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This simple diagnostic focuses minds on what the key account really values versus what you and your competitors are offering. It helps to cut through undue optimism, unnecessary pessimism to objectively identify what is really important to the customer. And hence, whether your value proposition is relevant and strong, where it is good enough and…
This is a blow-by-blow set of instructions for building your key account matrix, firstly to select key accounts from your customer base and secondly to identify what kind of key accounts they are – because they are different, will behave differently and perform differently for your organisation. Developing a matrix view of them is a…
Professor Marco Sisti of SDA Bocconi University in Milan presented the matrix approach to key account selection at AKAM’s meeting in Paris. It’s important to consider carefully what criteria are applied to make up the axes of the matrix and whence the data to inform them is sourced, internally and externally. The matrix approach is…
In spite of its name – key account selection/categorisation matrix – the matrix has many more uses than choosing key accounts. It represents your organisation’s portfolio of key accounts, which should be managed, measured and assessed as a portfolio. The position of a customer in the matrix should be used to decide how much resource…
These two spreadsheets prefaced with instructions for use are designed to make the process of building the key account matrix easier for you. They make clear what data you need to collect and supply ready-made blank tables for inputting it. You really must give contributors scales to get some consistency across their ratings, so make…
Companies often make the mistake of applying the same compensation schemes to key account managers as they do to salespeople. Understandably, employees reckon that what they are incentivized for is what the organisation really wants from them. So if short term sales are incentivized, short term sales are the output – not KAM. In this…
Do you think your Job Description properly represents your job? Does your company understand what you do? Are you tasked with coming up with the definitive key account manager Job Description or recruitment ad? This sample key account manager role description is a great help with any of those issues. Starting with an established model…
This AKAM Technical workshop (Lisbon, 2023) kicked off with the importance of strategic key account plans, arguably the most important thing a key account manager has to do. Which is at odds with the fact that they are commonly poor or even non-existent. So Dr Diana Woodburn explains how to construct the strategic key account…
There is a fair amount of work to do to produce a strategic key account plan – you don’t want to spend time trying to decide on a format. Use this downloadable tried and tested framework to communicate necessary information and plans in a logical and coherent form that anyone who needs to know in…
Where/how do you start to write a strategic key account plan? First comes the collection and analysis of information, then interpretation and thinking, before creating strategies that will be powerful for your company and the customer’s business as well. These downloadable worksheets help you to digest and use what you know about the customer and come…
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