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Does your customer fully trust you? You are of course trustworthy, yet this does not mean you are trusted. Trust is essential bedrock for progressing customer relationships yet at times it is managed too passively. Its assumed to be at an acceptable level when this really is not good enough. With a richer and deeper…
KAM often results in (counterproductive) stress – but where does it really come from? Research shows that no single factor induces stress, it’s about different combinations of stressors So how do you achieve ‘non-stress’ i.e. mellowness? And should you try? It’s not just the flip-side of stress.
Feedback from the March meeting requested a session on KAM frameworks and processes, presented here by Diana Woodburn, AKAM Chairman. She offered wide range of devices, most of which act first as diagnostics and then as decision-support tools and management action guides that convert into processes. Frameworks demonstrated included customer selection/categorisation, through risk assessment to key account prioritisation…
Sustainability is the buzzword everywhere but it seems to mean very different things to different people in different places. Often it is not even a single issue (see the list in this article), so the combination of aspects that makes up each corporate’s definition of sustainability is really variable – and volatile, as external events…
Close and strong business relationships potentially have many positive effects. However, researchers Nima Hierati and Yumen Zhang of Queen Mary University London identified the possibility of forces of destruction building below the surface. This short report on their pilot study revealed alarming developments such as risky reductions in partners’ monitoring and safeguarding activities, and the dangers…
While you should have good relationships with your customers’ people, of course, there are other kinds of relationship important in KAM: Gadde and Snehota’s research identified three layers. In this short article, Diana Woodburn argues that investment in human relationships in KAM is a means to an end, not a result itself. Good relationships can get you…
Key Account Management and selling are not the same thing. Key Account Management does not mean selling to big customers – it is not just a higher form of selling or a synonym for selling to the C-Suite. KAM is very likely to engage with the customer’s C-Suite, but the process will involve much more than the…
Feeling relieved to have won some business from tough conversations with their key accounts, suppliers often fail to identify the value they have missed out on as a result of poor negotiations. Many supplier organisations would benefit from a strategic, top down look at their negotiations with their high value, long term and often complex key customers. …
Risk awareness has always been in the long list of skills required of key account managers, but it is rarely high enough on the list, and awareness is not enough anyway. Being in business is about managing risk as well as making profits. Most risk is considered as financial, and while the ultimate impact may…
Strategic account plans sit at the core of KAM: they specify the value to be offered to the customer and received by the supplier. They should be what gets done, and yet very little has been written about them. This paper lays out the essential elements of strategic account planning: the purpose of strategic account…
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