Individual member benefits

AKAM is your route to recognition as a professional in key account management

AKAM offers you the opportunity to develop your understanding and practice of KAM, which in turn will enable you to demonstrate your competency to employees and colleagues. Whether you are involved in KAM at the frontline as a key account manager or as the leader/enabler of and organisations KAM programme, or as a teaching and researching academic, or in consultancy to support or train those in the frontline, AKAM offers you different ways of developing your knowledge and expertise and growing your network with like-minded people. We have used the network to help practitioners to find solutions to issues and test ideas, connected people who have picked up new ventures together, and found interview participants for researchers.

In addition, AKAM offers a route to the only professional qualification in key account management, the Diploma (see KAM Qualifications for details).

How does it work?

Meetings and Webinars

There are three meetings a year, which are free to Members: generally two highly participative workshops led by KAM experts and practitioners, and one conference with a wide range of presentations. Pre-pandemic meetings were held all over Europe: e.g. Paris, London, Oslo, Dublin, Lugano, Madrid, Milan, Berlin, and will resume when safe to do so.

We run frequent webinars which are accessible from all over the world, all on KAM topics: about 70% are exclusive to AKAM members. Meeting and webinar presentations are all loaded into Member Resources on the website afterwards, with exclusive access to members, so even if you can’t make a meeting or live webinar, you can get some good ideas from it whenever it suits you.

On-line Member Resource Centre

We are constantly adding to the materials available to Members only via the website. There are papers and articles, some practical and some academic, tackling a wide variety of KAM topics with a keyword search facility to help you find what you need. There are also tools and diagnostics that you can apply in your own organisation, which will save you a lot of time and trouble. Plus there are case studies, videos and lists of references to make it easy for you to learn more.

As far as we know, there is no other online resource for KAM like it. We expected to double in size over the next couple of years, and we hope Members will let us know what they want to see.

Diploma in KAM

The AKAM Diploma is open to anyone, though access to the Member Resource Centre on the website gives you a lot of great material to help you build your competencies, both in the job and on paper. The Diploma is aimed at experienced key account managers who want to prove their competencies (to current and future employers, and to themselves). It works through RPL: Recognition of Prior Learning, so you can don't have to attend at any particular time or place and you can work through it at your own pace.

Member network

Members have exclusive access to the member network of names, organisations and email addresses so you can contact people you’ve met at a meeting, or even start up a conversation with someone you’ve never met. Meetings are a great place to learn more about KAM in other organisations and to meet people who can help you in the future, either by giving you advice, referring you to someone who can help, or even just being somewhere to download your challenges. We have Members all over the world, particularly in Europe.

The AKAM Bulletin

The Bulletin is not exclusive to members, but you can readily sign up to it and receive directly AKAM news and a couple of thought-provoking articles every month.

AKAM development

We have plenty of ideas about how we would like to develop AKAM, and the best route to value adding support for Members is to have them involved, either by just letting us know how a professional organisation in KAM can support them, or by actively helping us organise that support. For example, we have launched Awards for key account managers, and we are working on a webinar offering. AKAM is involved in KAM research and would like to hear from its members what topics should be explored.