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There is a fair amount of work to do to produce a strategic key account plan – you don’t want to spend time trying to decide on a format. Use this downloadable tried and tested framework to communicate necessary information and plans in a logical and coherent form that anyone who needs to know in…
Once you’ve reached an agreement with your key account, probably the last thing you want is to get bogged down in the legal ‘details’ of the contract. But that approach could rebound disastrously! Jeremy Newton amply highlights the importance of clarity and anticipation in contracts. It may seem like legal negativity at the time, but…
Key Account Managers play pivotal roles in securing smooth business operation in a crisis period. You control a major part of your company’s business and much depends on you to help your company and your customer cope with the difficulties. Communication with your accounts is crucial: one customer said ‘You can always tell a good key account manager from a…
The crucial job of selecting key accounts was addressed by Dr Marco Sisti of SDA Bocconi University in Milan. The idea of choosing key accounts according to size of their past sales with the supplier is regrettably still very common. There are definitely better ways of carrying out this all-important task, as this very practical presentation demonstrated.…
The COVID-19 outbreak is causing the biggest disruption in decades to economies and businesses across the world. State of Flux 12 years of global annual research into supplier management best practices shows that most organisations are significantly exposed when it comes to supplier risk management, specifically pandemic risks. And while procurement and supply chain organisations…
Feedback from the March meeting requested a session on KAM frameworks and processes, presented here by Diana Woodburn, AKAM Chairman. She offered wide range of devices, most of which act first as diagnostics and then as decision-support tools and management action guides that convert into processes. Frameworks demonstrated included customer selection/categorisation, through risk assessment to key account prioritisation…
Sustainability is the buzzword everywhere but it seems to mean very different things to different people in different places. Often it is not even a single issue (see the list in this article), so the combination of aspects that makes up each corporate’s definition of sustainability is really variable – and volatile, as external events…
Close and strong business relationships potentially have many positive effects. However, researchers Nima Hierati and Yumen Zhang of Queen Mary University London identified the possibility of forces of destruction building below the surface. This short report on their pilot study revealed alarming developments such as risky reductions in partners’ monitoring and safeguarding activities, and the dangers…
Risk awareness has always been in the long list of skills required of key account managers, but it is rarely high enough on the list, and awareness is not enough anyway. Being in business is about managing risk as well as making profits. Most risk is considered as financial, and while the ultimate impact may…
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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