Buy in and be in 

13th October 2026 |   Dominique Côté

That gap – between holding the role and living it – is the most expensive and least examined leadership problem in strategic account management (SAM).

Why executive sponsorship is a leadership behaviour, not a title.

Ask a room full of senior executives how many sponsor a strategic account; most hands go up. Ask them what they actually did for that account in the last quarter and the answers change shape: a dinner at a customer event, a signature on a pricing exception, a phone call when something went badly wrong.

In recent work with Javier Marcos and Nicolaas Smit, including “Why Strategic Account Management Is a Boardroom Issue, Not Just a Sales Matter” in Velocity, we argued that strategic account management belongs on the executive agenda rather than inside the sales function – and we mapped the ten roles senior leaders can play in supporting strategic accounts. Architecture, however, does not create behaviour. What follows is about the leadership that makes that architecture live, and about a distinction that most organisations have never made explicit.

I hold this one personally. I was an executive sponsor myself in my corporate years and I spent much of my time frustrated by colleagues who believed the role amounted to a name on a slide.