Key Account Management, 6th Edition

14

Supplier positioning: managing suppliers

The lives of sellers and buyers have a good deal more in common than their traditional adversarial stances might suggest.

In a pre-KAM environment, the salesperson might have worked a ‘milk round’ (see Chapter 8) that viewed all customers as equal, so justifying the same amount of time and attention for each customer.

In what we might call a pre-KSM (pre-key supplier management) environment, the buying office would be inundated by a constant stream of representatives, each needing attention, and an equally constant stream of orders and invoices, each needing processing, such that the time spent on the really important suppliers was often little more than the time spent on the rather more ordinary. In ...