Arming Top Sales Executives
with the Expertise to Win

Building a real time Benchmarking Group of Top Peers

Guest Article by: Jim Brown - Adjunct Professor of Marketing, Rutgers University

Where do Strategic Account Management (SAM) executives get critical support when they must bet their career on their results? What if you are being asked to do a task at which you have little previous experience but others in the company (often with no experience) are expecting fantastic results?

Even though SAM organizations are usually highly successful, their initial roll outs are not met with applause by the field sales force (overlapping responsibilities, for example, can be a threat). Often, the executive starting them has a good chance of not being there when they finally are accepted. Many of blind alleys are traveled. This kind of support may not be available at a university. You could benchmark best practices used by other companies and try to emulate them. You could join the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA). You could study the research such as Chally s report sponsored by the Benchmarking Consortium, National Account Benchmarking. It all helps. The problem is, this cannot be accomplished in a short visit. One question leads to another and it will take time and a trust in the relationship to really dig at the issues that are not visible at first.

One successful solution is developing a relationship with fellow SAM executives at non-competing firms. These are sometimes called benchmarking groups. We have had recent experience with two of them. A newly appointed Vice President of Sales at one of the world s largest communications companies was asked to revamp the entire sales force, new structure, new compensation, new sales training, new strategic account organization. This was a daunting task considering he was really an engineer who grew up in the field sales organization with good people skills but no real solid experience in modern methods of growing the top line in a highly competitive industry.

How did he do it? He determined what industries were most successful over the past ten years, what companies led these industries in sales. He asked his clients if they knew these firms and which they considered the most professional. He then called his peers at these firms and told them of his plan to get together with non-competitors one day every two months to talk about specific sales organizational issues. Most of the executives jumped at the chance. It seemed they all had the same issues. They have now been meeting for over five years. They usually put together an agenda of issues at the end of every meeting to discuss when they meet again. They get the benefit of the results of programs in other firms --why some were successful and others failed.

It is highly successful. It keeps their companies ahead of their competition and puts them in a position of experience when talking to fellow executives in their own firms. In other words, it works.

Another group like this is the Global Forum. It was put together by Global Account Executives at IBM and Xerox. This is now a group of nine firms with similar problems of dealing with international clients. They also have been meeting for over five years and again are highly successful.

More information about these groups can be obtained by contacting Jim Brown - Adjunct Professor of Marketing, Rutgers University jjbrutgersedu@aol.com