SAM Team Training
SAM is not a discipline taught at business school or absorbed in conventional sales roles. Thus in even the strongest SAM departments, Strategic Account Managers may have competency gaps that stall their progress and motivation. Frank’s SAM team development services empower Strategic Account Managers to fast-track skill acquisition, break through plateaus, and raise their performance.
The foundation of Frank’s SAM Team Training Process is a series of full-day SAM Effectiveness Workshops. These workshops offer a time-efficient, staged approach to high-level performance for individuals and the SAM team. All workshops draw on the strategy, objectives and dynamics of the SAM department in the current year.
Workshops are typically bracketed by streamlined preparatory exercises and brief post-workshop coaching to ensure retention and transfer of learning. The team’s growth may also be further bolstered through team process consultation and strategic support on core communication vehicles.
The following is a brief description of the SAM Effectiveness Workshops. All workshops content may alternatively be delivered on a one-on-one basis through Brief SAM Leadership Coaching. To explore these options or request a more detailed PDF on content and outcomes, please contact Frank Granek.
Influence without Authority: Foundations for Strategic Account Managers
Influence without authority is a pillar of SAM success. This workshop provides Strategic Account Managers with an effective, reliable process for interpersonal influence, one that they will draw on literally every day. Participants learn to systematically establish positive rapport and align to the cognitive style and language patterns of key stakeholders. They learn powerful techniques of social psychology that deliver influence outside the path of logic. They gain practical tools for influence mapping at complex organizations. They learn to shape influential content and adapt it to diverse mindsets. These are the skills that empower the Strategic Account Manager to gain access to key stakeholders, overcome objections, shift mindsets, and align others toward win-win solutions. Principles and techniques learned span language, body language, voice, and behavior.
Relationship Differentiation: The Art and Science of SAM Partnerships
This workshop builds on the Influence without Authority workshop described above. It gives Strategic Account Managers processes to confidently build relationships at the C-suite and with diverse stakeholders, at the customer and within their organizations. Participants learn to strategically target and grow individual relationships and whole relationship networks – and to leverage them to build long-term business. Participants substantially improve their ability to strengthen personal ties during the whole relationship cycle, and to manage the opportunities and obstacles that may emerge at each of its stages. Participants are trained in hidden Positive Relational Dynamics: how to shift among multiple relational roles and apply strategies to generate behavioral advantage, while staying true to their personal values and communicative styles.
Creating Customer Value through SAM: Principles, Psychology, and Pragmatics
This workshop strips away jargon, customizing leading and tested models of customer value. It explores how, in the real business world, SAM can move to the front lines of customer value, operationalizing it to identify, acquire, retain, and grow key customers. Participants look at their existing value proposition with fresh and ambitious eyes. They strategize to expand and package their value offerings more effectively, and to co-create new forms of value with the customer. They develop options to entwine the customer’s and their organization’s missions and business models. They learn how to differentiate through not only the product but also service variables and whole customer experience. Through this workshop individuals and the SAM team can ensure their value proposition yields unmistakeable ROI within its organization.
C-Suite Dynamics for SAMs: Mindset, Access, and Impact
Top executives are the primary targets of influence for SAMs. This workshop trains SAMs to increase their access to and impact with the top echelon of organizations. They become more skilled in aligning to the C-Suite’s strategic mindset, with its emphasis on competitive strategy, profitability, pressing challenges, and concrete metrics. They learn to respond confidently to and capitalize on the C-Suite’s tough-minded communicative style. They learn to strengthen partnerships by delivering value on multiple planes: not only senior leaders’ organizational visions and operational exigencies, but also their personal leadership ambitions. SAMs learn pragmatic tools to analyze organizations, profile key leaders, initiate contact, and navigate C-Suite partnership campaigns.
