Tug-Of-War…Who’s Winning

If you needed a lawyer to defend you, how well trained and effective would you want your lawyer to be? How much would you be willing to compromise on the lawyer’s ability and track record in an effort to save money?

If you needed surgery, how skilled would you want your doctor to be? Would you settle for less in an effort to save money? Or, would you think it wise to find the best surgeon, pay accordingly, and increase the odds of a positive outcome?

If you owned or managed a business that, on any month, had the potential to either earn thousands of dollars or lose thousands, how well trained and effective would you want your account managers to be? An ineffective sales presentation with inadequate follow up on the part of an account manager is the best hope your competition has for not losing their current customers to your company.

Have you ever thought of the role of an account manager being broken into three distinctive categories, and then compared to the “three legs of a stool?” In that analogy, the first leg could be represented by the number of sales meetings an account manager has, on average, per day; the second leg, the quality of the prospects; and the third, the effectiveness of the sales meeting (an account manager making the case for using your company even though the buyer currently uses one of your competitors) and the subsequent follow up.

When each of these categories is where it should be, the stool will sit straight and be strong. If any one of the three categories is less than it should be, everything changes, leaving the stool unstable. When an account manager is “short” on one or more of the basics, it becomes absolutely predictable that their performance, whatever it is, will fall short of what it could have been.

For example, making great sales presentations to poorly qualified prospects is a flawed approach to maximizing a territory. Or, when an account manager spends almost every hour of every day doing nothing except taking care of their current customers, thus making a minimal number of sales presentations to potential “new tryers”, they are laying the foundation for producing less business in the coming months, not more.

As you look ahead to the rest of this year, would you like the second half to be an improvement over the first half? If so, the odds are we can help. The April class is already filling up…should we add one or more of your account managers to this next class, or possibly the one in May or June?

If you have questions, or need to schedule one or more of your account managers for an upcoming class, give us a call.