The role of information technology
Curse or saviour?
Information technology has made the practice of KAM possible and practical, but all too often it has also threatened to strangle it at birth.
Before the days of e-mails and mobile phones, the kind of cross-functional diamond teams we have been describing would have been very hard work indeed. For most sales professionals it was so much easier to get on with the job as an island of independence. My own memory of working on major accounts in the early 1980s is of a once a month face-to-face meeting with my sales manager – the rest was pretty much down to me.
So, what we might call the first wave of IT was almost entirely beneficial, enabling conversations to be had more frequently, more easily, ...
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