After spending some time last week with a really sharp group of Strategic Account Managers at the SAMA Academy in Chicago, a number of IMPAX's of core beliefs were reinforced and clearer than ever, including:


Value leading companies have to get better at selling their value, and sooner rather than later
Procurement is investing in their people and processes, and is getting better at not buying value
Procurement is also getting better at making us feel as if we have no options but to play by their rules
In order to successfully sell value, we have to be in front of senior level executives who can make the decision to invest more and buy our value
We have to get better at monetizing and articulating the value in the form of "Business Fit"
There are more barriers (systems, processes and people) than ever before standing between us and these senior level executives.


What does this mean for us sales and relationship management professionals? We have to work harder at not getting blocked. We need to keep fighting to stay engaged with the line executives who, if they feel strongly enough, can influence buying decisions like no one else. To do this, we need to:


Utilize more and different senior-level access strategies
Develop and leverage more coach relationships who can help us with our access strategy
Utilize an executive sponsorship program to develop like-rank relationships between our executives and our customer executives
Develop collaborative relationships with procurement whenever possible
Offer procurement our compromise strategy, where we will respond to RFPs if we can present our response to the decision team
Issue our own RFPs (requests for presentations).
Utilize relationship review presentations to maintain decision maker relationships with current customers


Just because selling value effectively is harder today than it's ever been doesn't mean we don't need to do it anymore. It means we need to do it more than ever!