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Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations
Understand the value of knowing your account team’s influence in their organization, and yours, to drive results.
- Understand how important your account is to the vendor and how it is classified.
- Understand how informed the account team is about your company and your industry.
- Understand how long the team has been with the vendor. Have they been around long enough to have developed a “brand” or trust within their organization?
- Understand and manage the relationships and influence the account team has within your organization to maintain control of the relationship.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Conducting the appropriate due diligence on your vendor’s account team is as important as the due diligence you put into the vendor. Ongoing management of the account team should follow the lifecycle of the vendor relationship.
Impact and Result
Understanding your vendor team’s background, experience, and strategic approach to your account is key to the management of the relationship, the success of the vendor agreement, and, depending on the vendor, the success of your business.
Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations Research & Tools
1. Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations Deck – Understand the value of knowing your account team’s influence in their organization, and yours, to drive results.
Learn how to best qualify that you have the right team for your business needs, using the accompanying tools to measure and monitor success throughout the relationship.
2. Vendor Rules of Engagement Template – Use this template to create a vendor rules of engagement document for inclusion in your company website, RFPs, and contracts.
The Vendor Rules of Engagement template will help you develop your written expectations for the vendor for how they will interact with your business and stakeholders.
3. Evalu-Rate Your Account Team – Use this tool to develop criteria to evaluate your account team and gain feedback from your stakeholders.
Evaluate your vendor account teams using this template to gather stakeholder feedback on vendor performance.
Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations
Understand the value of knowing your account team’s influence in their organization, and yours, to drive results.
Analyst Perspective
Having the wrong account team has consequences for your business.
IT professionals interact with vendor account teams on a regular basis. You may not give it much thought, but do you have a good understanding of your rep’s ability to support/service your account, in the manner you expect, for the best possible outcome? The consequences to your business of an inappropriately assigned and poorly trained account team can have a disastrous impact on your relationship with the vendor, your business, and your budget. Doing the appropriate due diligence with your account team is as important as the due diligence you should put into the vendor. And, of course, ongoing management of the account team relationship is vital. Here we will share how best to qualify that you have the right team for your business needs as well as how to measure and monitor success throughout the relationship.
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Donna Glidden
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Executive Summary
Your Challenge
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Common Obstacles
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Info-Tech’s Approach
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Info-Tech Insight
Understanding your vendor team’s background, their experience, and their strategic approach to your account is key to the management of the relationship, the success of the vendor agreement, and, depending on the vendor, the success of your business.
Blueprint benefits
IT Benefits
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Mutual IT and
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Business Benefits
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Insight Summary
Overarching insight
Conducting the appropriate due diligence on your vendor’s account team is as important as the due diligence you put into the vendor. Ongoing management of the account team should follow the lifecycle of the vendor relationship.
Introductory/RFP phase
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Contract phase
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Vendor management phase
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Tactical insight
Don’t forget to look at your organization’s role in how well the account team is able to perform to your expectations. |
Tactical insight
Measure to manage – what are the predetermined criteria that you will measure the account team’s success against? |
Lack of adequate sales training and experience can have a negative impact on the reps’ ability to support your needs adequately
(Source: Spotio) | Info-Tech InsightRemember to examine the inadequacies of vendor training as part of the root cause of why the account team may lack substance. |
Why it matters1.8 yearsis the average tenure for top ten tech companies2.6 years is the average experience required to hire. 2.4 years is the average account executive tenure. 44% of reps plan to leave their job within two years. The higher the average contract value, the longer the tenure. More-experienced account reps tend to stay longer. (Source: Xactly, 2021) |
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Info-Tech Insight
You are always going to be engaged in training your rep, so be prepared.
![Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations preview picture](https://cdn-static.infotech.com/solution_set_hero_images/uploads/39204/1c511457b491e942b4e74fafa24b3579_big.jpg?1657722692)
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
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A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
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Unlock Sample ResearchAuthors
Donna Glidden
Steve Jeffery
Related Content: Vendor Management
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Search Code: 99082
Last Revised: July 19, 2022
TAGS:
vendor management, vendor strategy, managing account teams, vendor reps, account team, sales reps, vendor performance, request for proposal, RFP, rules of engagement, quarterly business review, poor vendor performance, sourcing, vendor evaluations, positive reinforcement, vendor training, vendor experience, sales training, LFBPBook an Appointment
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