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Key Account Management

In: Business and Management

Submitted By abhyasmail
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Rethinking Key Account Management: adapting and refining your Sales organization’s response to the new realities

Managing the future
Most executives recognize that the real assets of a company are embedded in the quality of the relationships between the company and its most important stakeholders, such as clients or customers, employees and suppliers. Developing strategic relationships with customers should therefore be a central issue on the CSO’s agenda moreover in current context.

Key Account Management is a systematic process for managing key interactions and relationships with most valuable customers. It focuses on the creation, implementation, execution and evaluation of an overall plan to guide the account team in developing new relationships at the C-level, aligning the best resources to the most profitable opportunities and delivering what was promised.

Everybody would agree on the strategy, even more when you know that the Pareto principle applies here also with 20% of the customers generating 80% of the revenue/profit. However when looking at our recent CSO Insights’ study, execution seems different:

51% More than half of the companies recognize that they need improvement in selecting key accounts 60% CSO interviewed understand they lose deals because their competitors have established a better relationship with their customer 52% Also recognize their Key Account plan need improvment

2

Why Key Account Management has become increasingly important
The consolidation of buying power in the B2B sector over the last decade has increased the importance of key account management across numerous industries: • It is long evident in the Consumer Product Goods – witness the co-location of 500 P&G and over 200 Johnson & Johnson personnel in Fayetteville, Arkansas; headquarters for Wal-Mart. This large number of personnel is taking over the

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