The Marketing and Sales Excellence Initiative serves as a premier global forum on Marketing & Sales Excellence practices and thought leadership for customer-centric
Embracing circular business models unlocks opportunities for companies to engage with customers, optimise resource utilisation and ensure a sustainable future.
When done the right way, customer engagement can turn into a lucrative opportunity.
In 2011, we started talking with top B2B executives about their engagement with their firm’s major customers in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The vast majority told us that they were very involved, to great effect. However, when we interviewed their sales account managers, we heard a different tale. While a minority of executives did well, many seemed to need at least some guidance.
We realised that self-reports would be unlikely to give us the true picture. So, from 2012 to 2018, we conducted 30 executive education workshops with more than 500 strategic and global account managers in the United States, Netherlands, Switzerland and Singapore. This allowed us to identify five distinct archetypes describing the roles executives play with key customers.