What is Key Account Management?
What’s in a word?
Some people object to the word ‘account’: ‘Surely it should be key customer’, they say, ‘calling them accounts makes it sound like we’re a bank.’
I justify the use of the word on one ground only, and that is that it represents the customer as an investment made by the supplier in its own future.
Key Account Management is about managing those investments, which is something rather different from selling. Put simply: Key Account Management is about managing the future.
Managing the future
This is never easy, though in principle it’s all quite straightforward. Figure 5.1 shows the three things that you have to balance if you are to be successful in this pursuit: your objectives, your resources ...
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