Depending upon which side of the table you’re sitting on, you’ll most likely have a strong feeling about this: “That’s my account!” If you’re a manager, bet you’ve heard that plenty of times. If you’re a seller, you’ve said it, no doubt. And I get it, you want to defend your territory.
But when I managed, NO ONE owned an account – not even my top sellers. If you had McDonalds through an agency, but never bothered to go after the local marketing money or their recruitment budget, that was fair game for any other seller.
In one case, we had four different sellers all working one “account,” all getting money, and not butting heads. If the first seller was aggressive, they could have had all the money. But I was not in the game to miss my budget just because a seller was not seeing all of the possibilities.
I called it “Management By Contact,” not “Management By Account.” Did I have some sellers who hated this? Yes.
The lazy ones.
Nope — I’m not training multiple sellers to work on one account. My job is buying, not managing your employees.
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