The age-old standard of selling products to clinicians is no longer a pathway to success. The continued rise of large, complex and sophisticated organized customers in the U.S. healthcare system is creating new imperatives and opportunities for Life Sciences organizations.

The “State of KAM in Life Sciences” research report(s) consists of two separate bodies of research, one covering medtech and the other covering pharmaceuticals. Conducted jointly with SAMA and ZS, they provide comprehensive and granular insight into the objectives, organizational models, support functions, current effectiveness, barriers, metrics and investment priorities for the medtech and pharma fields. Participants included 27 leaders of SAM/KAM functions, representing enterprise or business unit SAM/KAM organizations at 15 top pharma and medtech companies.

One key takeaway: The vast majority of these companies need to make significant advancement in their KAM strategies and capabilities if they’re to maximize impact and success with their large, organized customers. The deep-dive analysis provides quantitative results as well as qualitative feedback from respondents.

The report reveals:

• The SAM/KAM goals and objectives for many of the largest global Life Sciences companies
• The specific challenges and opportunities they face
• Metrics they use to measure success
• Where and how companies plan to invest

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Video:  State of KAM in Life Sciences
Article:  Key Account Management Is a Priority for Medtech Leaders
Article:  Why Pharma Must Invest in Key Account Management Capabilities

Price:  $6,000 per report, $9,000 for both

Report purchase entitles you to a 90-minute readout session with a ZS Life Sciences expert.

Access to the reports is limited. To learn more about purchasing your copy of the full report, contact SAMAresearch@strategicaccounts.org.

SAMA's 2021 “Report on Strategic Account Management Compensation Practices” is the most comprehensive survey of SAM/KAM compensation practices available anywhere. Conducted in partnership with ZS, the report establishes benchmarks and tracks market trends related to:

• SAM/KAM job profile, responsibilities and scope
• Compensation levels, incentive mix and trends for SAMs, SAM program managers and VP/directors
• Pay plan types, structures, components and metrics
• Frequency of performance measurements and payouts
• SAM program common and best practices

Survey respondents included 125 account managers, 7 program managers and VP/directors from 102 companies headquartered in Europe and North America.

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Webinar: “2021 Study Results on SAM Compensation”

Price*: Non Member - $600 | Individual Member - $400 | Corporate Member - $300
*Reports are free to participants

The SAM job differs from most in that success depends not only on the individual's own abilities but also on the organization's allocation of resources to support the SAM. SAMA surveyed more than 200 SAMs, managers of SAMs, executives/heads of strategic accounts organizations and other leaders who support or govern strategic accounts to learn:

• The skills and roles that separate the best SAMs from average ones
• The top skills and roles identified as needing further development
• How well supplier firms are aligning their talent and internal resources for strategic account performance

Of the eight key roles associated with a SAM, "value solution creator" is seen as the biggest differentiator of highest-performing SAMs, while "data analyzer" and "data organizer" are seen as the least differentiating. Surprisingly, emotional intelligence appears LAST on a list of skills that separate the best SAMs from the rest.
 

Price^*: Non Member - $500 | Individual Member - $300 | Corporate Member - $200

*Reports are free to participants

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How do supplier organizations – and, more specifically, SAMs – develop, manage and grow their most important customers? And just as importantly, what milestones and metrics do leading companies employ to track their progress?

We surveyed more than 200 strategic accounts professionals to learn:

• Which KPIs companies use to drive strategic account performance, including the mix of internal vs. external measures and leading vs. lagging indicators
• How closely leading organizations align their KPIs with their strategic selling processes
• How closely these companies' strategic selling processes align with the principles of strategic account management (as opposed to traditional sales)

Key findings:

• Barely half of respondents believe their firm's KPIs are designed to drive both internal AND customer metrics.
• Companies are still weighting their KPIs toward lagging (rather than leading) indicators.

Price*:  Non Member - $500 | Individual Member - $300 | Corporate Member - $200

*Reports are free to all participants

The increased connectivity provided by digital technologies has created new forms of collaboration opportunities in industrial ecosystems, new ways to monitor and manage the installed asset base and new channel configurations with new tools to connect and influence decision making and product usage. To put it bluntly: Digitalization has shaken the foundations upon which strategic account management is built.

This report, based on a review of current literature, content analysis and on-one-interviews with digital experts and SAMA corporate members, sets out to understand how digitalization is changing the logic and practice of strategic account management. The outcome is seven recommendations for companies that aspire to become digital leaders.

