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Papers and articles

Why are senior managers (not) involved with their firm’s most important customers?

There are radically different views on whether senior management should or should not be directly concerned with key customers. Sometimes challenging issues require the authority of the CEO, and senior managers in direct customer contact are generally more sympathetic to and accommodating about their needs and expectations. Customers have a view about their position with the supplier…

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Papers and articles

Collaboration beats commoditisation

Collaborative thinking allows organisations to apply their capabilities and resources to expand propositions. But it’s not so simple. Collaboration and integrated approaches can increase customers’ perception of risk and trigger internal friction. At the same time, formal contracts often feel more like ‘contracting for failure’ and can be really divisive. But David Hawkins of the Institute for…

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Papers and articles

Why are senior managers (not) involved with their firm’s most important customers? (In brief)

This very brief summary of conclusions from Victor Wullink’s Masters thesis gives a flavour of what he discovered from interviewing seven very different companies. He found that a relationship exists between the degree of KAM embeddedness in a firm and top management involvement. Its importance in terms of acquiring and retaining customers depends on customer perceptions, particularly when the product can be…

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Papers and articles

Quelle segmentation pour ses comptes stratégiques?

Ce n’est pas tout de vouloir mettre en place des comptes stratégiques, encore faut-il savoir les sélectionner. Lors de la conférence de l’Association des Key Account Managers (AKAM), le professeur Sisti, professeur de marketing et de vente à la Bocconi, a donné quelques indications. Parmi les éléments à prendre en compte : lier la segmentation…

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Papers and articles

Shareholder value measurement – essential for the future

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…

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Papers and articles

Is Key Account Management the same in large and small companies?

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…

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Diagnostics and tools

Valuing Key Accounts

No companies have unlimited resources, and even if they do, they still consider carefully where to apply their time and money to get the best return. Financial arguments can be and should be applied to key accounts as much as to any other funding decision. This approach shows you how to calculate the Net Present Value (NPV)…

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Diagnostics and tools

Process mapping for key accounts

How/does your company fulfil KAM promises? Do you even know? It should come as no surprise that key accounts expect key account managers to understand their own company even better than the customer’s business. What is surprising, though, is how poor is key account managers’ knowledge of their company’s capabilities and ways of working, particularly its processes. This…

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Case Studies

How KAM worked for Unipart with Vodafone

Maurice Daw tells how key account management spearheaded Unipart’s strategy to build on its dominant but saturated position in the automotive sector to enter the challenging world of telecoms. Unipart started as a traditional third-party logistics provider with Vodafone and ended up with a unique ten-year contract. The relationship developed from ‘hygiene factor’ to offering…

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Case Studies

Focus on key customer differentiation

Zaris is a security company with three strategic business units and five key customers that represent over 20% of its business. The case study outlines the financials and a short portrait of each customer. This poses questions about the selection and categorisation of key customers; customer profitability; allocation of key account managers to key accounts; objectives…

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