Building business relationships with strategic account management
Strategic account management is being used more often to identify and nurture key business relationships
Relationships are at the core of any business, so building strong ones is important. One relationship-building strategy that is increasingly becoming popular in healthcare – particularly in the pharmaceutical industry – is strategic account management.
"Historically, fragmentation in U.S. healthcare has enabled success via one-to-one selling, but the future will likely require highly effective strategic account managements across many customer groups," said Bill Coyle, principal at ZS Associates. ZS Associates, a sales and marketing consulting firm, and the Strategic Account Management Association released a report last year on strategic account management practices.
Strategic account management (SAM) is a company-wide initiative that identifies a company’s most important customers and partners and focuses on building strong and mutually beneficial relationships with them.
The ZS Associates/SAMA report indicated that the tech/IT industry and the healthcare industry are examples of industries on opposite ends of the SAM spectrum. While the tech industry has fine-tuned their SAM approach, the healthcare industry has only recently made a significant move toward increasing the breadth and depth of its SAM programs.
"While it is hard to pin down a cost on how much pharma is spending on SAM, an individual large pharma could easily spend a few million dollars in designing its SAM program, apprenticing and developing SAMs and building associated infrastructure (tools, materials, training),” said Coyle.
Michael Berrian, a director at Standard & Poor’s, said he sees SAM being implemented more by pharmaceutical distributors than by pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the distributors, he said, are doing so for the purpose of sourcing products at more competitive rates.
But, as organizations seek to create superior customer value and company growth, they will increasingly rely on SAM, said Mike Moorman, managing principal of the go-to-market strategy and transformation practice at ZS Associates.
"As core products and services become more commoditized, the business insights and problem solving provided by SAMs and their teams are becoming a key aspect of the value proposition," said Moorman. "Companies and teams who do this best will earn the greatest proportion of the customer's premium business."
