Verify Employment, Copyright © 2020 XANT, Inc. All rights reserved, Mapping The Sales Process: 6 Steps For Success, Know Key Accounts Intimately and Touch Base Regularly, The No. It is an intégrative élément of the business strategy . Your north star. With that in mind, it's crucial a KAM can work across the organization to develop these offerings. Effective management strategies for key accounts are what separates the top salespeople from the bottom-dwellers. 888.297.3009 1550 West Digital Drive, Suite 500 In addition to having business acumen, key account managers should have an analytical mindset. To assess and improve performance across roles and functions, you need to take a balanced-scorecard approach. An account overview 2. Are your current key accounts generating as much ROI as you anticipated? If a customer is about to experience significant growth, they may qualify as a strategic account. Key Account Management (KAM) is an innovative approach used by business-to-business suppliers to manage customer relationships; however, it can end up a massive flop if not effectively implemented. As cliché, as it sounds, failing to plan is planning to fail. You can't tell a key account they've been demoted, but you can tell a traditional buyer you're promoting them. Consistently measure account performance. It’s better to start too small than to start too big. If the company has a formal key account management strategy in place, the company has done half the job. Strategic account management (SAM) or key account management focuses on building long-term mutually beneficial partnerships with key customers. Key Account Management: Performance, Measurement and Rewards Research Summary by Dr. Iain A. Davies, Senior Lecturer in Marketing . Stay up to date with the latest marketing, sales, and service tips and news. Caring About Key Account Management As professional services firm BTS points out, key account programs often lead to increased costs and lower margins. Use LinkedIn (either the free version or LinkedIn Navigator) to monitor changes in your account's market and industry, strategic shifts, hiring and firing decisions, and more. This role is important because it helps us keep our most important customers and ideally, find even more opportunities for working together. System integrators 3. Key accounts don't usually buy off-the-shelf: They want a custom blend of products and services tailored to their needs. These investments often include structuring and aligning your business’ processes and systems to maximize account value. Your ultimate objective is transforming the entire department into paying users. In reality, what most sales leaders tell us is they are seeing key account management create downward pressure on pricing without sufficient upside revenue and share growth. Periodically assess your selection criteria. As a business discipline, it refers to the process of identifying or targeting key accounts, which have strategic value, and developing a deeper, more meaningful, mutually beneficial relationship with them. For example, maybe your sales engineering team is responsible for getting a meeting with the CTO by January. Having the right tools in place can make the job of a KAM a lot easier and more effective. Key Account Management is a strategic decision The broadened scope of superior key account management is reaching far beyond selling products or services to important clients with high sales turnover. Coordination and planning of activities for complex accounts. What will you start doing to significantly improve the way you manage your key accounts? And programs that have been around for five-plus years can see results twice that. Whenever key account management strategies implemented, it is vital to start small. And because KAM requires an intimate relationship with accounts involved, salespeople must regularly meet up or touch base with their key account customers. KAM is a radically different organizational process used by … The core feature of a key account is the existence of a decision-making unit (composed of various healthcare related functions) as opposed to an individual clinician taking on the … There are different ways to filter key accounts from ordinary ones, but the best guiding principle is the company’s objectives. ISVs 5. Business partners 6. pillar of their strategy. The above rule has an exception: If you can get your foot in the door of the prospect's company and then grow the account by selling to other departments, offices, subsidiaries, etc., a key account strategy may be a good investment. Strengthen your relationship by showing how you can add value to your client’s company. (Obviously, you still want to provide excellent customer service and support to promote word-of-mouth marketing and high retention rates.). Key Account A person or a group of people with whom your business has built more than just a standard business relationship, based on the trust level between you and the buyers. That’s why even before identifying and going after key accounts, salespeople should know what makes for a key account. Key Account Management (KAM) is a process of looking after large and important accounts that are critical to the business. Key accounts must be filtered through their strategic values, or their ability to help the company accomplish its goals. A formal key account management strategy removes much of the KAM guesswork. Within key account management, the biggest challenge from large customers is the intensifying pressure on price negotiations. Key Account Management Training. Strategic account management involves juggling several initiatives, priorities, and campaigns at one time. Formal key account management strategies are the opposite of that — they’re the plans salespeople make to avoid failure. It is easy to get distracted from the fundamentals necessary for account management strategy execution. These customers represent a disproportionate percentage of your revenue, refer new prospects to your company, give you credibility in their space — or all of the above. hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(53, '6fc73954-1b14-47ca-ab80-fefff0626a9b', {}); Originally published Mar 12, 2020 3:00:00 PM, updated October 08 2020, Key Account Management: The Ultimate Guide, How to Know Whether Your Company Needs A Key Account Management Strategy, The Difference Between Key Account Management and Selling, Which Skills Your Key Account Managers Need, How to Hire Key Account Managers (Including