enable us to be the provider our customer needs us to be.

The impact of AVI-SPL’s global strategic accounts program

Our results of each of these key performance indicators (KPIs) have been significant. From the initial idea, the program has grown to represent nearly one-third of our global revenue and significantly outpaced averages within our company and

the industry at large:

• Customer satisfaction: Accounts in our program report a Net Promoter Score of 92

• Loyalty & expansion: 280% increase in wallet share

• Diversification: 70% increase in the mix of services

• Relationship equity: $176M+ in new business won

We are honored to once again be recognized by the SAMA community in receiving the 2023 Excellence Award for C-suite Support and Engagement for the SAM Program and Strategic Customers. Our program has reached this level thanks to the collaboration, advice, and best-practices sharing of numerous members of the SAMA community. Thank you to our CEO, John Zettel, and program sponsor, Dale Bottcher, as well as the rest of our executive team for their sponsorship of both our program and of our clients. n

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN STRATEGIC ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT: APPLICATIONS, BENEFITS, & RISKS

By Javier Marcos Professor of Strategic Sales Management and Negotiation Cranfield School of Management (UK) Director Key Account Management Forum

Andy Hough

Lecturer, Sales Leadership & Performance

Cranfield School of Management (UK) and Dayle Childs

Senior Lecturer in Sales & Digital Marketing Bournemouth University

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally changing some of the practices of managing strategic customers. Following previous articles on high-performing strategic account managers (SAMs), here we provide an overview of how SAMs can use AI, outlining the benefits and risks.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere now and arguably the next major transformation in business and organizations. It is very likely that in your business, there are ongoing discussions as to whether you should adopt AI in your organization and, second, how to do it. AI tools can help across many areas of the sales and account management function, including data collection and insights, prospecting, customer engagement, intent signals, proposals, coaching, and customer service. Presently, over 100 tools are already available,¹ though in this article we only focus on a few of them.

At the recent Global Sales Science Institute annual conference in Toronto there was a healthy debate about the topic of AI in customer management operations.² Kevin Peesker, President Worldwide Small, Medium, Corporate & Digital of Microsoft, stated how the leading technology firm is deploying 50,000 engineers to AI overall, a subset of which will be focused on generative AI. Why? Because generative AI will transform jobs within organizations and will

often boost performance. McKinsey & Company estimates in their recent special report “The economic potential of generative AI,” that generative AI could contribute the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually, especially in areas such as customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and research and development (R&D).³

We argue that if your organization has yet to start scoping the applications of AI to your customer management operations, it may already be too late. The cycles of major technology breakthroughs are not happening every few years, but every few months. Let’s examine how AI can be used in strategic account management.

Understanding what AI is, and what it’s not

First, allow us to address what AI is and how it is relevant to the SAM function.

Generally speaking, AI refers to a computer’s ability to perform a task conducted by humans. The release of ChatGPT has resulted in AI receiving exponential coverage, but AI was around long before ChatGPT and can be used for much wider purposes. The foundations of generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) are based upon a concept that has existed for decades, known formerly as machine learning, where systems use algorithms to learn and adapt, thus analyzing and drawing inferences from data patterns. The increase in

technological capabilities then resulted in computers being able to solve much more complex problems utilizing “deep learning.” Deep learning utilizes neural networks to gain insights and form solutions.⁴ Figure 1 outlines these three layers of AI.

So why is AI getting so much attention in the sales world? Well, at the corporate level, AI can be used to generate deep insights regarding customers, markets, operations, and products/services. This provides the sales force with up-to-date, cutting-edge information to use within their sales role.

For SAMs, AI also offers multiple opportunities. AI can be used not just to increase performance or efficiency, but to reduce workload — something of increasing importance given current statistics of mental health in customer-facing roles. AI can help to optimize your sales process, predict customer behavior, identify opportunities, and improve forecasting, all of which can help you perform your sales role better. Perhaps equally important, AI can automate repetitive tasks (e.g., meeting notes, emails, other admin responsibilities), reducing the burden of those monotonous tasks and getting you back to doing the things important to you (or perhaps even giving you time to de-stress over a round of golf).

So, the important question on your mind is likely, where do I start? Below we will help you understand where, when, and how you can implement AI into your account management role, as well as some of the risks you need to be cautious of.

Applications of AI in strategic account management

Artificial Intelligence

Any technique that enables computers to mimic human intelligence. It includes machine learning.

Machine Learning

A subset of AI that includes techniques that enable machines to improve at tasks with experience. It includes deep learning

Deep Learning

A subset of machine learning based on neural networks that permit a machine to train itself to perform a task.

