Account Management Across Borders


There are both opportunities and issues with servicing multinational clients.  We can help with both.

Many companies manage multinational accounts solely on a local basis.  We think this approach misses some key opportunities to increase sales while reducing costs and attrition.

In the UK alone, over 60% of the buyers of products and services are subsidiaries or European headquarters of multinational companies.  For these companies, two significant issues hinder profitability when it comes to account management.

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  1. Unnecessarily High Attrition:  Unstructured cross-border communication between units makes servicing international clients across borders almost impossible.  Servicing is not structured to reflect customers’ regional management needs.  Communication of issues and opportunities is non-existent.  Your value proposition is weakened and the client has little reason not to be coerced into more frequent RFPs--allowing your competition to chip away at your most valuable clients in your weakest areas.
  2. Lost Sales:  With most multinational clients, you may not have the business for all subsidiaries in Europe.  We estimate this untapped potential business to be 50-75% of the total potential volume.
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Although Relationship Managers attempt to coordinate with their counterparts in other markets, the process and tools to do so are usually undeveloped.
Servicing clients across borders involves cultural challenges, differing levels of autonomy within subsidiaries, local loyalties, reporting-line cross-overs, etc.  We believe a simple, focused program of multinational client servicing can protect and grow your bottom line by at least 5-10% in the first year.  Side benefits will accrue to other areas
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  • Establishment of best-practices among servicing groups across markets
  • Reduced costs of servicing and management information
  • Establishment of critical mass within smaller markets
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