Key Accounts stall or fail when risk is unseen, and therefore untreated.

Watch: Seeing risk across your Key Account’s 21 growth drivers

Key Accounts stall or fail when risk is unseen, and therefore untreated.

Your Key Account’s 21 growth drivers can combine in 4.4 trillion possible ways. Do you have a way to see where yours stands?

Here’s the math. Every key account partnership runs on 21 growth drivers, from executive access to contract compliance to competitive intelligence. Each one sits at one of four levels of maturity. Together, they can combine in 4^21 = 4,398,046,511,104 ways. Every combination is an opportunity to grow the partnership and a risk of losing ground, and any driver left unattended can slide back a level and pull others down with it.

Most teams manage that with a CRM, an account plan template, a QBR deck and a pipeline report. They’re useful tools, and they record what has already happened. They rarely show where the partnership stands across all 21 drivers, or how a drop in one area sets off a chain reaction in the others.

Now add 30 people across regions, functions and experience levels, all touching the same account. Each group has its own tools, its own priorities and its own view of what matters. The risk that hurts the account usually sits where no one was looking.

I’ve seen what happens when a team does look. Our client’s annual spend with us grew 100 times in 18 months, to $10M, and we knew procurement would soon push for discounts. Our whole account team, from finance and contracts to delivery, worked with our champion to shape the client’s decision criteria and the RFP before procurement got involved. Three months later, procurement issued that RFP, and we won a five-year contract worth nearly $30M.

SAMA research found that strong strategic account programs deliver twice the revenue growth in strategic accounts compared with non-strategic accounts. Structure gives the whole team one view of the account.

Here’s where to start:

1. Pick your most important key account and list the growth areas that matter most: executive access, champion strength, contract compliance, competitive position and account intelligence.

2. Determine what level you’re at now and define the next level up for each. Be conservative here.

3. Prioritize which ones you can level up this quarter or next.

4. Write the plays you’ll run to reach the next level in each area.

5. Share it with everyone who touches the account.

You won’t cover all 4.4 trillion combinations this way, but you’ll start to see progress and can build from there.

Our system, the Vitality Index, gives your team all of this in one place and scales across your entire organization. It has plays for every growth driver at every level, so it covers all 4.4 trillion combinations across the 21 growth drivers that form Vital Partnerships that last. If you want help, schedule a free 30-minute consultation and ask for a demo.