Rethinking Key Account Management:adapting and refining your Sales organization’s response to the new realities
2
Everybody would agree on the strategy,
even more when you know that the
Pareto principle applies here also with
20% of the customers generating
80% of the revenue/profit. However
when looking at our recent CSO
Insights’ study, execution seems
different:
Key Account Management is a
systematic process for managing key
interactions and relationships with
most valuable customers. It focuses
on the creation, implementation,
execution and evaluation of an overall
plan to guide the account team in
developing new relationships at the
C-level, aligning the best resources to
the most profitable opportunities and
delivering what was promised.
Managing the future
Most executives recognize that the real assets of a company
are embedded in the quality of the relationships between
the company and its most important stakeholders, such as
clients or customers, employees and suppliers. Developing
strategic relationships with customers should therefore be
a central issue on the CSO’s agenda moreover in current
context.
51%
More than half of the compa-nies recognize that they needimprovement in selecting keyaccounts
60%
CSO interviewed understandthey lose deals because theircompetitors have established a better relationship with theircustomer
52%
Also recognize their KeyAccount plan need improvment
The consolidation of buying power in
the B2B sector over the last decade
has increased the importance of key
account management across numer-
ous industries:
• It is long evident in the Consumer
Product Goods – witness the
co-location of 500 P&G and over
200 Johnson & Johnson personnel in
Fayetteville, Arkansas; headquarters
for Wal-Mart. This large number of
personnel is taking over the manage-
ment of competitor product cate-
gories and supply chain responsibili-
ties for their customer. There was a
time, when Wal-Mart may have four
sales people from 4 product lines,
calling on the same customer. This
manner of interaction is no longer
acceptable.
• Consider the wholesales fuel (gaso-
line) business. One large, multi-
national energy company use to work
“jobbers” or regional distributors of
fuel must now contend with whole-
salers and grocery chains who take
over a larger share of the retail fuel
market. This requires a new response
from the supplier and the industry
value chain.
• Witness the automotive industry:
- A tier 1 automotive supplier knew
they needed to improve key account
management capabilities when their
OEM customer was more knowledge-
able of their global pricing policy than
their individual account teams; the
supplier was at a significant disad-
vantage when negotiating prices that
were inconsistent by region.
- Or consider one premier tire manu-
facturer that like the fuel supplier
must now learn to sell to the likes of
Costco and major multi-country dis-
tributors in Europe.
• Not to be overlooked, emerging
market multi-nationals are now work-
ing to penetrate mature markets –
moving from undeveloped markets in
Africa, SE Asia, to mature markets in
Europe and the U.S. where they must
compete with already established key
account competitors. In these circum-
stances, it is just not technology and
low cost that wins the deal, but also
the capacity to show product devel-
opment roadmaps and ensure highly
reliable service in a complex environ-
ment where risk tolerance is zero and
where English is the first language.
These examples and the increasing
concentration of buying power in
many industries have increased the
level needed to improve key account
management practices.
3
Why Key Account Management has become increasingly
important
4
The 10 key success factors of Key
Account Management.
Accenture has identified what high
performing sales organizations are
doing to enhance business and rela-
tionships with their most important
customers:
Strategy
1. Start with a customer-based
segmentation strategy, implementing
differentiated approaches for key
accounts and other tiers. Criteria
include existing and future revenue
growth, strategic position in the
industry.
2. Align sales organization (global
versus local) and process steps with
their key customers, establish long-
term partnering agreements on an
added-value-reward sharing basis and
have intensive cooperation through
mutual knowledge sharing.
Organization
3. Align organization to the customer’s
organization, when possible: single
account leads with similar functional
heads for product, supply chain,
marketing, and operations.
4. Carefully select the “Account
Planning Team” with the right com-
plement of skills to develop robust
account plan. This is a cross-functional
team composed of dedicated and
indirect personnel.
Process
5. Define a clear process of what is
a key account, determining target
customer needs, and implementing
procedures to ensure that they receive
customer service based on total value.
6. Conduct regular key account plan
review meetings to monitor action
plan and sales results that are
integrated in company-wide review
cycles.
7. Have maintenance process to
maintain key account “power map”.
8. Have a partnership approach, joint
process and product improvements
with regular target measurement for
strategic customers.
Technology
9. Have access to a common repository
of information – the customer profile,
relationship maps, sales data, won/loss
analysis, internal organizational
charts, etc. that facilitate coordinated
communication at both tactical and
operational levels to allow for one
common message.
