Key Account Management: Strategies to Leverage Information,Technology, and Relationships to Deliver Value to Large Customers

Now more than ever, companies are faced with a critical and challenging truth. Today’s customer is demanding more attention, superior service, and the expertise of a dedicated sales team. Suppliers must make difficult choices to determine how to allocate limited resources, including which customers receive the highest level of service. Increasingly, supply side organizations are working to design and implement key account programs to meet or exceed these expectations. Key account management is a specific business strategy that involves complex sales processes, large-scale negotiations, and the alignment of multiple internal and external stakeholders. This multi-pronged process is anything but straightforward, and the business world is filled with examples of key account programs that have not achieved the expected results. This book addresses the strategic challenges facing top executives and sales leaders as they build strategies to better manage their key accounts.

By leveraging up-to-date research, testimonials drawn from interviews with experienced practitioners, best practices of successful companies, along with straightforward practical guidelines for executives and sales leaders, this book can serve as an instruction manual and toolbox for organizations working to achieve success through their key account strategies to meet the demand of their key customers.

About the Authors

Joël Le Bon is a marketing professor at the University of Houston C.T. Bauer College of Business and director of executive education for the Sales Excellence Institute. He received a Bachelor of Arts in management science, a Master of Science in marketing and strategy, and a PhD in marketing from the University of Paris Dauphine. He is also an alumnus of the Kellogg ITP program of Northwestern University and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Pennsylvania State University within the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM).

Carl Herman has over 30 years of experience in high tech sales, key accounts sales, and in senior sales management. He earned his BA degree in economics from the Colorado College, and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. He has held sales and sales executive positions for five high technology compa¬nies: Unisys, Oracle, Siebel Systems, KPMG Consulting, and Landmark Graphics, a Halliburton Company.