Account Based Everything may be a huge topic lately. Most are account focused, they need to grow their relationships, increase penetration and grow revenue. Developing our accounts may be a huge opportunity. There’s huge amounts of knowledge outlining the differences in sales time and price between growing an existing relationship and acquiring net new logos. Growing our existing accounts may be a handily winner!

Intuitively, it is sensible to leverage our current accounts. we all know them, they know us. we will leverage our existing position to grow the connection . we’ve a touch of an “insider” or incumbency advantage with these accounts. To defend our position in these accounts, some even adopt a technique , “Make the pain of change far greater than the pain of staying an equivalent with the incumbent.” A 180 degree reversal of what we attempt to do with new logos.

There are always going to be problems, the customer is, sometimes getting to be dissatisfied and unhappy. There are going to be differences of opinion and a few periodic contention within the relationship.Yet we still are driven to expand the connection.

Incumbency creates a special set of problems with our accounts. The familiarity with one another is, often, a challenge. The customer knows us, knows our products—warts and every one . A competitor is new and different. Yes, they need their own warts and problems, but our customer doesn’t know them; for our customer, it’s all new. We become the bottom of comparison, with the competitor claiming they will do better.

Yes, there’s some level of safety in inertia and why change. Yes, there could also be some switching costs. But our position is modified, we are the target to be displaced.

Alternatively, incumbency may lock our relationships with certain people or functions within the organization. However those people and functions are perceived by others within the organization is additionally how we are perceived.

They are naturally reluctant to possess us running bent the top users selling them more—it adds to ITs workload. Our sponsors in IT don’t want us going out and drumming up more work, challenges, and headaches for them. Yet our competition doesn’t have an equivalent constraint. they’re starting with IT; they begin with the top users, inciting them to vary, a minimum of if they’re doing their jobs correctly.

Even worse, if it’s perceived poorly by the top users, we also are viewed poorly by association. we feature a burden our competitors don’t bear.

From the very inception of our account based relationships, we’d like to be cognizant of the mixed blessings of incumbency. we’d like to create our relationship recognizing these challenges.

We have to be particularly focused on customer experience and managing expectations. there’ll be problems–but generally customers recognize this, they’ll even recognize they’ll be the source of a number of the issues. However, building a culture and process around how we respond and manage those problems is critical. Helping define expectations and therefore the problem management process at the very beginning of the connection is critical to our shared success.

Value realization is probably the very most vital. Regardless how well things could also be going, albeit there’s never a drag that we’ve to repair, if we aren’t producing the results the customer expects which we committed to, the connection are going to be destroyed. Too often, we don’t set the expectations at the inception of the connection and that we don’t follow through to form sure we are delivering to expectation.

From the very beginning, broaden the relationships the maximum amount as you’ll. Recognize over the lifetime of the connection you’ll want to possess wide and deep coverage of the account. Don’t get yourself trapped into only one part of the organization, but from day one seek to create a robust support base across all of the accounts.

Finally, developing a collaborative governance structure is critical to future account development, helping both the account and us keep the connection as “important” and managing the challenges of incumbency.