High-Level Selling

Today’s selling can be a complex combination of relationships between buyer and seller linked all the way from the boardroom to the mailroom. With compartmentalized sales teams, cross-functional customer groups and long-term organizational partnering, the buyer-seller interaction has become more complex and potentially more lucrative at the same time. To manage these complexities many sales organizations are turning to national account management programs to enhance what they can offer buying partners.

While such account management programs can differ from company to company, they share certain common traits. Typically, a sales organization, whether it has thousands of salespeople worldwide or merely dozens operating regionally, will utilize a national account marketing strategy to foster and improve relations with a high-potential multilocation account. The purpose is to develop a bond between the two companies that offers the prospect of mutually beneficial long-term results.

By granting a client national account status you are acknowledging that this customer offers significant sales potential and has an interest in centralizing its purchasing and winnowing down its suppliers. Depending on the industry, a national account may also demonstrate complex buying behaviors or other specialized needs. And almost by definition a national account must display a willingness to enter into a long-term alliance that benefits both of your organizations.

The national account relationship also permeates every interaction between two corporations, from the upper-level executives to the front line field sales representatives. Because this relationship is at once so vital and complex, highly placed sales executives called national account managers or NAMS are chosen to plan, develop and manage the entire program. A NAM’s responsibilities include addressing client concerns to ensure that all contract obligations are fulfilled, bringing together and deploying all a company’s resources that can positively impact the account and disseminating strategies to the organization’s salespeople for when they call on the account’s various divisions, departments and locations. To perform these varied tasks a NAM must demonstrate both high-level selling skills and the ability to understand and analyze a client’s key product and profitability goals. The NAM is ultimately responsible for managing the relationship so that both participants achieve their sales, profitability or market share goals for the alliance.

Estimates vary on the recent growth of national account management programs but one clear indicator comes from the increased membership in the National Account Management Association (NAMA). NAMA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and developing these key business partnerships and assisting the national account managers who direct them. In the past year alone NAMA membership has grown 62 percent to over 600, and within five years should surpass the 2,000 mark.

According to Marriott International VP of Business Travel Sales and current NAMA President Mike Pusateri, the increased interest in national account management can be explained by the need for large sales organizations to find value-added solutions in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

“Deregulation and consolidation have brought many industries to a point that I call the ‘rule of three,’ ” Pusateri explains. “Antitrust laws won’t allow for monopolies but they will allow three major competitors to dominate a market. Once an industry gets to this point all the small players have been squeezed out, the differences among actual products are much smaller than ever before and customer support, customer reinvention and value-added services become monumental. A lot of sustainable competitive advantages can be borne out of the reengineering that comes from national account management work, and that’s at least partially why the number of NAM programs has jumped so dramatically.”

At a recent northeast regional NAMA meeting in Stamford, Connecticut, top Xerox sales executives detailed the challenges and successes the copier and document giant has faced with its 135 national and global account programs. The 50 attendees, including senior sales executives from such diverse corporations as 3m, Pepperidge Farm, Dow Chemical and Kaiser Permanante, listened as Howard D. Katzen, VP of Xerox’s Major Account Competency Center, described Xerox’s unique approach to national account management.

At Xerox, Katzen explained, the average NAM has spent 10 years building a relationship with a specific account. With one account, a major manufacturer, the Xerox NAM had established a relationship with the man who later became chairman when both were junior executives. For obvious reasons this long-standing closeness gave the entire Xerox sales organization an access to the client’s upper-level management that competitors could only envy.

Katzen also described the role of the focus executive, a top Xerox official responsible for facilitating what he calls the “executive-to-executive” relationships between Xerox and customer accounts. Much more than cogs in a mini old-boy network, Xerox’s focus executives are expected to understand all of a client’s key business and technical processes so that whenever red tape or other boondoggles threaten the relationship he or she can step in at the executive level and facilitate the solution. To indicate the value Xerox places on the focus executive role Katzen pointed out that even Xerox CEO Paul Allaire has focus executive responsibilities.

Pusateri believes that because sales organizations are restructuring to address the needs of a changing marketplace, more and more companies will follow the example set by Xerox and other pioneers in the national account management movement.

“The percentage of sales dollars being spent on national account management is much greater today than ever before,” he says, “and that’s partially because the salesperson’s role is moving away from the traditional order taker to more of a consultant capacity. When at one time salespeople would bring in management reports to customers on their buying habits, today the focus is on data mining, which analyzes all the customer’s key data to identify trends, understand changing market forces or critique existing patterns. It’s much more strategic and requires analytical skills that were not so important in the order taker days.”

What both Pusateri and Katzen hint at is a term much bandied about in national account management circles: process. Among a NAM’s major responsibilities is taking an exhaustive look at every business function at a prospective national account, creating a detailed description of those processes and then creating a business plan explaining how to break into the account. At Xerox this procedure can take up to 18 months and generally results in a 50-page document. Besides a background in finance and business management, especially at this stage NAMS must be well-versed in strategic planning and negotiation, up-to-date on current technologies and even prepared to do a healthy amount of detective work.

Pusateri believes that understanding process is just as important for front line salespeople as for the NAMS in upper management. “Sales is a process,” he explains, “whether you’re talking about what takes place between a car salesman and a buyer or between two Fortune 500 companies. National account management is a sales process-focused orientation. Most NAMS aren’t merely telling salespeople to go out and sell more. They’re looking at market share, service, strategic selling and finding ways to motivate salespeople on a process level.”

Although not necessarily national account-based, in Pusateri’s eyes General Motors has led the charge into process selling at the front-line level with its approach to selling its Saturn line.

“Saturn is a great example, even at the bottom rung of sales, for focusing on process and not the end sale,” he says. “From what I understand, Saturn compensates its salespeople based on surveys sent to customers after the sale. They want to know ‘How was the selling process from the buyer’s perspective?’ And that’s what they want the salespeople to focus on. NAMS are the same way, only instead of dealing with a one-on-one sale that might turn around in 24 hours, they’re analyzing and improving a sales process that takes up to a year and a half.”

Beyond the high concept of “process,” however, certain indicators exist that point to the success of a national account management program. Depending on the specific account, these indicators may include everything from profit and revenue growth to the growth of a customer’s market share or whether a seller becomes an account’s sole vendor in a certain market.

Unquestionably, as the sales marketplace becomes more complex and increasingly competitive, future sales organizations will have to respond by becoming even more proactive in assessing and addressing customers’ needs. If Xerox and the other NAMA member organizations provide any guide, that future will increasingly rely on national account management programs to navigate the challenges of strategic communication, decentralized decision making and long-term partnering. With any luck some consensus might even emerge on how to define relationship selling once and for all.