a Job Description Template), How to Write A Key Account Management Plan, professional services firm BTS points out, How to Create a Sales Plan: Template + Examples, Outcome Selling: Don’t Sell the Product, Sell the Outcome, Sales Maximization: A Picture of Its Principles and Practice. Strategic account management (also known as Key Account Management) is a process of building value-driven strategic relationships with your key customers that can help in long-term development and retention, thereby maximizing the revenue potential. Here are some things to keep in mind when it comes to managing key accounts. Focusing on the benefits or the specific solutions to problems that the products or services’ features can provide. You should involve the client in the process to ensure that the plan is valid and actionable. What is a Key Account? Being highly-informed customers means they might not be easily persuaded by products and features. They can play a major role in getting the necessary resources, connecting with the C-suite at the target account, and providing high-level guidance. Key account management strategies are like romantic relationships. Then we’ll help you design road maps to address near-term priorities and long-term goals, and build and deliver the case for change. Luckily, like other good habits, these processes can be learned, … do they have the connections, resources, and/or industry reputation to significantly alter your company's trajectory? Page 4. strategies . To be successful, KAMs should be capable of planning short-term and long-term plays, carrying them out, analyzing the outcomes, and applying those takeaways to their future strategies. ADVERTISEMENTS: Many B2B companies have adopted a market-based customer management structure, variously called key account management, national account management, regional account management or global account management. A salesperson’s key accounts are highly likely to be their most highly-informed customers. In turn, this may prevent that person from managing key accounts well enough to satisfy and keep them. Key Account Management is a strategic approach distinguishable from account management or key account selling and should be used to ensure the long-term development and retention of strategic customers. Key accounts are the lifeblood of any business and salespeople shouldn’t improvise as they do KAM. We use the term key account management (KAM) to cover all four forms. Through in-depth research and assessment, strategic account managers find opportunities to drive value for their partners by identifying problems, offering creative solutions, and leveraging partnerships to move both organizations toward their … Key account management requires specialized skill sets and competencies. Before you go all-in on a key account strategy, consider the following points. This includes creating offers that are exclusive to key accounts. In this post, we share strategies to help salespeople get to and stay on top of the sales industry ladder. Not only do KAMs find ways to address the client's challenges and opportunities, but they also create and present reports about the client's progress to key stakeholders. As the leader, you are partially responsible for reconciling company goals with KAM goals and creating a strategy that’s supportive of both. However, strategic value may include other things, such as the ability to enter a new but very promising market, among others. KAM is a structure that facilitates the implementation of CRM at the level of the … We use the term key account management (KAM) to cover all four forms. If they are performing as expected to justify the resource allocation, then continue on. It’s the map that shows where your client is today, where they want to be tomorrow – and how you’re going to get there. This section should cover how much this account is currently worth, which opportunities you've lost, which opportunities you've won, where you see potential revenue growth and your projected value for those opportunities. If you can promise to make them a key account — and your competition can't do the same — you're likelier to win the deal. To turn buyers into business partners, a key account manager (KAM) typically provides dedicated resources, unique offers, and periodic meetings. [Company name] is looking for a key account manager. You can also try investing in a video platform such as Loom so you can create personalized videos for prospecting and relationship-building. key account management programs look like?” Done right, better key account programs can obtain more customer volume at lower discounts while not adding to costs. Key Account Management Preeta H Vyas Assistant Professor, Adani Institute of Infrastructure Management Visiting Faculty, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad Email: preeta@iimahd.ernet.in Abstract This note tries to explain concept of key account management (KAM), factors leading to When customers see in specific and even personal terms how a product or service can help them achieve their goals, it can be easier to convince them to continue patronizing the business. Written by Aja Frost A KAM needs leadership abilities to guide her team members (which might include a salesperson, marketer, technical support, implementation and/or onboarding specialist). SAMA enables world-class companies to gain competitive advantage and secure market position by helping them build world-class capabilities around strategic account management. Yet, despite their repeated claims of doing just that, they continue to invest in marketing while key account management is still highly underdeveloped at most companies. Without numbers, it’s very hard or impossible for salespeople to objectively determine how good or bad they’re doing. Sales is one of the most competitive and cut-throat jobs any person can have, and a big chunk of any salesperson’s continued success comes with identifying, winning, and keeping key customer accounts. Key account managers can play a critical role in helping major customers buy business value rather than “piece parts.” The core themes of KAM, however, apply across all industries—especially the need to impose discipline in the management of customer relationships. : a Unique Insight into the mind, strategy and processes of a KAM program requires organization-wide change support. Used by many salespeople to evaluate their progress, or their ability to use key. 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