10. Embed your account plan in a
sales tool that is visible to all team
members. All aspects of planning-
including optimization of resources-
developed, distributed, and tracked
electronically.
What are Top performers doing?
Outside the traditional increase of
share of wallet in existing customers,
which is for many segments of the
B2B sector the primary strategy for
growth, an effective implementation
of Key Account Management requires
not only organizational and process
changes but above all a change of
mind.
1. Know your Customer
The fatal flaw made by most account
teams is not doing their homework on
the customer’s business needs, related
to their industry and their position
in this industry. Typically, account
teams are great at identifying the
opportunities to exploit with their
customers; however, few take the
time to understand the customer’s
position. This yields a shallow under-
standing of their customer that too
often is apparent in client discussions.
Operating from a deep understanding
of the customer’s business allows the
account team to conduct conversa-
tions on things other than price.
While performing an assessment of
key account planning activities at a
customer in the C&HT industry, we
were able to identify up to 13 very
specific account plans that were not
shared across the account team. All
of them had valuable customer
insights but scattered among several
documents, the account team was
not able to exploit its full value.
To address this challenge, Top
Performers define, deploy and main-
tain one “consolidated” key account
plan to gather into one single place
all strategic account information.
Moreover, it allows to share best
practices to the whole Sales Key
account team members but also to
the Top management.
2. Increase win ratesand focus on valuableopportunities
We also often hear our clients say
they can’t afford the luxury of losing
a single opportunity, even more in the
current economical context. However
this should not obscure the fact that
all the opportunities do not require
the same degree of attention. To
know which opportunity is more
important than another, we have
established a detailed approach that
through a set of critical success fac-
tors, questions, and job aides analyze
throughout the sales:
- If you are able to win this opportu-
nity,
- If you want to win this opportunity,
- If you win, will you then be able to
deliver what was promised.
Again this may sound obvious, how-
ever systematically applying this
method as early as possible in the
sales cycle has allowed some of our
customers to better anticipate next
stages. To give one example, who has
not heard this common: “let’s win this
first, and then we’ll see how we can
deliver it”. Well one of our customer
has paid the price for this. While he
was responding to an RFP that he
helped co-authored with his client,
while he offered the best technical
solution, while ... everything seemed
favorable to his victory, he lost
because he had badly prepared the
delivery phase. This phase could only
be done in partnership with two com-
panies on the market that each had
signed an exclusive agreement with
two of his competitors.
3. Build a momentum
An effective key account management
program calls for investments.
However, as the benefits have shown,
there are pay offs for these invest-
ments. Helping all companies to agree
on the gains and make the invest-
ment when both time and money
are in short supply. Nonetheless, it
remains a challenge.
A diplomatic way to enable sales
force to realize their lack of global
view of the account as well as strate-
gic alignment, hence the opportunities
they may be missing can be achieved
by organizing a Sales Bootcamp.
Bringing your best resources in the
same place to simulate an Account
Plan session and elaborating with
them the best value proposition based
on this new common understanding
of customer needs is really powerful.
This was done with many of our
customers and therefore being able
to identify in a few days new oppor-
tunities hitherto unexplored has often
been a good stimulus for sales force
adherence and willingness to change
their way of working.
5
Successfully implementing Key Account
Management
6
Given the benefits and value creation
potential, Accenture sees it as wise to
start implementing or further rollout
Key Account Management, particularly
in a transition from a difficult econo-
my to an upturn. This is the moment
of opportunity to improve the quality
of key customer relationships.
Accenture’s approach to KAM is broad,
reaching strategic, tactical and opera-
tional levels, encompassing internal
and external activities. It begins with
building a vision, strategy and defining
actionable KPI set, all of which are
aligned to the overall company
strategy. It also takes into account
the current economic situation and
recognizes that business benefits
need to be quickly realized.
In Accenture’s experience, the
rewards were to:
• increase customers intimacy and
start moving the overall customer
satisfaction index from average to
high
• improve win rate and capture rate
as well as deal profitability by up to
15% through improved opportunity
qualification and value proposition
development
• reduce companies’ competitor cus-
tomer influence through the identifi-
cation of new coaches and supporters
at C-level
• Develop a unique competitive advan-
tage through quality improvements,
innovation and faster time-to-market.
