When David Macaulay, President of Siemens IC's corporate accounts, took charge of the company's strategic marketing process in 2000, he knew that unifying the various divisional and national sales interfaces into a single team and providing accelerated sales growth, while still improving profit of course, was a daunting task.

The problem with Siemens historically was that each division focused on branding itself and not focusing on the three phases of the strategic marketing process (planning, implementation and control phase), so they did not sell as Siemens, they sold as a division.

"Our management's intention was to exploit the Siemens brand and its unique value to build more intimate relationships with our customers." (David  Macaulay, 2004) He went on to say “To build the strength for the whole brand we had to refocus on our long-term objectives for the account, consistent account planning, and execution. In addition, we had to develop a consistently higher level of executive engagement, which was previously never a planned process at Siemens. That meant top executives making regular planned sales calls on top executives from customers in which they consider their top executive involvement as one of our competitive advantages.”  (David Macaulay, 2004)

First, the implementation of an executive engagement process often takes more time than expected because of the need for cultural change at all levels of the organization. Second, once the process is implemented, it has usually an impact well beyond the initial scope of the project. Most recently, Siemens created a corporate-wide "Siemens One" initiative. Based on the lessons from its corporate account management activities, the objective of Siemens One is to harness the power of Siemens for the optimum customer partnership and develop the whole company toward an even more customer-centric organization model. Siemens’ CRM initiative implies that strategic marketing innovations will be implemented that will enable their organization executives and employees to build and align stronger relationships with its customers and meet organizational goals.

Companies can learn from this example, to create an effective corporate account management (CAM) program, to transform the organization from an internally focused, engineering-driven firm to a customer-centric, highly responsive global company.

CITE THIS AS: YouSigma. (2008). “Siemens Information and Communications Corporate Account Management Program." From http://www.yousigma.com.