In Table 1 on page 49, we offer a list of tasks that SAMs undertake in order to engage with their account and be successful, and then we present the benefits and drawbacks of AI within these tasks.

There are wider applications in the sales process, such as prospecting, which we have not considered here, as they mostly apply to new business sales and not to SAM specifically. AI can be used to enhance the processes of customer profiling. The information contained in profiles is diverse and can range from demographic to behavioral data and insights. With these profiles, AI can help account managers and their organizations improve the process of segmenting key-customer stakeholders and

FIGURE 1. THE LAYERS OF AI (MICROSOFT 2023)⁴

evaluate future business opportunities from these accounts. For instance, the company Humantic AI profiles customers to help judge those who may be early adopters, by analyzing past wins/losses and other types of data. Additionally, the company AI Bees expands on the buyer profiles identified in the book “The Challenger Customer,”⁵ giving the SAM critical insight into key stakeholder behaviors, i.e., blockers vs. gate keepers vs. economic buyers.

Turning to account management, a promising AI application is the opportunity to provide new and enhanced forms of personalized account engagement. Having profiled stakeholders is of vital importance when understanding how to personalize content to build trust, improve engagement, and improve individual experiences. The use of AI tools such as

PathFactory can engage each buyer type and stakeholder with content that enhances the experience and creates momentum in the buyer journey.

Another established application of AI is forecasting and predictive analytics. One of the biggest challenges that SAMs encounter when creating their forecasts is to estimate the proportion of deals in their pipelines that will never convert. Additionally, if the account is global in nature and/or multi-product or highly dynamic, accurate forecasting across multiple local account managers and products is a dark art. For their book “The JOLT Effect,” Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna conducted research using AI to discover that 40%-60% of deals today end up stalled in “no decision.”⁶

One of the main benefits of using AI for forecasting

TABLE 1. SUMMARY OF APPLICATIONS OF AI IN ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

Application Benefits Drawbacks

Profiling

AI-based profiling can help create momentum in the buyer journey and individuals’ experience.

Some customers may feel uncomfortable or distrust AI-driven profiling, leading them to avoid engaging with companies that employ such methods.

Personalized account engagement

Forecasting and predictive analytics

Process optimization

Customized content can help build trust, improve engagement, and enhance individuals’ experience.

These analytics can help estimate future revenues from customers as well as the proportion of deals that will never convert.

AI can automate routine tasks, such as data entry, email follow-ups, and appointment scheduling.

AI algorithms may not always accurately understand a user’s preferences or intentions, leading to irrelevant or poorly targeted personalized content.

AI models can struggle to handle unforeseen events or variables that were not present in the training data, e.g., a pandemic.

Integrating AI systems into existing account management processes can be complex and time-consuming. Ensuring seamless integration with existing tools and platforms may present challenges.

Performance analytics

AI-powered analytics can track account management metrics in real time, enabling SAM teams to respond promptly to changes in the market or customer behavior.

Relying solely on AI for sales performance analytics might lead to a lack of human oversight and critical thinking. It’s essential to strike a balance between data-driven insights and human judgment.

Account manager coaching

Pricing optimization

AI can analyze individual account manager performance data and provide personalized feedback and coaching tailored to their strengths and weaknesses.

AI can employ advanced optimization techniques to find the most profitable pricing strategies, factoring in different variables and their interactions.

AI systems may misinterpret certain nuances in supplier interactions with key customers, potentially providing inaccurate or irrelevant coaching advice.

As more businesses adopt AI for pricing, competition may intensify, leading to price wars and potential erosion of profit margins.

Servicing the account

AI can handle a large volume of customer-related queries simultaneously and can consistently deliver the same level of service without being affected by human factors.

AI lacks human emotions and understanding, which can be problematic for handling emotionally charged or sensitive customer interactions or complex inquiries.

revenues is that it can improve the accuracy of predictions by using more data sources, more sophisticated models, and more dynamic updates. AI can integrate data from various sources, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), social media, web analytics, and external market data, to create a holistic and comprehensive view of the sales situation, such as Salesforce’s Einstein AI.

A related area — process optimization — is being redefined by the application of AI in large-volume sales operations. The ability to craft and direct content to your key customers is now enabled by AI. For instance, the company Lavender AI has developed an innovative email coach. This service assists account managers in real time to write better emails faster, thus helping them get more positive response. In B2B sales, companies such as Qvidian, Proposify, and Better Proposals provide solutions to optimize proposal creation. By using prebuilt templates and machine learning algorithms, they automate the process of creating personalized proposals, saving account managers valuable time.

