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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. …
Defining performance in key account management is not simple. As a first step, companies should articulate what they want and expect KAM to do for them and link the required performance of key account managers to it. Some companies introduce KAM in order to retain their most important customers but then frustrate their own intention…
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…
Rewards tend to change behaviour and activity, as indeed is the intention. It is not clear, however, that rewards necessarily achieve the desired objective: in some cases, companies may be rewarding what would have happened anyway, or even generating negative and potentially damaging behaviour. Does ‘management by results’ work? Should key account managers be rewarded…
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…
For companies with a degree of sophistication in KAM, Malcolm MacDonald, Emeritus Professor at Cranfield School of Management, introduces the idea of Shared Value Added (SVA) and explains its importance in valuing customers to make critical strategic decisions about their business. Investing in customers is an alien concept for many people, including accountants holding the purse…
Fawaz and Fatan Baddar and Lulu Alhesan conducted 68 interviews to gain this insight in a rare piece of research into KAM in the Middle East. They found that Arab senior managers’ participation is imperative in relationships with key customers in the Arab world. Due to cultural and institutional factors that are unique to the Arab context senior…
Review of what academics say about KAM from Professors Björn Ivens and Catherine Pardo. They give clear indications of best practice in a number of critical management approaches, some still commonly overlooked. Are your management practices aligned with researched knowledge of KAM?
Rewards are mostly intended to act as incentives to encourage good performance, in this case, in KAM. But that begs the question of what is meant by ‘good KAM performance’ and how it is measured and assessed. This piece discusses the results of AKAM’s survey on how companies are evaluating KAM performance and what kind…
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