Every service or product provider wants their client account team to become trusted advisors to their customers. Usually this happens with preexisting relationships or long standing positive face-to-face transactions. Now that everyone’s working remotely, you hope this still might happen over Zoom meetings, but hope is not a strategy!
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You must insure your account team is providing
more insight and clarity than your competitors.
Insight and clarity can only come from providing a different perspective. I always start my client engagements by saying:
“I’ll never know as much about your organization as you do. But what I will do is help build an integrated picture that combines multiple perspectives including how things are connected to help find leverage in your situation just like an MRI functions in a medical diagnostic session.” For a larger view:Eightstep
As an outsider you have a short honeymoon period that allows seamingly basic questions to be asked. This seeking-to-understand position should not be wasted. If done correctly it sets the table for generating new insight based on linking perspectives across silos.
Generating this insight and clarity requires an eight step process:
| 1. Working into the account by doing your homework | Industry Trends Competitive positions Company website information Public strategy Internal interviews Customer interviews |
| 2. Capturing list of desired outcomes | What needs to change? |
| 3. Finding dependencies between these outcomes | Is it a prerequisite or downstream influencer? |
| 4. Surfacing leverage based on how things are connected | Plot based on relative scores |
| 5. Adding desired outcomes to the scope of logical projects | What bundles of changes should make up projects |
| 6. Create business cases for each project | Just answer four simple questions |
| 7. Performing a portfolio analysis against overall budget | Automatically red lines those projects we can’t afford |
| 8. Facilitating a virtual roadmap session | Sliding boxes around until you reach consensus |
Even working remotely through Zoom your account team can facilitate these deliverables and become trusted advisors. Then they will also be positioned to shape demand and supply decisions in favor of your organization.
Our product LeverSource performs these steps much like a digital assistant. It also provides account team management with transparent clarity on how the work is proceeding. The method is designed to be evergreen so that continual strategy refreshes can be performed that create new leverage maps to process.
If you’d like a hard copy brochure please drop me an email at don@leversource.com
For more examples please see our blog: http://www.leversource.com/resources/blog/
Or just visit our website at: http://www.leversource.com
