Much has been written about the importance of executive sponsorship internally in overseeing the successful completion of IT Projects. But does your company have executive sponsors regularly involved externally in the sales cycle?
Having worked on both sides of the fence (Product Marketing and Sales as well as IT management), I have seen the importance of assigning executive sponsors to key/enterprise customer accounts.
Working as the Chief Information Officer and Vice President, Product for a mid-size marketing services firm I found the role refreshing and, often, eye-opening. Our CEO required each member of the senior management team to pair with sales executives on our top customer accounts. In this case, the executive sponsor role involved working on five accounts throughout the year, making calls on the customer with the assigned salesperson once a quarter. This was a role we accepted in addition to the typical executive duties of day-to-day customer service and operations. As a key part of each executive’s MBOs, performance and compensation were closely tied to fulfilling the assignment.
As an executive nothing gets you closer to the customer and the business than going on three-legged sales calls. Your sales staff gains confidence that management cares, the B2B sales cycle benefits from a top-down rather than the typical bottom-up sales approach and your most important customers see that management is truly engaged at all levels of your operation.
On the other side of the fence, as the customer, nothing is more frustrating than engaging with suppliers and business partners whose executives are rarely, if ever directly involved in the sales and service process. If the only way you can get the attention of a partner’s executive team is through escalation when things go sideways you begin to lose faith that you are a key customer or partner. But when you know that you have an assigned executive sponsor who calls on you regularly you are a lot less likely to consider switching suppliers.
