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Senior management involvement

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Papers and articles

Embracing the silos for KAM

Dr Hajo Rapp, Head of Strategic Account Management and Sales Excellence at TÜV SÜD AG, presents an unconventional view of organisational silos, traditionally seen as detrimental to effective KAM. While acknowledging their drawbacks, Dr Rapp identifies hidden strengths of silo structures, including specialisation, accountability, and operational agility. Instead of dismantling silos, he advocates for strategically…

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Papers and articles

When KAM corrupts

This article summarises a longer paper on ‘Boundary spanner corruption: a potential dark side of multi-level trust in marketing relationships’ (also available in Member Resources here). These aren’t familiar terms to practitioners, but perhaps they should be – boundary spanner corruption is becoming an increasing threat in relationships between key account managers and their counterparts!…

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Member Resources

Boundary spanner corruption: a potential dark side of multi-level trust in marketing relationships

What do you know about the ‘dark side’ of KAM relationships? For many years the authors of this research investigated and advocated the importance of trust in key supplier/customer relationships. But it’s not quite as simple as that. They define corruption as the ‘voluntary collaborative behaviour between individuals representing different organisations that violates their organisations’…

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AKAM Workshops & Conferences

C-Level sponsorship and engagement in building strategic partnerships

AKAM Board member Dominykas Cibulskas used these slides to illustrate his presentation to the Marcus Evans Conference on Strategic Account Management, held in Amsterdam in November 2023. He’s clear that key accounts expect their suppliers’ CEOs to be involved in the relationship, but in lots of companies, the CEO stays away and insists KAM is…

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Papers and articles

An introduction to the key elements of a KAM initiative

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…

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Diagnostics and tools

Transitioning to KAM (1): the different phases of KAM development

Any organisation needs to take much the same actions to develop and establish key account management as any other. A ‘rough and ready’ assessment from internal sources can show far the company has progressed along the KAM transitioning curve, by identifying which essential actions for KAM development have been taken, and to what extent. Valuable…

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Papers and articles

Are you offering a genuine partnership or just rebranding sales?

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…

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Papers and articles

Stuck on your KAM journey?

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…

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Diagnostics and tools

Transitioning to KAM (2): detailed audit and action checklist

This audit framework is aligned with the ‘quick and dirty’ checklist in ‘Transitioning to KAM (1), but shows more specific actions to bring all bases into line in your current position in KAM development, and shows you what to do next to move your organisation to where it wants to be. To understand the different phases of KAM development,…

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Papers and articles

KAM team talk

By KAM team we don’t mean your organisation’s bunch of key account managers!. In KAM’s challenging environments it is widely accepted that to win and grow business, suppliers need strong internal teamwork – how do we know? Because key customers tell us, all the time. But many key account programmes focus on account selection, strategies, value propositions…

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