How to use Account-Based Engagement (ABE) for your Key Account success
Account Based-Engagement conveys the integration between marketing & sales to grow future business with Platinum- or Key accounts. It integrates Account-Based Marketing and Account Management Excellence.
It requires a well-thought-out strategy and close cooperation between account management, marketing and other disciplines like service in your company. KtotK introduces its valuable and powerful Account-Based Engagement concept.
Why is ABE so important for your future business with your Key Accounts?
- Growing or defending the Share of Wallet with your Key Accounts is not self-evident.
- The major shift to sustainable solutions requires the right innovations and capabilities.
- Equally important focused engagement with the stakeholders of the Key Accounts.
- Competitors are changing fast, and growing using all new innovations and capabilities.
- Focus on communication of the right message to the right stakeholders becomes a key factor of success.
- Control by account management on all phases of the complex Customer Buying Cycles becomes more critical than ever before.
What is the KtotK approach for this development?
The basis of the concept is the understanding of Customer Buying Cycles (CBC) of the company’s key or platinum accounts. Accounts which represent a substantial part of revenue and probably even more of net profit. These Key accounts deserve an integrated one-to-one marketing and account management approach.
RFQ stands for Request for Quotation, being the document representing the needs of all departments and its stakeholders with the key account. This very often is the moment for suppliers to start the “Sales activities”. Conclusion: too late. Suppliers must be present in all phases of the CBC, but certainly in “The concretize needs” phase.
The CBC is a cycle, which never ends. A cycle with distinctive phases requiring specific marketing and sales performance by the supplier. This is the reason why Marketing and Sales in a Key Accounts Program are invited to work seamlessly together on Account Based Marketing and Account Management Excellence.
The program’s objective is to foster practices, aligned with the account teams and marketing specialists, that can raise the level of the entire team’s performance and its individual members, and position Suppliers for accelerated growth in these tough key accounts, with long and complex buying cycles, and multi-level Decision Making Units.
KtotK’s Account-Based Engagement Program
This signature KtotK program is designed around the Customer Buying Circle and considers every stage of the decision-making process.
Each stage requires a specific focus, which we will concentrate on across the program.
Conclusion:
Marketing and Account Management will face a substantial changes in doing their business with their Key Accounts. Close cooperation between the two disciplines will prove, that growing a profitable business in his changing arena with the key accounts is challenging – but possible.
The road to a successful implementation requires a step-by-step approach. The steps we have defined in our program are shown below.
