IDENTIFYING & MANAGING YOUR KEY ACCOUNTS

 WORDS OF WISDOM

In key account management in India, relationship selling plays a large role. Generally, vendor development is an area which is not much stressed on. Five vendors for a single product scenario's are considered to be competitive. Therefore, if you are a new entrant in a segment, the only way to generate inquiries is to be in constant touch and build up the relationship. And let me tell you,without a domestic set-up or without an arrangement via which you can provide instantaneous service, do not make the mistake of setting ship here.

Now we come to the Key a/c funda! Your major customer accounts are your Key accounts and the others are your non-key accounts. Though every salesperson will swear that they give equal attention to all customers, that's not true..and everyone knows it. You have to give your key accounts more attention because although let's say, you do mean it when you say that thing about equal time, there are only 24 hours in a day and as you become a more and more accomplished salesman, situations will come up where your time will be asked for by two/three customers at the same time. As you don't have clones of yourself, you need to give priority to one customer. Which one should that be? No contest..the key a/c customer. If all of them are key a/c, use your relationship experience to predict whose need is more urgent. And you have to make heavyweight relationships with all your key customers. Do you ever wonder why experienced salespeople sell the same thing or search for new jobs with the same background ? Its because of the key customers. Your ultimate goal is to make your customer think of you whenever they require something you are selling, not even the brand, you! So changing to a new job in a different line will mean that your key accounts will not remain key accounts any longer. You have to make different key a/c customers from scratch. What a colossal waste of time and effort!

Say you have been assigned to a new area or you are drawing a sales plan. The first thing to do is to make lists of the potential customers  and existing customers. Rely on data for at least two years. How do you find out the potential key accounts at the earliest in a virgin territory. For every selling of a product, there has to be some similarities. List out all the key account customers in your last area. Make two columns like Common and Different. Fill those up. Say you have customers a,b,c,d and e who were key a.c who had 1,2,3 and 4 common things and 5,6,7,8 uncommon. Among your potential customers find out who satisfies this criteria. You have your key a/c customers. This method can give you 70% accuracy and the 30% inaccuracy is because we are assuming that all customers are static in time. Actually they are not. All of them are changing.. some customers are expanding, some are diversifying, some are going bankrupt. (After comparing you can start by concentrating on those potential key accounts where competition is less). Making new customers is a hell of a easy job then taking your competitor's customers from them.

Take these factors into consideration too and you'll have a reasonably accurate list with you.You can start planning only when you have this list. This is a logical plan.You want to be illogical, you just take your target and allot it to different customers. Of course, you'll fail here and a  strange thing is that often top management asks you how much are you going to sell in a new area without any market idea. Even if you explain it to them, they don't listen..In such a situation, i just make an illogical plan and at the end put in small type. " This plan has been made as a guideline. only as the market is not known.Changes will be made after proper market study"-something like that.

But you should not just do as I say blindly. Utilize those little grey cells called common sense. I am just giving you the skeleton. You have to put in the flesh yourself because all situations differ from each other. Some a little and some a lot. You also have to deviate from the plan to that extent. Try it out folks!..It's challenging and fun.

That should be enough for today

Till next time friends,

Love

from Bilbo

IN A LIGHTER VEIN

Hello Friends,


This is me, 'pore' ol' Bilbo.
and boy, the pore ol' sun is really beating down in a rage this Indian summer.


As the day is hot, I thought that we will take a break today and continue on, IN A LIGHTER VEIN


We'll start the jokes by a limerick, of which I am very fond of.I like the limerick because it gives you plenty of playing ground for creativity, for wit and sarcasm,and satire as Bill Watterson will know best about.



There was once this beautiful girl named Lude
She was very very creative but was also a prude.
She oozed innovation by the pound
And ideas kept following her around,
But sadly,her creativity bloomed only in the nude.


That's an example of a limerick.To write limericks, you don't have to be Keats and jilted in love (Keats was so tragic in his mid twenties, if he had not died when he did, I cannot imagine what his poetry would have made us do in his 40's...maybe roll on the ground and bawl at the top of our lungs). You need to know the language,a sense of timing and above all, you need to have a SENSE OF HUMOR.(By the way, a sense of humor can be helpful in sales & marketing too).I wonder if...


Have you heard bout this bar maid called Prim
Whose complexion was all roses and cream,
When asked how, one day 
She said" Why not, pray?"
"I always(hic!) fill me beer mug to the brim"


I came across this vocabulary important game yesterday and thought I'd post it here, so that we can avoid being dull (All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy). Enjoy 


WORDS WORTH




Play more free games at Play & Forget

THE PARETO PRINCIPLE CUSTOMIZED

You must have heard of the Paretto Principle (also known as the 80/20 law). Rubbish? That is right. I do not remember the exact words but I am darn SURE that I had made a similar comment when I was first discussing this principle with a live person (not a book). What is this principle anyway and what’s it doing here within a discourse of sales & marketing of capital equipment? The principle states that 80% of your input is responsible for 20% of your output and the balance 20% of your input brings about the other 80% of your output. And let me also tell you ..IT WORKS with approximations of-course.

If  taken into selling, the principle will state that 20% of your business comes from 80% of your customers and the balance 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. This is valid principle everywhere but when you are selling high value equipment, the South East Asian Market is just a little different.

• ·         10% of your customers can bring you 0-20% of your business revenue.
• ·         30% of your customers will bring you 80%-60% of your sales output.
• ·         60% of your customers will bring you 20% of your sales revenue.

This is one of the main differences that at any time you will always have a joker (or two jokers; God forbid). What does the joker do? The Joker is something you can never rely on until you get the Purchase Order. Nevertheless, why? You will ask. Is he a sadist? Does he get pleasure from seeing you as a victim of tensile and compressive forces? That’s not it friends? A Joker is someone to whom a business commitment means nothing. He is so whimsical that he can take an approach at 180 degree to the original at the last minute. For the joker, money counts,period.

I don't say that the joker can stop your orders. If you have been true to the marketing principles and if your offer is suitable, you can bring him around, but your target date is already gone. So, how do you defeat the joker in his own game? You don’t.  The only thing you do is to keep an allowance for him. Never underestimate the joker. He has got enough clout to stop all your orders. Be on good terms with him.

This is how you should think of devoting time when you are fixing up strategy. And, unfortunately in SE Asia, directors’ do not plan as a team. Unless you play as a team and so get them all-in (up to Dy. Manager level). Tell them the strategy. Ask for feedbacks. Do this and you will be shocked. You will realize that you have huge creativity with you.. The fact is that you have failed to tap it. How you tap it is the key here!

Finally, do not ever make heroes of your sub-ordinates or encourage them to be heroes. In Capital Equipment Marketing, heroes are losers . We once more quote an actual general Gen. Patton. Gen.Patton just before his victorious run is supposed to have said to his troops “Remember, no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country, he won it by making the other poor dumb bastard to die for his country”. There are no heroes in a marketing victory. Everyone has to contribute to it. If not, run for your life because you are about to be annihilated. What you are feeling is the eye of the hurricane!

Cheers then folks,

Till the next time

it's BILBO