The Key to Account Growth Is Sitting in Your Executive Suite

I don’t know many CEB Sales members who aren’t interested in increasing revenue and deepening customer relationships. With this universal goal in mind, we recently spoke with four member executives to learn more about their executive sponsor programs.

The members we spoke with all listed similar motivations for creating their executive sponsor programs: they wanted to build more collaborative, strategic-level relationships with their customers, and they wanted those customers to buy more from them. How these four companies structure and execute their programs, though, varied.

Choosing Customer Accounts for Executive Sponsorship

While all of the companies we profiled target customers with the potential for future account growth, the interviewed executives also consider factors such as the customer’s current account size, the customer’s reliance on their products, and how long the customer has been engaged with them.

Selecting Executive Sponsors

At most of the organizations we profiled, the account manager for the targeted account has the final say in choosing the executive sponsor to be paired with that account; however, one of the organizations created a committee to select executive sponsors and match them with customers. Regardless of the method for pairing executives sponsors with accounts, industry knowledge and skill set are important factors in determining a good fit.

Structuring Executive Sponsor Interactions

The frequency and type of executive sponsor interactions varied from company to company. One organization requires executive sponsors to meet with their partner executives in person twice a year, while another organization’s norm was weekly communication via phone or email, interspersed with four in-person meetings throughout the year.

A related and common challenge associated with any executive sponsorship program is scheduling. One of the member executives we spoke with cited an example in which eight months passed before the executive sponsor and customer could schedule a 30-minute meeting!

Measuring Program Success

Going back to the reasons for establishing executive sponsor programs (i.e., increased revenue and stronger relationships), are the programs successful? While all of the members we spoke with viewed their programs as successful, they lacked the hard data to back up this claim. Several organizations survey executive sponsors and customer accounts to rate the executive sponsor program, but none have been able to illustrate a link between the program and increased revenue, which, in the words of one member, “must be clearly demonstrated in order for the executive sponsor relationship to be deemed successful.”

CEB Sales members, to learn more about the profiled organizations’ executive sponsor programs, check out the full report: Structuring Executive Sponsor Programs.