Why Achieving Global Alignment is the #1 Challenge for Strategic Account Managers
Paul Hesselschwerdt 
Global Partners conducted a webinar on Strategic Account Management, which was attended by Account Managers from across a broad range of industries. Prior to the webinar we asked participants to identify their top challenges in making their SAM programs successful. Here are the top 3 challenges identified by the participants:
- Global alignment and communication
- Creating strategic relationships with the account
- Defining account goals, strategies and processes that are long-term
Some of the ways that participants expressed the need for effective global alignment were: “Getting global areas to exchange information consistently and effectively,” “Aligning my sales team to be most effective in managing my global strategic accounts,” and “Pulling together executive level decisions in the US with implementation teams in Asia and maintaining lock step communication along the way.”
Do you know why global alignment is such an important issue? Most participants rated their current SAM program as either “average,” “below average” or “failing”, in the area of Global Alignment and Communication. Take a look at the results from our live poll.
So, what can companies do to address this urgent challenge? In our experience helping global leaders such as Alstom, AREVA, GE, Sodexo, Sherwin-Williams and STMicroelectronics to improve the global alignment of their strategic account teams, we have focused on 3 things:
- Connecting everyone who routinely interacts with the customer. We call this Connecting the Global Customer Network.
- Ensuring that everyone involved with the account in any way has the same shared understanding about what the company is trying to achieve with the account. We call this a Shared Top Down View.
- Enabling everyone who is interacting with the account to communicate their key activities throughout the company. We call this the Bottom Up View.
You can also learn how Global Partners enabled ST Microelectronics, one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, to achieve global alignment with one of its accounts by accessing the case study.
If your Strategic Account Management process isn’t working, be in touch. As you can tell, we like to listen.
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