Marketing to Key Accounts in Europe

7 November 2003—ITSMA Europe's most recent Inner Circle Meeting focused on the hot topic of marketing's role in driving business generation and loyalty within key client and target accounts. Gathering last month in London, services marketers from a range of top IT and consulting firms delved into three specific issues:

• Defining key accounts
• Targeting decision makers
• Developing effective account-based marketing and selling

Here is a brief review of the discussion.

Defining Key Accounts
The first challenge for marketers is that the sales organisation often owns the definition process for key accounts. Perhaps not surprisingly, this means that decisions often reflect tactical concerns, such as ‘In which accounts do we already know people?’ or ‘For which accounts can we gain access?’

When marketers do get involved, they try to include such factors as usage intensity, current spending, and potential for growth. Client buying approaches are also relevant; marketers review the potential for mega-deals in which clients or prospects have globally centralised buying. Many global accounts remain decentralised and do not buy on this scale, however, so they might not be considered attractive enough to be key accounts.

Marketers will also designate as key accounts those clients with problematic relationships and/or for which the relationships have stagnated. Key account status provides an impetus for greater attention and hopefully increased satisfaction, loyalty, and spending.

Targeting Decision Makers
Most companies use a multidimensional stakeholder map to help target the most important people within key accounts. This approach helps identify the powerful people within an account, their specific issues and priorities, and their perception of the supplier, all of which assists in defining clear priorities for marketing and sales.

Often the suppliers will structure local account teams to mirror the decision makers in the account itself, with offices co-located geographically. The goal is to map to the client’s culture as far as possible.

And despite widespread discussion about C-suite dialogue and relationships, marketers here recognise that the C-level executives actually do not generally make decisions, although they must have an awareness of potential suppliers to make recommendations.

External influencers are similarly important for recommending suppliers, and several suppliers spend at least as much time and effort on these ‘recommenders’ as they do on the decision makers themselves.

Developing Effective Account-Based Marketing and Selling
Many of the leading suppliers in Europe are adopting key account marketing strategies to position their brands within individual accounts over the longer term. The goal is to formally take control of perceptions and build a favourable and sustainable position even if the salespeople with direct relationships in those accounts change year on year. The goal is also to influence and build support with the people who will sign the cheques in those accounts in five years’ time—not just today’s buyers.

Interestingly, rather than sales teams seeing this as an invasion of their account management roles, they often welcome this kind of initiative, seeing it as more relevant than ‘airy fairy marketing that happens up in the stratosphere,’ as one marketer put it.

Marketers at the Inner Circle Meeting universally agreed that value propositions are the most important thing to bring to a relationship sale, but most salespeople don’t have the skills or information to build them effectively. Therefore, marketers are getting more involved in driving research and campaigns around bid situations, even offering tactical skills such as copywriting. Marketers are also getting more involved with individual client intelligence, creating in-depth client profiling down to the key decision maker level.

If there’s one area that all marketers agree could be improved, it’s the way that service delivery people are used in account-based marketing and selling. These are the people the client trusts most, and while they often manage the client satisfaction programme, they have limited involvement in other relationship marketing activities following the sale. Attendees felt that delivery staff could fulfil a ‘trusted advisor’ role, bringing new ideas and suggestions to the account and putting clients in touch with their peers in other companies.

The final debate for marketers on this issue concerned whether account-based marketing techniques should be the remit of the marketing function or whether the marketing team should train others to ensure there is marketing ‘thinking’ employed for each account. Given the resource constraints facing most of us, the latter probably is more realistic. For that reason, we should all begin thinking about how to engender marketing thinking more widely across our organisations in 2004.

—Bev Burgess, info@itsma.com

ITSMA Europe will dig more deeply into key account marketing during the Client-Centric Marketing Course, scheduled for November 17–19 at the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s training facility near Heathrow, London. For more information, visit http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/03ME11E11.htm.

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About ITSMA
ITSMA specializes in helping companies market and sell services and solutions more effectively. As a membership organization, we provide research, consulting, and training to the world's leading technology, communications, and professional services providers to generate increased demand, strengthen customer relationships, and improve brand differentiation. ITSMA is based near Boston, and has offices in London and Tokyo. Learn more at www.itsma.com.