For example, our recent success
stories are:
• For an large manufacturer company,
the deployment of an industrialized
Key Account Management process
combined with rigorous key account
plan reviews helps to improve the win
and capture rate by up to two digits.
• For an international company in
electronic industry, the opportunities
qualification’s optimization, and the
shared and detailed power map docu-
mentation impact the win probability
ratio by more than 10 points.
Accenture’s approach to Key Account Management
1. Understand Customer
2. Create Plan
3. Execute Plan
4. Evaluate Performance
Vision and Strategy
Processes
Enablers
Joint Business Success
CustomerRelationship
Fig. 1: Accenture Key Account Management approach
The Accenture KAM approach is
helping companies to achieve high
performance in key account manage-
ment. With its commitment to find
the optimal solution for every unique
situation, Accenture has successfully
implemented this KAM methodology
for several clients around the world
in recent years. Putting our bench-
marking data to work helps clients
to pinpoint the areas where they
have the most potential to gain and
recommends leading practices to
shape the solution.
Accenture has developed an approach
that considers all elements leading to
successful Key Account Management
(Figure 1).
This model, which is aligned to the
generic CRM business process, includes
the vision and strategy, all relevant
processes and essential enablers.
• The vision and strategy: Account
planning driven by a consolidated,
common understanding of the
customer and vendor’s presence
at the customer.
• The processes: continuous closed
loop process integrating customer
relationship activities within account
planning at each step and including
clear Roles & Responsibilities defini-
tion for Account planning reviews.
• The enablers: crucial components to
make key account management
successful. From an organizational
point of view clear roles and responsi-
bilities have to be defined and spread
throughout the business. Employees
need to be trained in the specific
strategic account management tasks
and should have personal goals clearly
defined in order to align incentives
with strategic direction and optimize
results. From a technology point
of view standardized tools and
templates, including Organizational
Power Map have to be defined and
used.
To turn the methodology into reality,
Accenture has developed a set of
strategic Key Account Management
tools and templates based on
Accenture standard practices, pilot
projects and client experiences
(Figure 2).
7
Process
KAM Process
KAM Handbook
KAM Template guidance
Enablers
Customer Profile
Vendor Profile
Account Plan
Account Plan Workbook
Performance Dashboard
Descriptions of the key steps, Inputs and outputs and roles & responsibilities associated
with the KAM Solution
Describes how to use the enablers of KAM solution (CP, VP, AP, Workbook). Providing
clear instruction on operation procedures in daily work and R&R assignments within
the team
Explain how to complete templates and provide examples with job aids
Consolidated understanding of the Customer business, including industry environment,
organization, strategy and financial analysis (ppt format)
Consolidated view of Company engagement with the Customer including project
history, competition analysis, market share analysis and relationship analysis
(power map, ppt format)
Tactics and plans to achieve the objectives for the coming year. Aligned to multi years
strategy and based on a deep understanding of the Customer (Customer Profile and
Vendor Profile). Incorporates Budget and Market space analysis output (ppt format)
Centralized account management action plan to realize the objectives of the Account
Plan: key dimensions include market target, relationship management, competition
management (xls format)
Graphical illustration of Account KPI providing a monthly breakdown of actual against
targets to identify performance gaps (xls format)
Fig. 2: Accenture Key Account Management assets
Copyright © 2011 Accenture
All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
About the authors
Fabrice Marque is a Senior Executive
at Accenture, leading the CRM Service
Line in France. He is responsible for
our Service Transformation offerings
at EALA level: multi-channel strategy,
customer experience design, contact
centre activities organization, etc.
He has more than 15 years of
experience within Accenture, and
has worked across various industries:
Telecom, Electronic and High-
Technologies, Public Service,
Insurance, Energy, Health…
Mahfoud Chebboub is a Senior
Manager at Accenture, leading the
CRM – KAM offering in France. He
is member of the CRM – Sales
Transformation practice with a
specialty on B2B industries.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management
consulting, technology services and
outsourcing company, with approxi-
mately 204,000 people serving clients
in more than 120 countries.
Combining unparalleled experience,
comprehensive capabilities across all
industries and business functions, and
extensive research on the world’s
most successful companies, Accenture
collaborates with clients to help them
become high-performance businesses
and governments. The company
generated net revenues of US$21.6
billion for the fiscal year ended Aug.
31, 2010. Its home page is
www.accenture.com.
Contacts :
Fabrice Marque
Mahfoud Chebboub
01.53.23.60.62