The world of performance analytics, however, is in a state of flux. Peter Kerr, a leading sales management academic in Canada, showed how organizations need to combine both subjective and objective performance measures to better capture salesperson performance.⁷ AI-powered tools such as Chorus can help account teams capture and analyze calls, meetings, and emails to create more visibility, enhance account management processes, and enable behavioral change. This technology helps better combine leading and lagging indicators of performance, which has fundamental implications for resource allocation, quota setting, and compensation.

With better insights into how and why account managers perform differently against different indications (or otherwise), coaching can be provided to better suit the needs of specific account managers. Again, AI has a role in this. For instance, Spiky AI can be used to gain insights, identify areas of improvement, and enhance the effectiveness of customer meetings. Indeed, Dixon and McKenna used such technology to analyze 8,300 sales engagements, build a model, and test it against 2.3 million recorded calls. This would not have been possible without AI tools to analyze the effectiveness of the engagements. Likewise, the in-depth AI sales coaching tool Dialpad can unleash a personal coach “sidekick” for every seller, instantly providing real-time sales recommendations and built-in speech coaching. These functions ensure that reps are armed with an answer at all times and that the conversational cadence has a natural flow.

We all know the substantial, direct impact of price on a company’s profitability, to the point that Warren Buffett claimed:

“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.”

Often, the question for account managers is: How to optimize pricing and ensure that the maximum price increases can be implemented without risking losing customer business? Companies like Bubo AI offer pricing optimization tools, so suppliers can fine-tune their pricing strategies and maximize profit margins by applying targeted pricing tactics.

Strategic account managers invest a significant amount of time in meetings to service their accounts, and in so doing, they coordinate, align, and orchestrate relationships. Most of these are, in theory, linked to the implementation of strategic account plans. We know how challenging seamless implementation of these plans is. Tools like MeetGeek automatically record video meetings and transcribe, summarize, and share key insights from these meetings. This enables more accurate and speedy follow-up of actions facilitating the execution of strategic account plans. Also, large-volume customer operations can be challenging. AI can facilitate providing cost-effective, 24/7 service, ensuring consistency and speedy responses.

Benefits and risks of AI in sales

Looking at the wide-ranging applications of AI outlined above, one could be tempted to focus on its benefits. These are being increasingly realized by companies, but there are also risks we would like to highlight.

The gradual implementation of AI technologies will change some of the dimensions of the roles of strategic account managers. The implementation of AI will enable these roles to improve upon the areas outlined above. However, there are several risks to AI implementation.

Overreliance on AI itself: These technologies are very limited when human judgment and intuition are required to perform a task and obtain an outcome. AI should be seen as a tool to assist sales professionals rather than a complete replacement for human decision-making.

Data bias: AI algorithms are only as good as the data they are trained on. If the training data contains biases or inaccuracies, is limited in scope, or is highly context-specific, the AI

system may produce biased recommendations or predictions. This can have unintended consequences for people and organizations. For instance, incorrect use of performance data may result in unfair treatment of customers or staff, suboptimal allocation of resources, and flawed decisions.⁸

AI systems can also have dysfunctional effects that may not be immediately apparent. For example, automated account management processes driven by AI could result in flawed interactions with customers, particularly if they do not adequately address individual customer needs or preferences. Also, we believe that when AI tools are utilized, unless highly detailed input is used, the results could lead to standardized insights and responses (i.e., everyone is bringing the same thing to the table), which can be problematic and compromise differentiation.

Lack of transparency: Some AI algorithms, such as deep learning neural networks, can be complex and difficult to interpret for non-specialists. This lack of transparency can make it challenging to understand how AI arrives at its decisions. Those leading account management functions may face difficulties in justifying or explaining the rationale behind AI-generated recommendations. Likewise, they may struggle to get buy-in from account managers if they do not trust AI tools.

Privacy and security concerns linked to use of customer data: AI systems in sales often rely on collecting and utilizing large amounts of customer data. The improper handling of sensitive customer information can lead to privacy breaches and security vulnerabilities. Organizations must ensure they have robust security measures in place to protect customer data.

Ethical matters that sales leaders need to consider: AI systems in sales must adhere to ethical guidelines to avoid unethical practices or manipulation. For instance, using AI to

manipulate customers’ emotions or preferences in a deceptive manner could harm customer trust and brand reputation. AI-enabled customer management tools very rarely consider the emotional state of the person interacting with them. Accordingly, the AI tool cannot appropriately adapt itself.

