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Gem Spotting: Identify Strategic Accounts

Posted on October 4, 2019 - 5:21 am by admin

In the domain of B2B sales, a key account is a veritable “precious gem”. Typically speaking, it is that strategically valuable customer of yours’ who if lost would impact your organization’s profits significantly. Hence, managing that “gem” is crucial. Therefore, it is noteworthy that Strategic/Key Account Management (S/KAM) isn’t just about winning new business from your customers but changing the very complexion of how you do business with those customers. This calls for a robust S/KAM framework with a strong focus of winning and retaining those strategically significant “gems”

Let’s understand the three primary business attributes characterizes a precious gem

The Value Opportunity: All customer does not become large from day one. What is big today started off small at some point in time in the past which is why it’s important to look at growth potential in your key account selection criteria. The business value that the customer offers is co-related with time. Therefore while trying the estimate the value opportunity, some of the areas where account managers would need to do research pertaining to the above are: potential volume of future sales, their expansion into new markets, their profitability from operations, the uniqueness of their product offerings, focus on innovation, etc.

The Relational Attractiveness: Over and above the value opportunity, there are several pointers to determine your interest and investment of resources in a particular account. For example, you may like to consider the ease of doing business with a particular account before investing your resources in them for the longer term. Some of the other factors that you may like to evaluate are: how much of industry’s work do they represent, their budgets for your products/services, customer’s potential volume you can realistically capture, their willingness to collaborate with you, your access to their decision-makers and influencers, the mutual alignment of values and culture and the like.

The Competitive Positioning: What is your positioning in the customer’s mind space as against your competitors, will determine, whether both teams will be able to work well together for the long term or not. For example, a good current position in their mind would mean that you have a good relationship with the customer but more growth of the account is possible, perhaps through cross-selling products/services or by penetrating other divisions. A strong current position would mean that you are well entrenched with the customer and are maximizing the value from and to them. The limited current position would mean that you have been selling to them for some time but have only limited penetration of the account and future growth is unlikely unless conditions change.

Account managers shoulder the responsibility of deepening the existing accounts via the development of new opportunities. Towards the same, they do not have an infinite bandwidth of time to grow and protect their existing accounts. Hence they must make sure that they are applying uniform guidelines in assessing new opportunities when they arise. Those guidelines are determined by these factors: 1. The reality of the value opportunity. 2. The competitive ability. 3. Winnability 4. The worthiness of the win.

GrowthSqapes’ Strategic Account Development framework empowers you to train and develop both the skillset and mindset that is vital for Key Account Management.

This blog has been written by Baalmiki Bhattacharyya, Partner & COO at GrowthSqapes.

What makes organizations effective?

Posted on September 6, 2019 - 6:55 am by admin

What makes organizations effective? Organizational effectiveness is about achieving results. Capabilities are central to an organization’s ability to achieve results. It’s the people who drive the results. Whereas Mission, Vision, and Strategies are identified and formulated to map what the organization should do, it’s the people with their knowledge, skills, attitudes, put through the processes within the organizations’ boundaries, authorities, roles, tasks, their energies and resources that make the recipe for the results.

Great strategies necessarily do not give great results. For people to translate great strategies into unique results, they need unique capabilities.
Given the shifts in the business weather-patterns across the globe, the capabilities that business organizations need the most have evolved. It is still a debate if the manner and means of developing those capabilities have advanced at the same pace. Surveys on this, indicate that the most effective business organizations devote their energies and efforts on building such skills and competencies that help them to sustain their business. These organizations link their learning interventions to business vectors and track business performance.

For example, a firm we were engaged with had formulated a strategy to radically increase their business, by making their company a process-centric organization. Focusing on the key value-adding activities which summed up to the major processes and moving away from the traditional operational structure identified by departments. The strategy sounded great inside the board room, but on the ground it hit hurdles. The new approach that the strategy recommended required numerous capabilities that were new to the people: people had to learn to work in a matrix organization reporting to different bosses for different responsibilities.

Several islands needed to merge, with a heavy exchange of information, collaborative-influence became a pre-requisite as a competency for many managers who were until now only commanding their own ships. These new capability requirements demanded that the majority of people in the company changed the way they worked at least in some way. The strategy did talk about “change” but it was silent about the need to develop the capabilities that would facilitate the change.

Thus, recommending change and embarking upon organizational change, is not only unmanageable but also unachievable without building capabilities. Commonplace data show that today most companies indulge in some level of learning and development to build the skills and competencies of the people. Credible research shows that organizational bosses voice significant challenges about their own capability-building programs. The biggest being the ability to link the learning and development programs to business-vectors to arrive at some matrix to assess the impact of the learning interventions on the business.

On the positive contrary, there are companies who have seen the needle move. These companies experience that sustained capability building by linking learning and development interventions to business-vectors helps them track business performance. These are organizations that have evolved from being impromptu in their training and development approaches to a systemic sustained and scientific approach to capability building.

