Operating Above the Line of Safety

You fully trust your account teams to make key decisions with customer executives without you and your executive’s involvement.

For key accounts, you can list multiple problems solved by your account teams which were unrelated to your products and services.

" You can point to specific examples of proactively bringing ideas to the executives of your key accounts that have transformed significant areas of their business."

The leaders of your key accounts understand the biggest issues and opportunities in their customer’s industry and they are in line with your customer CEO’s thinking and strategies.

In key accounts, you are solving problems that executives create budget to solve.

In key accounts, little to no revenue comes from RFPs and competitive bidding situations.

You source and recruit your talent from outside of the sales organization for key accounts (e.g., your executive organization, external consultants , competitors)

"You equip your team on how to be an executive advisor – i.e., they know how to identify target executives, determine their business challenges, and know how to solve them."

You view the effort to build customer intimacy / indispensability in an integrated manner -- investing in the sales organization, talent, intellectual property, offers and others key business components – as opposed to only treating it as a sales issue.

Executives regularly allocate time for, and spend that time, interacting with and monitoring the success and progress at key accounts

There is a clear executive sponsor who owns the success of implementing the intimacy/ indispensability strategy

The organization clearly understands the importance of customer intimacy & renewable differentiation to the long-term success of the business. They are able to communicate intimacy's importance and it is regularly reported out on and discussed.

Customers regularly comment on the impact we make in their business

Customers are very willing to participate in case studies and/or offer referrals

We are regularly engaged in different parts of customers' business after proving the value in a targeted area

Customers comment on the consistency of our efforts and their ability to achieve outcomes