“Fundamental to understanding how SAM and SAM programs should adapt is the realization that changes in SAM practices are driven not only by the emergence of new digital technologies but, even more importantly, by the modifications in strategy and business models that digitalization drives. Consequently, SAM programs need to be elevated into an even more strategic role driving the digitally enabled strategic transformation of both firms and customers. To take on this role, SAM needs to be transformed from strategic account management to strategic ecosystem leadership.”

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• Article: “The impact of digital technologies on SAM strategies and business models”
• Article: “Elevating strategic account management”

Price: FREE

As companies develop, formalize and fine-tune their strategic account management programs, they must at some point wrestle with the question of how to measure the performance of both indvidual strategic customer relationships and the overall strategic accounts initiative. The problem is often legacy measurement systems that are focused on measuring performance of products, services and geographies and are not built to effectively capture and aggregate business and performance data by customer, across the entire company.

We surveyed more than 200 strategic accounts professionals to learn:

• How do companies use metrics to make the business case for strategic accounts investments? For the strategic accounts approach in general?
• Which metrics are most effective for different types of investments (e.g., customer-specific, innovation, talent, SAM program central office/Center of Excellence, functional area improvements)?
• And finally, how are investment decisions made?

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Infographic: “Investing in the strategic accounts organization”

Price*: Non Member - $500 | Individual Member - $300 | Corporate Member - $200

*Reports are free to all participants

While value co-creation has rightfully become an area of primary focus for SAM programs, less attention has been paid to two later steps in the value management process: pricing realization and value capture. With this in mind, we partnered with Value Innoruption Advisors to survey more than 400 SAM professionals to learn:

• What are the critical components of a holistic value management program, and how do they impact firm performance?
• What personality traits impact SAM acceptance and adoption of value management programs?

It turns out that the greatest drivers of value management success sit in the back end of the value management process: namely, in the pricing realization and value capture steps. But what makes a SAM great at executing these steps? And how do leading companies integrate value management capabilities into their strategic selling process?

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Overview: “If your check engine light is on, make the pit stop and look under the hood”

Price: FREE

SAM programs exist to manage a company's most important customers, but this broad category of customer relationships can include a diverse array of relationship types. While more companies recognize that business management models will vary by type of relationship, as far as we know no one has yet created an empirical foundation for a structured segmentation approach for all strategic/important accounts – until now.

The real-world account management model assumes that all customer relationships can be placed into one of four categories: (1) both companies consider the relationship transactional, (2) the supplier considers the relationship transactional, while the customer considers it strategic, (3) the supplier considers the relationship strategic, while the customer considers it transactional, or (4) both companies consider the relationship strategic.

What did we learn? Number one: A management case can be made for catagorizing important customers based on the combined views of the supplier on the customer and on the supplier's perception of the customer's view of the supplier. The survey found ample justification for this segmentation approach for both internal and external strategy and alignment, and for dynamically monitoring and tracking account changes as business relationships and a company's account management program matures.

Price: FREE

The "new normal" brought on by COVID -19 changed everything about how SAMs serve their strategic customers. SAMA and Boston Consulting Group teamed up to assess the impact of the crisis on SAMs and SAM programs.

The research, conducted in April and May of 2020, surveyed roughly 100 SAMs and SAM program directors, and it offers unprecedented insight into:

• Sales leaders' overall business outlook
• Changes in client expectations
• Key challenges and opportunities moving forward
• Best practices for navigating changing dynamics
   

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Webinar: Commercial Excellence in COVID Times - Lessons from recent SAMA/BCG benchmark survey

Price: FREE

The sales industry is facing the ultimate paradigm shift in how SAMs drive value. We now know that who you are as a SAM drives more value than what you do.

This statement is grounded in a landmark study, Return on Character® (Harvard Business Review), pioneered by Dr. Fred Kiel and the KRW Research Institute indicating that who you are – i.e., your character – is a better predictor of success than what you know how to do. In his study, Kiel found that leaders who scored high on so-called character habits achieved:

• Greater than 5x financial performance
• 26% higher employee engagement
• Reduction in corporate risk

SAMA is partnering with KRW, The Summit Group and Consalia Sales Business School to apply character science research to strategic account management and sales. We are currently recruiting participants for this groundbreaking study. Participants will receive:

• A full individual assessment report outlining behaviors, including the one "keystone" behavior that will have the greatest impact on sales performance
• Insight into where to expand mindset to get you to the next level of leadership
• Identification of unconscious habits that might be undermining leadership but won’t show up on traditional assessments or reviews

To participate in this research, email SAMAresearch@strategicaccounts.org.

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Blog Post:  Character Matters: Learn How to Become a Better SAM
Fact sheet:  “Return on Character”