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In case anyone was in any doubt about what is required in a key account manager, Gintarė Bėtaitė’s experience as a recruiter with Amrop Executive Search enabled her to make the expectations very clear. And the answer is – hopefully no surprises to any AKAM member – that it’s not about sales history. Companies are looking for…
Employability of sales students and salespeople is one of sales education’s major challenges. Dr Stefan Wengler shows how different skills should be delivered by different means of instruction, depending on the sales person’s ‘development stage’ as well as the ‘Key Account Management Cycle’.
Companies frequently launch their Key Account Management programme without having considered all the pieces essential to its success. KAM is a strategy that goes way beyond sales management, not least because the whole company is involved in delivering its promises to key customers. In this substantial paper Dr Olivier Rivière explains how and where to get started on defining and scoping your organisation’s approach. The Sales…
Ask six people what KAM is and you’ll probably get six different answers, albeit with some common threads and themes. In contrast, AKAM is clear about what Key Account Management is, what a key account is, and what a key account manager is. This statement also identifies critical elements of KAM which means you can see when and where it is really happening,…
For Lufthansa Systems, key account manager leadership is an obligation, not an option. For over a year the business has been working hard on this issue. Alistair Thursfield, Head of Key Account Management, explained why and how the whole organisation had been driving three core attributes critical to the kind of leadership it wants to…
How much have you really changed your thinking around and approach to your key customers? Is it still fundamentally the same, an intense glare from Sales that goes no further along the value chain and fails to involve other managers in either organisation? Are you actually developing value for your customer as well as your company – because you will get…
KAM means launching a transformation program to change behaviors, capabilities and priorities across most functions. So what perspectives and frameworks would be most helpful for commercial leaders aiming to launch or improve their key customer management? Steve Sienkiewicz of Accelerate Consulting suggests that KAM ought to be viewed as three-stage journey through a series of transformations – Align, Advance and Accelerate – and details…
The Loccioni story was told from the point of view of a key account manager, Mattias Bernhard, which highlighted a different selection and operating approach for only partly dedicated key account managers in a common SME situation, where they may be focused on a narrower range of products/services with a potentially more technical sell, in addition to other roles…
Dr Olivier Rivière (AKAM Board Member) explains that successful KAM introductions rest on three ‘pillars’: KAM infrastructure – which means the specific processes that will enact KAM – Key Account teams, and Key Account plans. Key Account Managers don’t achieve much on their own, so KA teams should be selected and enabled from the beginning, which is sadly often not the…
Is KAM a strategy or a culture change? It’s both! But while it may get conscious attention as a corporate strategy, the culture change required is often overlooked. Often really contradictory cultural norms continue to prevail unchecked: e.g. like a constant focus on short-term results, or concerns about being ‘it can do the cleaners’ by…
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