Recent interest in relationship marketing and customer retention has re-focused the attention of marketing academics and managers towards Key Account Management (KAM) systems as a means of operationalising long-term buyer/seller relationships. This paper examines the nature of KAM in industrial markets. It is structured around several strategic issues elicited from two main sources: first, empirical research in the area of industrial sales management and selling to major accounts; and second, observations from running a series of management development programmes for account managers. While different companies and industries are in different stages of KAM systems development, it is clear that many managers have found the shift from the relatively narrow focus of key account selling to the broader requirements of key account management problematic. Three interrelated conclusions have emerged from our work. First, most of the literature and debate on KAM has taken the seller's perspective. Second, there appears to be inadequate matching of the seller's total offering with the buyer's increasingly strategic and dynamic context. This is particularly evident in the short-term focus pervading some seller companies and in their failure to keep abreast of the kind of supply chain issues currently facing industrial buyers. Third, key account managers are often illprepared for the wider and more demanding roles which take them into areas of business development, industry/market analysis, benchmarking, relationship management and so on. KAM processes appear to be under-researched and, therefore, only partially understood. An agenda for empirical research is therefore proposed as a necessary precursor to any attempt to define KAM competencies, management development and best-practice. osa.

Addresses the question of how to make key account management processes in industrial and business‐to‐business markets more customer focused. Considers the processual issues emerging from recent empirical research and looks at a range of factors: cultural; organisational; and attitudinal; which have been found to affect the benefits gained from attempting to implement KAM processes. Points are drawn from a number of different sources, such as: formal research projects, studying particular buyer/seller dyads, broader industry surveys, and from observations made during KAM workshops and consultancy projects. They are presented as a guide to those issues that will be the major focus of future research.

No abstract

Argues that key account management (KAM) in industrial and business‐to‐business markets has its roots in sales management where it has long been recognized that customers of strategic importance require special treatment. Explains that, more recently, growing interest among academics and practitioners in relationship marketing has forced KAM centre stage as one of the few seemingly tried and tested approaches to customer retention and development, but that this trend has exposed three interrelated problems for the adoption of KAM systems. Maintains that: first, many companies have merely extended their traditional approaches to major account selling, rather than transforming their internal processes to accommodate the wider relational aspects of KAM; second, there has been a rush to define managerial competences and best practice, with little theoretical or empirical underpinning; and third, despite parallel developments in purchasing and supply‐chain management, there has been a tendency for the sellers’ perspective to dominate implementation issues. Addresses these problems by operationalizing the relational development model outlined in an earlier article entitled “From key account selling to key account management” (JMP, Vol. 1 No. 1). Draws on the findings from ongoing empirical research which takes the buyer/seller dyadic relationship as the unit of analysis to provide a critique of the relative neglect of KAM processes in preference to outputs in the form of managerial competences.

No abstract