Cambridge Business Association
Key Account Management
Book

Key Account Management

A Complete Action Kit of Tools and Techniques for Achieving Profitable Key Supplier Status

Peter Cheverton
Kogan Page, 2004
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Editorial Rating

6

Recommendation

As supply chains get shorter, industries are consolidating and buyers are narrowing their lists of preferred suppliers. This means that suppliers must get closer to their customers and manage their critical accounts carefully. This thorough survey of key account management outlines all of the essentials. Author Peter Cheverton provides a good overview of analytical tools, sound advice on strategy, timely warnings and even a CD with software and planning tools. Without great loss, the manuscript could have been trimmed much tighter, but the author’s style is clear enough that the unnecessary material is not particularly burdensome. getAbstract.com highly recommends this book to anyone with an interest in key corporate sales.

Summary

Key Account Management

To embark upon Key Account Management (KAM), first determine which customers matter most to your company’s future. Those are your key accounts. They are not necessarily your biggest customers, because smaller customers may be more important for the future. They aren’t the customers you think you can’t afford to lose, because often you will invest too much in those customers. They aren’t just the customers who offer the hope of future profits. You need profits today to make it to the future. Your key accounts are the customers who will be around now and in the future to help your company achieve its goals. Therefore, key account management is investment management.

Analyze every account as an investment in your future. Your analytical tools might include:

  1. PESTLE analysis - Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental change all affect the future.
  2. The Porter approach - Business thinker Michael E. Porter analyzes competition as a product of "five forces:" current competitors, new entrants, substitute products or services, customer bargaining power and supplier bargaining power.
    3. <...

About the Author

Peter Cheverton is Director of Insight Marketing & People, a key account management (KAM) consultancy and training firm. He is also the co-author of Key Account Management in Financial Services.

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