Key Account Management

CHAPTER 1

Key Account Management,Organizational Alignment,and the Selling Center

In many ways a firm’s most valuable financial asset is its customer base.

—Don Peppers and Martha Rogers

Setting up a key account program and strategy requires a careful analysis of the customers as assets, along with the suppliers’ strengths and weaknesses. Because selling to large customers consists of multiple stakeholders, key account programs should be built upon a clear vision and specific organizational resources which need to be aligned. In this chapter, we specify the criteria that help define key account customers and define selling centers’ structure and behavior. We also provide a framework for aligning the selling center with the key account strategy. ...