When someone leaves your Key Account Team, how much of the account walks out the door with them?

Watch: When someone leaves your Key Account Team

When someone leaves your Key Account Team, how much of the account walks out the door with them?

Picture the team supporting your most important key account and ask three questions:

Does every person touching the account understand their part in the strategy to expand and protect this customer? Where does the knowledge of how your team solves problems for this customer live? If one team member stepped away for two weeks, would everyone know what that means for the account?

If the honest answer to the second question is “in one or two people’s heads,” the account is one resignation away from starting over.

I’ve seen what that costs. At the world’s largest life sciences company, I inherited an account that had been through a long list of account leads. Each one took what they knew with them, and revenue hadn’t moved much. Three people supported it at one of the customer’s many locations. No one from finance, legal, marketing, R&D, strategic delivery or the executive team was proactively engaged in growing it.

Two years later, more than 50 people from every department, function and region supported that customer, without a single new hire. Revenue doubled from $7.8M to $15.6M. We went from one of 80+ global suppliers in our category to #1, and won Supplier of the Year.

It worked because everyone could see the whole strategy, including the parts outside their own role. The plays were written down, so each person could run their part, bring ideas to improve it, and support their colleagues as they ran theirs.

The strategy was bigger than any one person. As people came and went, the account kept growing.

When the whole Key Account Team can zoom in and out across the entire relationship, a departure on either side becomes a gap the team fills early. The knowledge of how to win for this customer lives where everyone can reach it.

Here’s where to start:

1. Objectively assess each account across the main growth areas.
2. Build a growth strategy for each area of the account you need to level up.
3. Develop an execution plan with clear action items for each contributor.
4. Create the plays your team must run to execute the plan.
5. Show every person on the team the whole strategy, including the parts outside their role.
6. Establish regular reviews to make sure the team is making progress.

Now, when someone joins or leaves the Key Account Team, you can share the strategy, the plan and the playbook, so on day one they step into a system built to scale. Keep it updated as conditions change in your key accounts.

Our system, the Vitality Index, gives your team all of this in one place and scales across your entire organization. If you want help with this or any of the 21 growth drivers that form Vital Partnerships that last, schedule a free 30-minute consultation and ask for a demo.