Barrett’s Competitive Selling Strategies program equips experienced account managers to identify, secure, and grow key accounts in an AI-shaped, increasingly sophisticated buying environment.
- The Problem: Big customers are getting bigger, more sophisticated, and more demanding, while rationalising their supplier base. Account managers trained for transactional selling aren’t equipped for the strategic, multi-stakeholder relationships key accounts now require.
- The Shift: Key account management isn’t a bigger version of regular selling. It’s a distinct discipline, identifying, ring-fencing, and growing the accounts that matter most, while protecting margin in an environment of intensifying buyer power.
- The Solution: Our Competitive Selling Strategies program equips experienced account managers with the strategy, tools, and skills to secure key accounts as genuine partners, not just bigger transactions.
When an account manager genuinely understands a key account’s business, not just their order history, the account stops feeling like a negotiation and starts feeling like a partnership.
Why Key Account Management Matters Now
Not every business needs a dedicated key account function, but more are finding they do. Five forces are driving this shift:
- Market maturity
- Rising cost of sale
- Growing customer and client negotiating power
- Pressure on margins
- Intensifying local, regional, and global competition
Customer power has changed the game. Big customers are getting bigger while rationalising who they buy from. Buyers are more knowledgeable, more sophisticated, and expect tailored solutions, all of which increases the cost of serving them. Buyers and sellers are having to find genuinely new ways of working together, and that’s intensified further as buyers now research and benchmark suppliers using AI before any conversation starts.
Key account management is the discipline of identifying, ring-fencing, and serving these accounts in a way that delivers buyers genuine value while protecting your margins.
Who This Is For
Competitive Selling Strategies is built for experienced, senior account managers charged with developing and managing key and strategic accounts in your organisation’s portfolio, not an entry-level program.
- Grounded in sound business and sales strategy thinking, validated across hundreds of businesses and thousands of salespeople globally
- Fully customised around your specific key account environment, goals, and objectives
- Comprehensive, taking account managers through the entire process from identifying to ring-fencing key accounts
- Practical and hands-on, working with real accounts already in your portfolio
Account managers learn to apply both offensive and defensive account strategies, understand the different decision-making processes and people involved in a buying committee, and define true customer-driven value, so the key account becomes a willing partner in the buy-sell process, not a hostile one.
The program includes Barrett’s electronic key account plan, a practical tool that helps account managers identify their position in a key account or specific opportunity, and the strategic options available to them from that position.
- How is this different from general sales training?
Sales training builds broad selling capability. This is a specialised discipline for managing fewer, larger, more strategically important relationships, where the stakes, the stakeholders, and the strategy required are all different. - Who should attend?
Senior or experienced account managers already responsible for key or strategic accounts, not salespeople new to the role. - How is this delivered?
A practical, workshop-based program using your organisation’s actual accounts, supported by Barrett’s key account planning tool. - How does this connect to Buyer’s Journey and Sales Strategy & Messaging Design?
Key accounts have their own buyer’s journey and require their own tailored messaging. We connect this work to both where relevant, since a generic value proposition rarely lands with a sophisticated key account.
Speak to us about your sales training needs.
Talk to us, your selling better advisory team, and we’ll be able to advise you on the best training solution for your business.
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