Sales and Account Team Behaviours Revealed

John Newton

New 'Inside the Account Managers Head' training programme shows how to drive greater value from suppliers.

State of Flux has today launched a new training programme aimed at helping organisations unlock new levels of value from suppliers by revealing how their sales and account management teams operate.

In order to proactively develop the business-to-business relationship with key and strategic suppliers, supplier managers need to be able to decode the motivations, drivers and methods used by their counterparts (i.e. account manager, the account team members and other players) in the suppliers’ sales organisation.

In this highly interactive two day master class, we reveal how the sales organisation and key account management team operates, in order to neutralise their tactics, develop the business relationship and take the lead in building a customer of choice position.

GETTING THE ACCOUNT TEAM WORKING TO YOUR AGENDA

This subject of sales and account team ‘IQ’ is now more relevant than ever before for procurement, as sales teams become more sophisticated in how they plan, engage and interact with their customers in pre and post contract settings.

Old fashioned ‘hunter-farmer’ models and relationship-centric account management techniques are recognised by sales organisations as no longer sufficient. They are increasingly adopting contemporary account management strategies to create demand and use indirect advocacy-building approaches to extend their reach and influence into their target accounts. Therefore, inside knowledge of the latest account management methods is vital to a supplier relationship manager who wants to engage an account team on a level playing field.

WORKSHOP AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

To build more productive buy-sell relationships, it’s important to get the account manager and the account team working to your agenda. But before you can do that you’ll need to know how to ‘read’ account teams, decode their actions and then engineer the result you want. The over arching aims of this training programme are designed to help you:

• Appreciate the sales perspective on pricing, bundling and margin, using these to influence price and TCO based discussions.
• Manage and facilitate the supplier relationship more proactively, owning the relationship and overseeing the business interactions they have with your stakeholders.
• Use new knowledge of sales account and opportunity management techniques to gather supplier insight that gives you more power.
• Broaden your focus beyond the ‘mechanics’ of a management process to proactively find opportunities to release more supplier value.
• Develop your vendor ‘IQ’ in order to know the account team at a deeper level.
• Engage and influence the account team to build better rapport, surface true intentions and develop the supplier relationship.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

If you would like more information about this training or the other programmes in our curriculum, please contact John Newton (john.newton@stateofflux.co.uk) or call +44 (0)207 842 0600.