Overall, the advantages of AI technologies can be constrained by some of its limitations. In particular, the “approaches that work” in strategic sales and account management are contextspecific, and, thus, require laser focus and precision — characteristics that some AI technologies are currently lacking.

AI in strategic account management: ’for’ and ‘against’ considerations

Professor Ethan Mollick, the author of “One Useful Thing,” the useful Substack that translates his academic research on AI and business into practical learnings,⁹ claims that “general purpose technologies are these rare events like steam power, the computer, or electrification, or maybe the internet, where a new technology comes along that touches everything.”

We believe that AI will touch, but not change, everything. Key account managers will specialize wherever AI is worse. They will use technologies to better discern the customer relationships that matter, and then devise specific plans to cocreate customer value over the long term. They will very likely use automated profiling tools like Crystal to better understand their key contacts, and then target their approach and run more effective meetings and client interactions. Key account managers will continue to be the knowledge brokers that can solve complex and unique problems. AI follows rules and patterns and may lack intuition.

The emergence of AI is an accelerant poured onto the fire of the “internet of everything,” simulating humanity and offering

AI should be seen as a tool to assist sales professionals rather than a complete replacement for human decision-making.

an alternative to people’s traditional involvement in tasks. The futurist Gerd Leonhard questions if we are ready for such exponential change. He argues that business as usual is dead, and exponential technological change has created potential equality in business excellence. Technological advancement has left only one space for innovation in strategic account management: we, the strategic account managers. Using technology will liberate time and help focus in enhancing the experience SAMs deliver to their accounts. That will become a source of competitive advantage.

Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York and author of “The Gutenberg Parenthesis,” evangelizes for the unstoppable rise of the internet and AI. The book’s title refers to the theory proposed by Lars Ole Sauerberg and Thomas Pettitt (University of Southern Denmark) that the internet is eclipsing the print era. The print era that began in 1455 with the first edition of the Bible was an interruption to knowledge creation and transfer. For thousands of years prior, information was created and shared orally, and the internet, its technological advances, and AI are returning humankind to that practice. Practically, AI will accelerate the ability of machines to communicate as humans and remove people from particular processes, including those undertaken by salespeople today.

The invention of the printing press led to mass literacy. We wonder whether AI will lead to a “mass” of customer centricity and customer value creation. A key debate in AI is the potential impact on job displacement. Our view is that AI will not replace the SAM. Rather, the SAM who has knowledge and command of AI will replace the SAM who doesn’t. n

NOTES. We do not endorse or recommend any of the service providers mentioned in this article. We are just using them as examples of AI applications and potential benefits.

In addition to our own research and that of others which is cited at the end of this article, we have, given the nature of this article, used ChatGPT to provide some information about the benefits and risks of using AI, which we verified and confirmed for accuracy and validity.

1 T he Best AI Sales Software in 2023. (n.d.). https://www.coldiq.com/ ai-sales-tools

2 Peterson, R. M., Rangarajan, D., Dover, H. & Gordon, C. (2023). Artificial Intelligence Tsunami Hits Sales. Global Sales Science Institute, Toronto 7-10 June 2023.

3 Chui, M., Hazan, E., Roberts, R., Singla, A., Smaje, K., Sukharevsky, A., Yee, L., & Zemmel, R. (2023, June 14). The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/ourinsights/the-economic-potential-of-generative-ai-the-next-productivity-frontier#introduction.

4 Deep Learning vs. Machine Learning in Azure Machine Learning. (2023, July 12). Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ azure/machine-learning/concept-deep-learning-vs-machinelearning?view=azureml-api-2.

5 Toman, N., Spenner, P., Dixon, M., & Adamson, B. (2015). The challenger customer: Selling to the hidden influencer who can multiply your results . Portfolio.

6 Dixon, M., & McKenna, T. (2022). The JOLT effect: How high performers overcome customer indecision . Portfolio/Penguin.

7 Kerr, P. D., & Marcos-Cuevas, J. (2022). The interplay between objective and subjective measures of salesperson performance: towards an integrated approach. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management 42(3), 225-242.

8 Franco-Santos, M., & Otley, D. (2018). Reviewing and theorizing the unintended consequences of performance management systems. International Journal of Management Reviews 20(3), 696-730.