Conflict in SAM: From Stress to Success
This training builds conflict prowess from the inside out. Participants unearth and shift their core attitudes about conflict. They learn to reframe conflict in a positive light and respond to it confidently and as an opportunity. They become aware of their underlying conflict-handling preferences and, using the framework of the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), expand their repertoire of conflict strategies. They learn to anticipate conflicts at an early stage and, where appropriate, head them off. For conflicts that occur, they learn a Conflict Prowess Process than can transform moment-by-moment conflict dynamics and resulting business outcomes. This process bolsters insight into conflict partners’ deep-lying concerns, facilitates changes in their attitude, and greatly improves the potential for resolution and collaboration.
Negotiation Success in SAM: Shaping the Game
This intense workshop delivers the skills that ensure the greatest likelihood of success in high-stakes SAM negotiations. Participants gain mastery of foundational and often misunderstood negotiation concepts, including BATNA, ZOPA, and interests vs. positions. They will adopt and practice a transformative five-stage Negotiation Success Process, and learn to apply it to shifting negotiation dynamics. They will learn to identify and adjust to the negotiation style and tactics not only of the C-suite but also of the range of their key stakeholders – at the customer and within their organizations. While negotiations too often strain personal bonds, participants of this workshop will gain the ability to leverage negotiations to actually strengthen their relationships and business partnerships.
SAM Leadership Branding: Elevating Image and Identity
The Strategic Account Manager’s personal leadership brand can be a hidden source of influence and power. This workshop integrates leading principles of business branding, communication strategy and leadership psychology. To start, participants will learn to define their leadership brand, including core identity and positioning. They will then learn to effectively audit perceptions of their leadership brand with internal and external customers. They will create pragmatic Leadership Brand Development Plans that will help them take their personal and professional ambitions to the next level. Through this process they will elevate their existing professional objectives with customized SMART goals on multiple branches, including: intellectual capital growth, long-term professional impact, leadership style refinement, and personal marketing strategy.
Creative Systems Thinking: A SAM Toolkit
There is nothing paint-by-numbers about SAM. Strategic Account Managers are called on to demonstrate the cognitive skills of the most senior and impactful leaders: creativity, innovation, and a confident command of complexity. Too often these are considered natural endowments – you’ve got ‘em or you don’t. In fact these cognitive skills can be substantially learned or strengthened through a set of concrete methods and techniques. This workshop draws on the most practical and proven tools – including those of Michalko, Buzan, and DeBono – and integrates them into a streamlined SAM Creative Systems Thinking Toolkit aligned to the particular dynamics and accountabilities of SAM. Participants will become more skilled in navigating complex environments, maintaining the big picture, generating innovative pathways, and facilitating creative systems thinking in others.
Communicating SAM in the Moment: Clarity, Confidence, and Consistency
Clarity, confidence, and consistency in core messaging about SAM can greatly advance organizational support and customer access. In this workshop the SAM team learns to identify and transcend the often hidden challenges to the SAM function that may exist at their companies and their customers. These may be organizational, philosophical or psychological. The SAM team confronts these challenges head on. The group is guided to craft a playbook of messages, both short and substantive, including: what SAM is conceptually, how it functions practically, where it radically differs from roles such as sales, and how it delivers competitive advantage. One key element of this workshop is learning and practicing the 7 Principles for Communicating SAM. Participants learn to project the SAM brand outside of speech, in attitude, behavior, and results.
SAM Change Leadership: A Workshop for SAM Initiative Architects
This is a workshop designed for senior leaders and stakeholders in Strategic Account Management. It explores the multiple stages and levels of challenges faced in launching and leading a Strategic Account Management Initiative. Some of these challenges are built into the very nature of SAM (its long-term nature and confusion with consultative selling, to name only two of many). Others are related to entrenched structural and power dynamics that may be threatened. The workshop pivots from these challenges to a SAM Organizational Change Leadership Process that leaders can use to dissipate misconceptions, move naysayers toward buy-in, leverage senior support, and over time deliver on SAM’s full potential.
