Processual issues in key account management: underpinning the customer‐facing organisation

Abstract

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.

Government, company, and dyadic factors affecting key account management performance in China: Propositions to provoke research

“…Guenzi et al (2007) further find that organizations' encouraging a relational strategy leads to greater customer-oriented selling, adaptive selling, and team selling. Among factors essential to KA relationship development, teamwork and coordination across supplier functions are important (Millman & Wilson, 1996), although overcoming "factional interests" (Millman & Wilson, 1999) as well as traditional within-firm power bases and other internal barriers (Brady, 2004) may limit the effectiveness of KAM's relationship building potential.…”

Supplier capacity and key account management performance: a stochastic frontier analysis

“…Top management emphasis (X 3 ) in key account management is conceptualized as the extent to which senior management participate in the key account management approach that develops the positive customer perception about the senior management commitment towards the key account management program (Homburg et al 2002;Millman and Wilson 1999).…”

“…Tsai and Chen (2008) mentioned that in the Asian context key account management literature are very rare. Researches relating to key account management were conducted in western and other developed countries like South African perspective (Abratt and Kelly 2002), perspective of United States (Boles et al 1999), Germany context (Homburg et al 2002;Homburg et al 2003), context of The Netherlands (Kempeners and van der Hart 1999); from the perspective of United Kingdom (Millman and Wilson 1999); from Finland context (Ojasalo 2001), a French perspective (Pardo 1999); and from the context of Australian (Spencer 1999).…”

Ethical and Moral Dilemmas Associated with Strategic Relationships between Business-to-Business Buyers and Sellers

“…Importantly for many suppliers, SAM is far more than a sales strategy for major accounts -it is a progression towards a form of ''partnership'', or network, or alliance with major customers, characterized by joint decision making and problem solving, integrated business processes and collaborative working across buyer-seller boundaries, described as a process of ''relational development'' (Millman and Kevin, 1989). Nonetheless, in spite of the growth of SAM, recent studies suggest that while SAM is one of the most fundamental changes in marketing organization, it is one where a sound research foundation to guide management decisions remains largely lacking (Homburg et al, 2002;Workman et al, 2003).…”