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Tuesday, June 25th, 2019
How to work with strategic customers to create joint solutions for growth. Article summary Persistent, disruptive forces impacting profitable growth are intensifying, and as a result, companies in many industries face slower growth and accelerating commoditization of product and service margins. Given marketplace complexity and dynamic shifts in how customers buy, traditional business models are threatened and new strategies and…
Wednesday, March 27th, 2019
How to make a successful transition from individual contributor to manager? Project aim The purpose of this project is to examine whether the transition from high-performing salesperson to effective sales manager can be made more successful. As McCall (2010) highlights, there is a big risk to this promotion: “When situations change dramatically, as is the case when a person is…
Wednesday, March 27th, 2019
This report from Cranfield’s KAM and Strategic…
Thursday, March 21st, 2019
As part of a wider professionalisation of the sales function, forward-looking companies are discovering the benefits of sales education as a way to equip their people to thrive in today’s complex and challenging business environment. Today’s business landscape is challenging in multiple ways: it’s super competitive; technology is forcing us to deal with change and adapt our go-to-market models at…
Thursday, March 21st, 2019
This is the first of a series of articles in which the authors explore customer value and differentiation. In this article Dr Simon Kelly and Dr Paul Johnston consider the importance of customer value and its criticality in building effective value propositions. They draw together their experience as marketing and sales practitioners, their recent academic and commercial research, and their…
Tuesday, December 18th, 2018
As we explore how to build a KAM programme, we need to consider strategy – customer by customer. In the first article of this series inspired and adapted from our book Implementing KAM, we explored the reasons why KAM is becoming critical for selling organisations and the customers they serve, why a shift towards a customer-centric approach is critical, and…
Friday, September 21st, 2018
Here we explore designing customer-centric processes for mutual growth. More than three decades of research and managerial practice have informed the development of a solid knowledge base for defining and planning key account management (KAM). Executives attending our KAM training programmes and commissioning consulting interventions tell us time and time again that the crucial challenge is the implementation of KAM….
Friday, April 28th, 2017
by Professor Malcolm McDonald, Dr Beth Rogers This book explores the challenges of winning, retaining and developing key accounts. Key accounts are customers who help their suppliers grow, and consequently, they wield significant power. Although they are the key to market share and revenue growth, the costs of serving key accounts can erode profitability unless they are thoroughly understood and…
Sunday, April 23rd, 2017
Professor Malcolm McDonald and Dr Beth Rogers look back on two decades of key account management and consider where it can go from here. In 1998, Malcolm McDonald and Beth Rogers wrote a small book called Key Account Management: Learning from Supplier and Customer Perspectives. It was based on their research at Cranfield School of Management about the then relatively…
Saturday, January 28th, 2017
Surprisingly little research has been conducted to uncover the major challenges for KAM implementation in professional service firms. Here, the authors discuss how to identify and address them. Professional Service Firms (PSF) provide specialised advice to their customers, and are characterised by knowledge intensity, low capital intensity (in fixed assets), and a professionalised workforce, which makes them distinct from companies…
Thursday, April 7th, 2016
How the investment community works and why SV is good not only for marketing, but also for KAM. There are two schools of thought about the topic of shareholder value (SV). One school, led by Professor Hugh Davidson, argues that it leads to short-termism. The other school, to which I belong, argues that short-termism has been endemic in Western economies…
Saturday, October 31st, 2015
As part of his MSc Professional Practice in Sales Transformation, Sony Mobile’s Russell Keating explores how to unlock more sales through a strategic understanding of his client’s key concerns as well as those of his own organisation. This project relates to work with one of the largest mobile phone operators in Ireland, referred to as the “client” throughout this paper….
Saturday, October 31st, 2015
Much has been talked about the nature of value propositions but how do KAMs go about the act of proposing value? Paul Johnston explores KAM distinctiveness, social context and identity. What makes a key account manager distinctive from other salespeople? Much has been researched and written about KAM best practice (see for example Rackham, 1995; Payne et al, 1998; Ulaga,…
Monday, July 6th, 2015
As part of his MSc Professional Practice in Sales Leadership, Sony Mobile’s Gustavo Mancera describes how research and reflection led to a new mind-set and approach that created differentiation in the marketplace. The problem to be addressed The rapidly changing market affected the entire team´s mind-sets including myself. We had fallen prey to negative mind-sets (Squire, 2009) while struggling to…
Saturday, April 11th, 2015
Dr Philip Squire, CEO at Consalia says: “The one book that provoked my early interest in sales was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, published in 1936. It’s still a good read today.” He also mentions The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford; Global Account Management Creating Value by David Hennessey and…
Saturday, April 11th, 2015
Nick de Cent finds that pharma thought-leaders are successfully adapting KAM models to their own ecosystem. Not all big accounts are key accounts. That’s one important lesson that the pharma industry has been learning the hard way. Another is that effective key account management (KAM) is more about finding effective solutions than simply flogging product in a more complex environment….
Saturday, April 11th, 2015
Beth Rogers leafs through some recent Masters dissertations to see what has been exercising the minds of sales managers. One of the joys of running a course such as a top-up Masters programme for sales managers is that their learning is applied to their company, and both tutor and student can see the potential impact. One of the downsides is…
