Rachana,

Welcome to the world of Account Management! I can give you a few basics that have worked for me.

1) My best business development tool for expansion is great delivery. Irrespective of whether an individual will directly refer me to another
group, I can always mention that person’s name as a customer and describe the work I’ve done.

2) Depending on the organization, I find building a relationship with the shared services groups, like Finance and Purchasing help a lot. Although
Purchasing is often the transaction group, they do know the ‘buyers’ and can be very helpful in recommending who to speak to or at least
recommending me to others.

3) We offer a variety of value add services, otherwise known as investments in our clients. For example, we will give our clients a free
‘strategy day’ to present front of mind topics to key executives. The key is to get the right people from the client to attend and showcase our
capabilities.

Any more and I will be giving away my competitive advantage

Good luck.

Joe G.

In a decentralized organization without clear top level champions there often evolves a push for “best practices”. This happens where
there is no clear control to hand out edicts from the top down but the business still wants different units to benefits from the experiences
they’ve had.

If that mentality can be encouraged, it becomes a low stress way to propagate services and solutions for your business sponsors. They can
get some credit for offering their experiences to other areas without seeming invasive in the process or like they’re sicking a salesman on
their peers.

So you might try to foment the best practices committee concept and then support your current business sponsors by providing them some
great case study presentation materials around what you’ve been doing for them. Then the selling is really done for you and the other
business areas can come to you rather than feeling like you need a strong business sponsor to push for meetings for you.

Kevin C.