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Key account managers have to navigate their own organisation and their key account’s. Having an awareness of how organisations manage themselves and people within them can make the process a whole lot easier. Company cultures differ, so interpreting and anticipating their impact can help to find alignment. The ways that organisations operate can seem very…
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…
Dr Diana Woodburn highlighted the principal issue, i.e. that the role of the key account manager is broad, cross functional, complex and long term, whereas they are predominantly rewarded for sales – which is sharply focused, functionally narrow, relatively simple and short term. Hence often poorly matched to the customer’s needs and timelines. Dr Diana…
Performance and reward schemes are notoriously tricky. Instead of stimulating the action and behaviour you want, they can just as easily act as a deterrent, especially in KAM, which is more complex and involves more people than Sales. Three frameworks are presented here to use as tools to help you develop the right scheme. The first…
Changing the reward system is one of the adaptations to KAM that organisations are most reluctant to change, but poorly focused reward schemes – usually sales volume based incentives – are not merely an unfortunate detail that will need to be sorted out at some stage: they can be a major driver in the wrong direction…
In this webinar, Diana Woodburn shares insight into different ways that organisations recognise KAM performance and its consequences. If you’re a KAM programme leader or HR professional, you need to consider whether your performance and reward scheme sends mixed messages and encourages unfortunate behaviour. If you’re a key account manager, you’ll want to coach your…
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…
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…
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…
Article | Survey findings. Rewarding key account managers is far from simple: rewards are generally linked to performance, and there are different views of what constitutes performance in KAM. Furthermore, while most organisations hope that rewards act as incentives, there are some approaches which actively disincentivize desirable outcomes. A good proportion of key account managers…
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