Last week, Market-Partners Inc. was pleased to once again participate in the annual Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) conference. Attracting more than 600 attendees, this event was entirely focused on thought leadership for Strategic Account Managers and those that support, direct and enable Strategic Account Management Programs.
Our CEO and founder, Martyn Lewis, facilitated a 90-minute workshop with Deborah Honea of AWS. During the talk, Martyn discussed our research and Outside-In™ approaches while Deb shared her extensive experience in designing and successfully deploying strategic and corporate account programs at Fortune 100 companies.
Summary
The workshop opened with Martyn reviewing how and why customers are buying so differently in the modern world. From our interviews with over 3,000 customers, our most critical insight remains how detached the selling and the buying processes have become. Gone are the days where buyers were dependent upon sellers, and with those times, the intimacy that many sales professionals once had with their customers.
Martyn and Market-Partners’ perspective is that the only way to successfully engage in the today’s market is to start with a deep understanding of how your customer buys. Martyn explained our model for decoding the Buying Journey DNA and mapping the end-to-end Customer Buying Journey. Once the Buying Journey is understood, Martyn then showed how businesses can develop their Market Engagement Strategy – an action plan detailing when and how to engage in the Buying Journey, as well as their approach for remaining relevant and providing value to the customer at each stage of the buying process.
In the second half of the presentation, Deb spoke on successfully deploying these approaches across a sales organization, underscoring the need to consider change management in such a transformation. More specifically, she highlighted the importance of leveraging the voice of the customer, ensuring the full involvement of your sales teams, leadership engagement, and the requirements of an enablement model, including reporting, technology, business cadence, and measurement. Deb finished out the workshop with the positive outcomes of embracing such a customer-centric selling approach grounded in the Buying Journey rather than a traditional sales process.
Interested in Learning More?
As a result of the amazing feedback we received, Martyn has scheduled a follow up webinar on June 11th, 9 AM PST. Given a deep understanding of the Customer Buying Journey and the development of the Market Engagement Strategy, this micro-workshop will focus on how your selling approach can be created to align, manage, and drive the Buying Journey.
The webinar will follow our 30-30 format: 30 minutes of content followed by an optional 30 minutes dedicated to questions and discussion. Even if you did not participate at SAMA, this micro-workshop should provide a high-value insight into driving greater sales results, shortening sales cycles, increasing forecast accuracy, and aligning the entire customer facing team to a singular, customer-centric approach.
