Key Account Manager: How to focus your efforts on high-value accounts?

Last Friday morning, October 2, a breakfast co-organized by Incenteev, Azalead, and INES CRM took place, with the theme: “How to focus your sales team’s efforts on very high-value accounts?”

Three experts in marketing, sales management, and customer relations shared their secrets to accelerate your B2B sales. Here’s a recap of the conferences.

Key Account Manager: The Challenges and Benefits of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Hervé Paolini, General Manager of Azalead Software, a tool for accelerating sales on target accounts, began this morning’s conferences by explaining a new technique: Account-Based Marketing.

Nowadays, the most used technique in marketing is to combine inbound marketing with email marketing automation, which gradually raises awareness among prospects, generates their interest, educates them, and ultimately aims to convert them.

There are two major limitations to inbound marketing.

The first is that it creates a gap between sales and marketing. On one hand, sales teams complain that marketing doesn’t provide them with enough good prospects; on the other hand, marketing complains that sales teams don’t leverage the generated leads.

The second limitation is illustrated by two figures. 95% of B2B visitors leave a website without leaving their contact details. And 80% of emails sent by marketing are not opened. This means that the number of prospects reached by marketing is low.

The winning combination is outbound marketing, which is more traditional marketing, coupled with ABM. This involves choosing target accounts—that is, the accounts you truly want to acquire—identifying all stakeholders, educating them from both the marketing and key account sales perspectives, to ultimately convert them into customers. ABM is a highly targeted outbound marketing solution. With ABM, you can choose your future clients, concentrate marketing resources to educate and nurture only these accounts, which allows sales efforts to be focused on converting them.

A solution like Azalead allows you to:

• Identify and target high-value accounts
• Engage with these accounts using banner advertisements
• Alert sales representatives when their target accounts are ready to be re-engaged

Specifically, here’s how to implement an ABM strategy:

1. Build your list of target accounts
2. Assign target accounts to your sales representatives
3. Map these target accounts, i.e., identify all relevant stakeholders within an account
4. Engage your target accounts with marketing actions
5. Alert your sales representatives as soon as an account is ready for follow-up
6. Measure progress in your sales pipeline

In summary, ABM is:

• A powerful lever to align your marketing and sales teams
• A sales accelerator
• A perfectly complementary approach to inbound marketing

Account-Based Marketing: Lead Generation, Methods, and Tools

To continue this great morning, Sébastien Henrot, Sales Director at INES CRM, presented tools for generating leads and implementing an ABM strategy.

Nowadays, data has become a strategic asset for increasing sales. Why? Because it offers a new experience to your key accounts. It’s about offering the right service at the right time to sell more.

But how to go digital?

You need to:

• Collect data
• Centralize it in a CRM
• Qualify and enrich it
• Segment it
• Personalize your actions
• Communicate with your prospects
• Retain your prospects

It is necessary to transform your data into intelligence. To start well, you need to make your team aware of the value of the data you will have collected. The exploitation of this data, information sharing, and information updates—all these steps are important for effectively managing and tracking an account.

To effectively transform your data into intelligence, you must first define your personas.

Personas are fictional characters who embody, represent, and summarize the typical profile of one of your segments. A persona is therefore a model reflecting your target consumer.

To define your personas, you need to ask yourself a few questions: What are their needs, motivations, challenges, desires, and fears? You need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
Next, define profiles, create a composite sketch, and score them based on the importance this persona has for you. Then analyze the results.

It is important to prioritize your personas. Not all your personas have the same value.

Implement an ABM strategy based on the personas that will guarantee your success.

Here is an example of a simple segmentation and persona.

Qualify demographic data:

1) Define what your ideal customer looks like: which sector(s)? which revenue range? the number of employees? which country? which city?

2) Value each criterion: for example:

• 0 < Revenue < €500,000 then Revenue = 1 point
• €10M < Revenue < €30M then Revenue = 9 points

3) Who is your ideal contact person: Management? Marketing Director? Sales Director? HR Director? IT Director? …

It is very important to personalize to put humans at the heart of digital. To do this, implement marketing automation (nurturing) campaigns where you will use email marketing, not to broadcast the same message to an entire database, but to deliver a targeted message at the opportune moment within well-thought-out scenarios.

Lead nurturing aims to nurture the relationship based on the prospect’s level of education and progress in the buying cycle until they are ready for the desired conversion.

Implementing a nurturing campaign takes between 9 and 12 weeks. It is very important to carefully consider the scenarios and messages conveyed after each action taken by the prospect.

Once again, it is necessary to implement a Lead Management strategy between your marketing and sales teams so that leads are processed correctly and handed over to sales at the appropriate time.

A CRM, like INES CRM, helps your sales representatives focus on strategic accounts. It allows for measuring all efforts made, whether marketing or sales, and enables the implementation of marketing automation and nurturing campaigns.

Engaging a Key Account Manager: Mission Impossible?

This morning concluded with a presentation by Roland Massenet, President of Incenteev, the leading social application for motivating sales teams and distribution networks, who explained how to engage and motivate your key account managers across the four key sales phases, from opportunity detection to account development.

Phase 1: Opportunity Detection

During this stage, social media must be at the heart of your strategy. LinkedIn is THE social network that allows you to detect good opportunities. Thanks to LinkedIn, you can identify quality contacts. Distribute your content to them in a highly targeted manner. LinkedIn also promotes account networking and allows for building quality relationships with various targeted stakeholders.

How to support your sales representatives on LinkedIn?

1) Organize a challenge on making contact with qualified leads

2) Provide your sales representatives with relevant content to share

3) Supplement efforts with “sponsored content”

4) Work on your sales representatives’ profiles with the marketing department

Phase 2: Proposal Construction

Collaboration is very important in this second phase. Collaborative intelligence gathering is one of the keys to success for a key account manager.

Collaboration will allow for coordinating all project stakeholders. Experts will be involved throughout the proposal construction.

Organizing quizzes will develop each key account manager’s expertise regarding your clients.

How to accelerate communication within the project team?

1. Create a collaborative group on a social platform: Incenteev, WhatsApp, …
2. Challenge participants to share information
3. Engage the project group with physical events, followed by virtual discussions
4. Post meeting minutes directly on the platform

Phase 3: Closing

During this phase, commitment is important. Everyone internally must have the most up-to-date information.

The timing of communications to different stakeholders is decisive. The energy invested in closing is a concrete sign of the teams’ future commitment. The senior manager’s commitment must align with a discourse on values.

How to measure customer engagement in your sales process?

1. Measure customer engagement by analyzing email opens and proposal reads using tools like Sidekick or Tilkee
2. Challenge your sales representatives on customer engagement metrics

Phase 4: Account Development

During this phase, you must remain focused. It is important to continue targeted collaborative intelligence gathering; it helps to nurture customer knowledge. All involved stakeholders must continue to have access to key information. Intimate customer knowledge is the best defense against competition.

How to maintain sales momentum throughout the account lifecycle?

1. Measure the regularity of contacts and milestones
2. Challenge on the proper maintenance of the CRM and account plan
3. Challenge your sales representatives on the metrics
4. Engage, keep the involved project group informed

And disseminate customer knowledge to all management teams in a fun way with quizzes.

For your key account managers to be motivated throughout the sales phases, ensure that the engagement is simple, fun, mobile, and collaborative.

A social platform for engaging your sales network, like Incenteev, will certainly allow you to engage and retain all your sales representatives.

And how do you ensure your sales representatives focus on high-value accounts? Feel free to leave us a comment.