How to protect your good accounts from the competition

With the global recession well into the psyche of everyone now, the activities of competitors has increased ten-fold over the last 12 months. Previously there were attempts to win the account but not serious enough that the account actually opened the door to them. Now the customers are looking at all options in an attempt to improve their situation, particularly lower costs and inventory exposure.

Traditionally, your good accounts are the first places you would take your new products and services. They provide you ready acceptance and honest feedback for your new offerings. You hone your presentations and sharpen your approaches because of the feedback provided by your good accounts. We all knew that your good accounts are the places where you make the greatest financial return for your time invested.

So, it pays to think more deeply about how to protect your good accounts from the competition's approaches. You want to stop them getting in the door so they don’t have the opportunity to entice your customer.

Here are four proven strategies to help you withstand competitive onslaughts.

1. Deepen and broaden your relationships.

To deepen the relationships means that you work at enabling the key people within your good accounts to know you and your company better. Make sure you are connected with all the key players and influencers and not just the ones that are familiar and easy to get access to.

Extend the relationship to include others from your company. If possible, bring a number of the key people in your good accounts into your facility to meet some of your company's other employees. Take your boss, operations manager and customer service people into the account to meet them. The more comfortable they are with your company, the more of your people they know, the less likely they are to seriously consider the enticements of a motivated competitor.

To broaden the relationships means that you make sure that you know more of the key people within your key accounts, and that they know you. Be methodical. Make a list of all the important contact people within a good account. Then carefully evaluate the state of the relationship you have with each of them.

If there are important people who don't know you, fix that quickly. Make sure that you have positive relationships with your key contact's boss, and the boss's boss. Work as high up the hierarchy as possible.

While the depth and breath of your relationship isn't guaranteed protection against your competitors, it goes a long way to assuring that your good account will keep you informed of what is happening, and will probably give you an opportunity to respond to any especially appealing enticements. It's step one in protecting yourself from the competition.

2. Close any open doors.

Your competitors will be looking for ways to gain a foothold in your accounts. They'll search for cracks in the door that they can wedge into greater opportunities. Beat them to the punch by eliminating any opportunities. Carefully examine these issues:

1. Pricing. It is not at all unusual to find that some prices in your good accounts have crept up to the point where they are not nearly as competitive as they may be in other places. Review your prices, and make sure that your margin increases haven't put you in an awkward position. You may have to reduce some prices to prevent a competitor from making you look bad.
2. Problems. There may be some unresolved, lingering problems in your account. And, while they may not seem important to you, they provide an opportunity for your competitors to turn into an opportunity for them. Are there products that need to be returned? Invoices with discrepancies that need to be resolved? Items that need to be picked up? Training that was to have been done and never got scheduled? Information you were supposed to obtain for someone that you never did? You've got the idea. If there are any unresolved problems in the account, a good competitor will find them and exploit them to his advantage and your disadvantage.
3. Products. You may have some product weaknesses that you competitor can exploit. For example, you may have available this year's version of some standard product. But your good customer is happy using an earlier version. You've never seen any reason to try to convert them to this year's model, when they are perfectly happy with last year's. However, last year's model may not stand up favorably to this year's version for your competition. In that case, you may look bad when your competitor brings in this year's hot new product, and compares it to an older model that you are supplying. Shame on you. You should have detailed your version before your competitor got the chance.

3. Bundle up your products and services.

You may be selling ten different items to one of your good accounts. Rather then continue to sell those ten as separate issues, package them together and write a contract that addresses all of them as a package deal. Get your good customer to acknowledge the package. That way, if your competitor tries to pick out one of the items you're selling, they can't because the price and service on one item impacts the others. The more you can bundle items together into packages the more difficult it is for your competition to dislodge you on one of those items.

4. Formally communicate your value.

Arrange for quarterly meetings between your good customer's key people and you and your boss. At these meetings, bring reports detailing aspects of your service, how much money you've saved that customer, the training you've done, the information you've provided, etc. Don't be afraid to identify other areas that you could impact in the same way. This formal reporting raises your position in the customer's eyes from that of being just a vendor, to that of a valuable partner. This separates you from the competition, and makes it less likely that your customer will be attracted to the someone else.

While none of these strategies are guaranteed to put an impenetrable wall around your good accounts, the wise combination of them will make penetrating one of your good accounts an extremely difficult and frustrating project for your competitors. Sometimes the best strategy is a good defense.

Mastering Sales^TM Major Account Management programme can sharpen your skills and provide you with the knowledge and application of these points to ensure your accounts are protected, and even more, you secure new accounts from your competitors.