Account management is a business development discipline many companies know they should practice—but few do so with the degree of consistency and intelligence that would behaviorally differentiate them from their competitors. We said in the preceding chapter that you can initiate strategic account planning during the latter stages of opening game when you have targeted prospective customers who have the potential and attractiveness to make good strategic accounts if you can win them. When you make contact with those accounts in early middle game, you should shift your strategic account focus to the kinds of tactical account management activities that help you build your position in the account. You could form an account team, for instance, and develop and implement action plans for extending your network throughout the customer’s organization; establishing the dialogue; demonstrating high interest, responsiveness, caring, and commitment; gathering information on the customer; and telling the customer more about your company and products. You could learn how the customer is wired (which we will discuss later in this chapter) and implement a contact plan for systematically developing the right relationships.
You could do many of the early opening game strategies we discuss in this chapter through an account team responsible for penetrating the account and surfacing viable business opportunities. What we are proposing here is not rocket science, nor is it an original idea, but it can differentiate you behaviorally because few companies do it regularly or well. It’s one of those business development disciplines that most people agree is useful and productive—but few practice because, they argue, they don’t have the time or the resources. It reminds us of the old saying, “I didn’t have time to do it well, but I did have time to do it over.” Except that in business development, when someone else has won the contract, you can’t do it over. In the mid-1980s, we worked for one of the world’s largest engineering firms. We were talking to the head of one of its business units one day about bidding selectively, and he said, “Hell, we’ll chase anything that moves, and if it doesn’t move, we’ll kick it to see if it’ll move, and then we’ll chase it!”
Another business unit in this same company submitted nearly one hundred proposals in a single fiscal year and didn’t win anything. After several days of off-site planning, the company’s president announced the strategy for the new year—submit two hundred proposals! With that sort of thinking, the company could fully expect to double its win rate. It goes without saying that bidding indiscriminately is bidding stupidly. There are better ways to throw money around, and one of them is to be selective about which customers you want to pursue (and later which opportunities to pursue, and which to pass by) and then devote the time, energy, and resources to the most attractive and rewarding customers and opportunities. When you’re not spread so thin, you have time to do things right, including tactical account management during early middle game.⁶