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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…
Understanding what drove your organisation towards KAM can be crucial in ensuring that it stays focused and makes progress during the quite significant amount of time it takes to make a KAM programme successful. In this short paper, Dr Diana Woodburn shares research into the factors that goad organisations into KAM, positive and negative, and…
Short paper from Bulletin No 1. Following the AKAM workshop in June 2017, Olivier Riviere concludes that size doesn’t matter for the fundamentals of KAM. But KAM, whatever its degree of sophistication, requires more resources than plain Account Management, and if those resources are allocated to KAM, they cannot be used for another purpose. So there…
Short paper from Bulletin No 1. Targets are a commonly used device in sales management, but are they appropriate in key account management? They are normally closely linked with rewards, which is what companies expect and intend, but it is critical that reward schemes are seen as fair, and targets are the element most likely…
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…
Too many suppliers have overused and abused the ‘partnership’ word, ultimately only offering a high-level sales relationship – not what customers expected and wanted. So many customers have become cynical about partnerships, and suppliers should only propose the approach if they genuinely mean it and know how to deliver it. This article by Richard Ilsley discusses what…
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?
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