This is an approach wherein the company looks at its strategy through the lenses of the capabilities required to execute the strategy and achieve the result. It begins with a systemic approach to diagnosing the parts of the system to arrive at the capability gap of the whole system. This ensures that strengths are not concentrated in a few parts warranting a misbalanced organization. That’s what systemic sustained and scientific approach to capability building is, which produces a tangible positive business impact.

GrowthSqapes, through its various capability development interventions, help organizations achieve effectiveness.

This blog has been written by Satyakki Bhattacharjee, Managing Partner at GrowthSqapes.

Great Leadership Capability: 5 Manifestations

Posted on August 2, 2019 - 11:48 am by admin

Leadership in the most layman terms could be called the art of engaging people and motivating them to drive towards the attainment of the common business goal. Leaders play this most crucial role in any organization. They are the torchbearers of the organizational mission, vision, values, and business goals. Think of Steve Jobs and Tim Cook at Apple, Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, Jack Ma at the Alibaba Group or Bill Gates at Microsoft. All these leaders have been at the forefront of the success journeys of the companies they led while also bringing about a business turnaround in troubled times.

Special mention – Vijay Sharma of PayTM India, who changed the way how every level of Indian society transacts financially. Such is the effect of a leader with great leadership capability that s/he can steer an organization towards success. So, what are some of the manifestations of great leadership capability?

Studies and researches world across establishing the following as industry and role agnostic capabilities and competencies that differentiate between great leaders and average leaders, as also, leading organizations and average organizations.

1. Collaboration & Teamwork: Unlike a boss who treats his/her people as subordinates, a leader treats his/her people as a team. This fosters a spirit of inclusion and sharing, thereby encouraging an environment of teamwork and collaboration. When people collaborate as a team, tasks are accomplished in a better, more efficient and timely manner. Apart from this, great leaders provide the environment to bring out the best of everyone by way of sharing ideas and best practices. The key to this is the belief system of the leader.

Remembering Hertzberg’s Theory X and Theory Y, effective leadership for total organizational effectiveness emanates from the on-ground application of Theory Y principles. These leaders are called ‘great’ because at the core of their heart they believe that people fundamentally want to work and deliver results. This generates a climate of positive and productive reciprocity in the teams led by them, thereby heightening the possibilities of business results achievement.

2. Innovation & Creativity: The open and collaborative environment promoted by a great leader ignites and encourages the spirit of innovation and creativity. People are encouraged to think out-of-the-box and innovation are encouraged. People are rewarded for coming up with creative ideas and solutions to problems. This lends the organization a competitive advantage to outperform competition and create a niche for itself.

An important component of capability building for leadership development is encouraging diverse and radical thoughts, opinions and suggestions. Great leaders are effective because their approaches are not tilted towards being either Left-brained or Right-brained. They freely welcome unconventional, unusual, never-tried-before approaches to problem-solving. A message goes out to the people that ‘being different is not judged here’. The effectiveness of leadership capability lies in its Whole-Brained Thinking and Application.

3. Increased Performance & Motivation: Great leaders inspire others to bring out their best and be self-motivated. This not only increases the motivation and enthusiasm levels but also the overall work output. Higher productivity positively impacts self-image and work satisfaction levels and in turn, leads to greater motivation and enthusiasm.

Thus, an incremental cycle is set in motion which leads to a win-win situation both for the organization and the individual. Individuals realize the value and power of being the source of origin for any activity. Being motivated is nothing but wanting to make a move without anybody telling you to do so. People in organizations with effective leadership experience so. This gets so much into the unconscious competence that the manifestation is so natural. People realize it in retrospect only when they are checked on this.

4. Greater Levels Of People Commitment: When people believe in their leader, they are motivated to work towards common business goals. This is a result of the increased commitment levels towards the organizational vision, mission, values, and goals. This increased commitment is a by-product of the psychological contract that is forged between them and the leader. Beyond the semantics, commitment is a behavioral characteristic of the organization at the individual and group level that prevents the organization from being stagnant.

Organizational stagnancy can thus be referred to as how primitive and non-relevant with time, individuals and groups become in the organization in the ways that they think and act. It is a committed leader that makes committed people. An important manifestation of commitment is constant renewal and, renewal in thinking is the antidote for organizational stagnation.

5. Lower Absenteeism & Turnover: In an organization where there is a warm welcome extended to radical and diverse opinions and ideas; where it is celebrated to be unconventional; where the climate is such that one is enthused and excited to reach the workplace.

Has an enjoyable identity at the workplace and can also claim to have friends and relationships there – is an organization where chronic absenteeism is bound to below. This is a place where people come to experience positive emotional energies. A climate created by the leader through his/her managerial style. A Harvard University research by Litwin and Stringer shows a high degree of correlation between organizational climate and business turnover.

The above are the five manifestations of great leadership capabilities in an organization. Clearly, there is no hierarchy of significance within these manifestations. All of these comprehensively constitute leadership capabilities that differentiate between great leaders and average leaders, as also, leading organizations and average organizations.

GrowthSqapes offers a structured approach of inculcating the above capabilities at various leadership levels through a range of organization development and leadership development interventions.

This blog has been written by Namita Singh, Consultant & Project Manager at GrowthSqapes.

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