Keir Woods suggested that the account-management process could be viewed as a crop farm.  At any time some fields need ploughing, others must be hoed and others harvested.
This is a useful simile to share with an account-management team, as it enables them to visualise tasks swiftly:  ‘You have to accept that some of the actions you want won’t come to fruition for a long time.’ 

Prill agreed:  ‘It can take a year to see the changes you want. Milestone targets are essential.’  For Prill’s team, nearly half the bonus depends upon them each hitting five to six milestone objectives every three months, with the rest down to sales levels.

Suppliers should also look beyond financial rewards, suggests Woods.  ‘Financial incentives are a short-term way of rewarding people. Promotion, recognition or simply giving them more good projects to run is very important.’  One delegate suggested telling the account how well you thought your account manager was running it in his presence.

Johnson suggested that accounts could usefully be divided into those where you are seeking to maintain a favourable status quo, those which you want to develop and those where you are protecting.  Each of these calls for different skills and maybe for different individuals within your organisation.

Ultimately, before setting up a reward structure you have to be very clear about precisely what type of behaviour you want to encourage.

But what are the external steps you need to take to get caviar?

Everyone agreed that researching what partners really want from you is a vital step. All too often it will reveal a huge disconnection between what a supplier is doing and what a partner wants.

Chas Pell of VIA International shared some research into what Primary Care Organisations, who increasingly specify what drugs doctors prescribe, want from pharmaceutical companies.  The findings show that most drug companies are still delivering product and me-me-centric messages rather than taking the time to understand the long-term needs of the PCOs (see diagram).

Such structured research is extremely important and is undertaken far too infrequently.

But many companies also fail to ask for regular feedback from accounts. Bairner at P&G said:  ‘We will sometimes sit down with an account and list all the things we are doing for them. We then ask them to prioritise the list. Invariably, we find that what they really value is totally different from what we think it will be!’

Bairner said he also asked retailers to set out their targets and to then score how much P&G was helping them to meet them. Greg Hardiman at BP said that when doing a survey it was always worth asking the account whether they would be happy for their remarks to be attributable.  ‘We find two-thirds are happy for us to give their comments and remarks straight back to the account manager,’ he added.

Often suppliers fail to use the findings of market research. In his presentation, David Prill of Janssen-Cilag looked at how Janssen maps accounts on a simple two-axes graph, showing how attractive an account is to the industry and how attractive it is to Janssen-Cilag.  ‘For the industry we ask questions such as: What is the history of prescribing patterns – are they innovative?  How willing are they to work with the industry?’

Prill then asks a separate set of questions in order to ascertain how attractive an account is to Janssen.  ‘Are there permanent specialists in our drugs area? How well do we work with them? Are there any positive guidelines already in place?’

This enables Janssen to map accounts.  ‘For instance, if they are attractive to us and to the industry we know there will be more competition.’  Janssen also maps which factors it can influence itself and which it cannot.

Many delegates wanted to explore the best way of engaging a client. 

Johnson made the point that the whole idea of ‘managing a client’ was suspect.  ‘People don’t want to be managed, they want to be engaged,’ he said.  All this points again to the vital importance of understanding the client’s business model and business plan.

Far too few companies bother to understand their partners’ agendas. Of course, sometimes their partners don’t understand their own agenda! 

Several pharmaceutical companies made the point that many PCOs have no clear idea of their own objectives or are striving to meet 101 disparate goals and targets.  This highlights again the need to understand the environment or industry in which partners are operating. There is no point selling into NHS organisations unless you have a clear idea of the agenda of the NHS as a whole.

Several companies were uncomfortable about the money that partners were demanding for special projects. A concern that extends across industries!  As the manager of a pharmaceutical company put it:  ‘How do I turn our relationship with NHS organisations from a visit to a brothel into a marriage?’  Another echoed this concern:  ‘We are perceived as well-heeled tourists in a Third-World country. People will take as much money from us as they can and not deliver anything back.’
 
The panel suggested that once again this comes down to the need to understand the agenda and business model of the intermediary or influencer. Said one panellist:  ‘Ask questions: What is it you want to achieve with this money? Where do you want to get to? What are your milestones? Ask them what they are prepared to stake and how they will get involved.’  Another delegate suggested that one way round the problem was to look at skills, rather than finance.  ‘Analyse the skills that both sides are bringing to a joint project. These may be more important than money.’
 
All this fed into a debate about how to measure relationships.  Bob Johnson of Orange explained the complex measurements he had put in place at Commodore and then at Orange.  ‘We put in place a profit-and-loss account for every store in the major store chains such as Dixons. We also factored in intangibles such as the value of the consumer awareness that Dixons generated for us.’

Prill of Janssen-Cilag revealed the complex set of milestones and targets that his company puts in place for each and every account.  These range from tasks such as identifying decision-makers to defining local issues and winning internal agreement to a plan.

Many delegates sighed, groaned and laughed at the mention of customer-relationship management systems. But almost everyone is using some sort of CRM system. 

Prill looked at how Janssen-Cilag has managed to integrate just about everything into a single CRM system.  From a single screen the account manager could access everything from influencer maps to milestone reports.  He admitted that getting account managers to use the system had proved a struggle, but added:  ‘Two of my guys with strong theatrical tendencies do a sketch in which a new employee is first inducted and shown the twenty different reports he has to fill in from Excel to Word. He is then shown the new CRM system and how it replaces everything else.’  Behaviour is beginning to change and sales results are reflecting the change.

Bob Johnson describes caviar as ‘consistency, clarity and confidence and the avoidance of complacency’. That is as good a start as any.  And yes, you can eat it!