Key Account Management, 6th Edition

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Customer distinction

In Chapter 26 we walked through the first four steps of the six-step customer classification process. We start a new chapter for steps 5 and 6, largely to make clear the change in the nature of the task and the challenge.

Steps 1 through 4 asked us to think and to analyse, steps 5 and 6 require us to do something about all that thinking, something that will make a difference to our business.

Step 5: Customer distinction strategies

Having defined the four customer categories – key accounts, key development accounts, maintenance accounts and opportunistic accounts – the next step is to decide how our approach and our activities will be different in each case. If there is to be no distinction, then not only was the classification ...