9 W harton Professor Ethan Mollick on the Urgency of Getting in Front of AI. (2023, June 29). Microsoft WorkLab podcast. https:// www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/podcast/wharton-professorethan-mollick-on-the-urgency-of-getting-in-front-of-ai

Javier Marcos is Professor of Strategic Sales Management and Negotiation at Cranfield School of Management and the Director of the KAM Forum. He can be reached at Javier.marcos-cuevas@ cranfield.ac.uk. Andy Hough is Lecturer in Sales Leadership and Performance and the Founder of the Institute of Sales Professionals. He can be reached at Andrew.Hough@cranfield.ac.uk. Dayle Childs is a Senior Lecturer in Sales & Digital Marketing, Bournemouth University, UK. He can be reached at dchilds@bournemouth.ac.uk.

CALL FO R VELOCITY SUBMISSIONS FOR 2023 AND BEYOND

Why Submit an Article?

Velocity is the official publication of SAMA. It provides a forum for the exchange of information relating to the practice of strategic account management and is the vehicle that enables SAMA members to be the best community of practice.

Thousands of account professionals, SAM managers, and C-level executives at the world’s largest and most forward-thinking companies read Velocity to learn about best practices and next practices from professionals who are facing the same challenges they are.

By having an article published in Velocity, you’ll be recognized as having expertise on the topic, and you’ll elevate your visibility within the community and your own organization. Your organization will benefit by having its name brought to the attention of the wider community as a thought leader.

But you’re not a writer, you say? Not a problem. Your professional knowledge is more important than your writing skills. The SAMA editorial staff can help with grammar, organization, and style. If you can write a business letter, you can author an article.

If your firm has a public relations, marketing, or communications department, they may be able to help you document your knowledge and experience. Do make sure, though, that you provide them with in-depth information and that you review their documentation of your knowledge and experience for accuracy and to ensure it meets the article requirements below.

Case Studies

Case studies are particularly welcomed, answering the questions and following the format of:

• what was the issue;

• what were the steps taken to address the issue; what resulted for the SAM, the SAM’s

organization, and that of the SAM’s clients?

Article Requirements

Articles must be directly applicable to strategic account management (not just sales). It helps to keep in mind that SAMA’s audience consists of those who work in complex, highly matrixed organizations and focus on building strong and mutually beneficial relationships with a company’s most important customers and partners.

Articles must avoid directly promoting a product or service.

Velocity articles range between 2500 and 3500 words, covering three to five pages. These ranges are approximate; somewhat over or under these word counts is fine if justified by the content.

Articles from consultants and academics are welcome, but bringing aboard a practitioner co-author will get you to the top of the pile. If that’s not possible, please consider adding concrete, real-life examples from your work with clients.

Graphics that aid in understanding an article are also welcomed. In addition, please consider contributing original research in graphic form to Velocity’s Data Watch column.

If you’ll be working with graphic designers or printers, have them contact halverson@ strategicaccounts.org for the more technical requirements for graphics.

Who We Want To Hear From

✓ SAMs and sales executives, managers, and account managers at all levels

✓ Procurement, strategic sourcing, and supplier relationship management executives

✓ Independent consultants and academics working with strategic account organizations. Articles co-authored by a consultant and a practitioner, or an academic and a practitioner, lend credibility to theory.

Key Subject Areas

While authors may choose a topic most relevant to their own experience, some of the topics most relevant at this time are:

• Organizing and running the SAM program central office

• Going deep: uncovering strategic information from and about the customer

• Leveraging technology, data, and/or analytics to change the way you drive significant revenue with your customer, working internally and/or collaborating externally

• Implementing innovation

• Deploying disruption

• Quantifying and validating customer value in a case that resulted in a valuebased price solution or that prevented losing a deal and/or the customer

Elements of a Successful Submission

An article doesn’t need to contain ALL of the following, but the more boxes it checks off, the higher priority it will be given.

✓ Practitioner author or co-author

✓ If written by a consultant or academic, must incorporate practitioner point of view

✓ Real, concrete business examples that exemplify the concepts discussed in the article

✓ Hard data

✓ Innovative concepts/“Next practices”

✓ Human element

How To Submit

If you already have a white paper, case study, or article ready to go, send it to Velocity associate editor Nic Halverson at halverson@strategicaccounts.org. You will be notified that your article has been received and is under review. If you just have an idea for an article, send a brief description and any supporting materials to halverson@strategicaccounts.org.

C ongratulations

2023 Award Winners

Systematic Enablement of the SAM Program

Innovative Value Co-Creation

C-Suite Support and Engagement for the SAM Program and

Strategic Customers

Outstanding Young Program of the Year (<5 years)

Outstanding Mature Program of the Year (5+ years)