By Javier Jaime, Head of Enterprise Client Management, Siemens
Does strategic mean important?
I have been asking myself this for a while, and I mean it as a real question.
In almost three decades of enterprise sales, the word has meant the same thing everywhere I have heard it used. Strategic accounts. Strategic opportunities. Strategic partners. Strategic initiatives. Ask what makes one of them strategic and the honest answer is usually some version of: it is big, or it matters to someone senior, or we would be in trouble if we lost it.
So, the working definition — the one people actually use — is important. Is that wrong?
The case that it is right
Start with the word’s own history. “Strategy” comes from the Greek word for generalship. Stratos, the army, literally “that which is spread out.” Agein, to lead. Strategy is the office of directing a force that is spread out across more ground than it can hold.
A general puts force where the stakes are highest. Importance is built into the job. If a thing matters enough, it should pull resources toward it, and in that sense a strategic account is exactly the account that is important enough to get more than its share. Strategic and important line up.
The word also carries an implied logic. When someone calls an account strategic, they are usually claiming it survived some vetting. Somebody looked at the whole list and this one rose.
I have built tools on exactly this basis. A few years ago, I put together a four-tier account classification for account planning workshops. The top tier was defined as the accounts that mattered most to two different sales teams at the same time. In other words, the most important ones. Rooms full of sellers stack-ranked their accounts into it, owners got assigned, and every owner in the top two tiers took a turn in the hot seat defending their plan. It worked. We came out with a ranked list and an owner assigned to every account on it.
Where it stops working
What the list could not tell us was what to do differently about any account on it. Twelve accounts in the top tier is a statement of what matters. It is not a statement of what we will do with the people we have.
Picture your coverage as pins in a map, one pin for every person you have on an account. Spread evenly across the paper, that is coverage. Bunched up in one region with bare paper everywhere else, that is a strategy. Most account plans I have seen are the first map with the word “strategic” written across the top of it.
The general’s job has a second half. Fixed soldiers, more ground than he can hold. Where he is strong, he is strong because somewhere else he is thin. Importance tells him what is at stake. It does not tell him what to leave exposed. That decision is the strategy, and it is the part nobody wants to write down, because somebody loses coverage.
Strategy is choosing where to be strong, against resistance, in service of an end. You cannot be strong everywhere.
Read that again with “important” in mind. Everyone can list what is important. The list is long, and that is the point. Strategy is what happens when the list is longer than your capacity and you decide anyway.
How importance gets the label without earning it
The funnel does it for you. If a rep carries $10 million, we expect $30 to $40 million in pipeline. So, the funnel gets filled. If you hired well, it fills with real pursuits. If you did not, it fills with whatever survives the pipeline review. Either way, the largest opportunities in it get called strategic, because size triggers the word. The leading indicator has no quality control, and it manufactures strategic importance every quarter.
Then the org chart does it. The same thing happened to “vice president” at the banks. Once everyone had the title, it stopped telling you anything about the person. “Strategic account management” started life as a segmentation label: manage the important accounts differently. “Strategic selling” is a method for complex, multi-threaded sales, and the word there means complex. Neither contains a decision about where to concentrate. Both can be run flawlessly by an organization with no strategy at all.
And your own position does it. Strategic is a word like “upstairs.” It points relative to where you are standing. Your boss’s strategy is your goal. Your strategy is your report’s goal. So, from any chair, the biggest thing you can see looks strategic. It is a horizon effect. Any organization that never defines its layers has guaranteed that everyone in it is miscalibrated, from the field to the boardroom.
So, does it?
Sometimes. And the word cannot tell you when.
Think about an emergency room on a bad night. Everyone who came through the door is important. Nobody is there for fun. Triage is the decision about who sees the one doctor first and who sits in the hallway, and it is a brutal decision precisely because everyone waiting is important. Being important got them through the door. Triage is the strategy.
That is the answer. Important is the input. It tells you what is at stake. Strategic is what you did about it with the people and money you actually have. An important account that gets the same coverage as every other important account is important. An account you fed by starving another one is strategic, whether or not it is large.
Any sales leader lives this at planning time. One headcount approved, four territories that could use it. Every one of them is important. One is going to get the person. The argument about which one is the strategy. The list of four is not.
The cost of getting this wrong is not the label. Words get spent like money. When strategic means important, the word is spent one level too low. Once “strategic account” means “large account,” there is no word left for the question above it: across all of these accounts, where do we concentrate, and what do we starve? In most places that conversation never gets scheduled. Nobody decided against it. The language that would have convened it was used up.
Which is how most sales organizations end up with everyone holding a number and nobody holding a strategy. Handing out quotas is a decision about where the effort goes. It spreads the effort like peanut butter, an even layer over every account, and nobody remembers deciding that.
A play you can run this week
Take any sentence with “strategic” in it and delete the word. If the meaning barely moves, the word was decoration. If it collapses, the word was doing real work.
Then print your strategic account list and ask the harder question of each one: What are we giving this account that we took from somewhere else? Name the somewhere else. Accounts with an answer are strategic. Accounts without one are important, and important is fine. Call it that.
A list of important things is a budget request. A strategy is the fight over which one gets funded.
This blog was originally published on LinkedIn.
