Are You Neglecting This Crucial Customer?

For most salespeople, B2B means “business to business”, but the most successful ones take the “2” literally. Simply put, they know that their selling task works in two directions, and they focus just as much on selling internally as externally. A key account manager’s task is no different than that of the ambassador to Botswana, who represents America over there and Botswana over here. Being good at one makes them more effective in the other.

If you are a key account manager, you know how important it is to take very special care of your most important accounts. You know what drives them, how they measure success, and who the key people are. You cultivate business and personal relationships at all levels that your product or service touches, and you take extra special care to ensure that you pay close attention to all the key people who influence your success. But you must never forget that you serve n + 1 accounts, with the 1 being your own employer.

If you think about it, you need to take as good care of your internal customers as you do of your external ones. It’s not just for self-preservation—it actually helps your external accounts as well. The salesperson who knows where to go and what strings to pull to get things done internally for their external customers is worth a lot, especially when customers are competing for scarce resources. For example, one of my clients was an international dairy company which took a portfolio approach to its products, and allocated resources to where they produced the greatest profit or strategic benefit. Invariably, the key account managers who were most adept at selling internally on behalf of their clients were always among the top performers.

In his book Achieve Sales Excellence, Howard Stevens states that “the ability to get things done internally” is one of the key attributes that senior level executives value in their sales contacts. You become more valuable to your customers by being a strong customer advocate, and that value makes you more valuable to your employer as well.

In addition, one of your key roles as a salesperson is to communicate information to your customers that they can’t get anywhere else, and they can’t go on the internet and learn all about the internal workings of your company and figure out how to use it to help them. Only you can.

On the other hand you don’t want to push your customer advocacy too far. While you want to sell internally on behalf of your external customers, you need to balance that against the needs of your internal customer. Squeaky wheels may get the grease, but they also may get replaced if they squeak too much. That’s why it’s important to understand your own company’s business model, so you can take a bigger picture view of how you can develop your external accounts to provide value.

How to improve your ability to sell internally

Stevens says it’s important to develop the following three skills:

• Know your company
• Create your support network
• Communicate your customer’s needs and expectations

I’d like to put my own personal spin on those three tasks.

Know your company. When you are intimately familiar with how your company makes money, and its cost structure and which products or services are most profitable, you can help them by going after the right business. At the same time, knowing your own company’s capabilities protects your external customers because you won’t be making unrealistic promises. You also need to thoroughly understand your company’s values so you can apply them to make on-the-spot, day-to-day decisions about which products to push with customers and which to de-emphasize.

Create your own support network. When your customer has a major problem or an emergency need, can you quickly get to just the right person to help, and will they listen? One of the best ways to learn the decision process is to trace every step that a customer’s order goes through from invoice to delivery and successful implementation and servicing. Who is involved at each step? What do they care about? How are they measured? What concerns and challenges do they have? What do they know and don’t know and need to know to do their jobs easier? What value can you offer them in return?

Communicate your customer’s needs and expectations. I’ve touched on this already in terms of customer advocacy. The surest way to find the right balance and make “B2B” a true 2-way street, is to always be able to answer the SO WHAT? question. What is in it for the company and the internal person you’re talking to, to help the customer? Is it profitable? Does it provide insights that can be used to improve value-added or differentiation?

Finally, these three tasks become even more important in industries that are undergoing significant change, because key account managers are will face an accelerating barrage of new situations, new choices, and new decisions, and those who can sell just as well in both directions can be facilitators, not  bottlenecks, to successful adaptation.