Handbook of Strategic Account Management E-Book

Diana Woodburn

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1196

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A compilation of the established knowledge in strategic account management

While companies and academics expend tremendous effort on mass marketing, they often overlook their immediate customers (which are critical in both senses) and hence the importance of strategic account management (SAM). This handbook is a compilation of papers that present researched knowledge of SAM across the academic community which fills a void in the existing academic literature. Handbook of Strategic Account Management identifies drivers of the SAM approach, key issues and success factors, operational needs and areas still awaiting exploration. Each paper includes an overall referenced summary of the tenets of SAM relevant to the area it reports, and together with the combined list of references, it creates an indispensable resource for academic readers, students, and researchers.

Handbook of Strategic Account Management is written by over 40 knowledgeable experts with substantial experience of SAM from teaching, researching, writing and advising companies on why and how it works, spread widely across Europe and the US. It represents the balanced, researched body of knowledge in SAM and will be an invaluable resource to anyone exploring the approach, whether for a student thesis, for original research or for answers on how to approach SAM as a company initiative.

"Today’s strategic, key and global account management professionals owe thanks to a small community of academic researchers who, over the past three decades have been pioneers in identifying, cataloguing and analyzing the selling and business management practices of an emerging profession we now call strategic account management.  This Handbook is an important milestone to mark SAM’s still evolving impact on corporate business strategies and its ever-increasing relevance as a proven engine for growth in business-to-business strategic customer relationships."

Bernard Quancard,President & CEO of SAMA (US-based Strategic Account Management Association with over 3,000 members worldwide)

Yana Atanasova                Bjorn Ivens                         Toni Mikkola                    Ivan Snehota
Audrey Bink                      Ove Jensen                         Stefanos Mouzas             Kaj Storbacka
Per-Olof Brehmer              Robert Krapfel                     Peter Naudé                    Olavi Uusitalo
Noel Capon                       Antonella La Rocca              Jukka Ojasalo                  Tom Vanderbiesen
Simon Croom                    Sylvie Lacoste                    Catherine Pardo                Stefan Wengler
Osman Gök                       Nikala Lane                        Nigel Piercy                       Kevin Wilson
Paolo Guenzi                     Régis Lemmens                  Michael Pusateri                Diana Woodburn
Stephan Henneburg           Tommi Mahlamäki               Jakob Rehme                    John Workman
Sue Holt                           Malcolm McDonald               Sanjiy Sengupta               George Yip
Christian Homburg             Florin Mihoc                       Christoph Senn                 Judy Zolkiewski

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

The editors

About this book

Key strategic account management: where are we now?

A definition of KSAM

Questions for research

Section 1: Strategic dimensions of KSAM

Section 2: Value creation through KSAM

Section 3: Developing KSAM programmes

Section 4: Operationalizing KSAM

SECTION 1: Strategic Dimensions of KSAM

Making the case for managing strategic accounts

Introduction

Addressing customers

Generalized pressures on traditional go-to-market strategies

Pressures from customers

Impact of pressures on the firm

Conclusion

Drivers for key account management programmes

Introduction

Key account management

Managing industrial sales complexity: A tentative framework

Three key account management programmes at ABB

KAM programme drivers

Conclusions

KSAM as an organizational change: making the transition

Introduction

KSAM strategy

KSAM structure

Making the change

Conclusion

Switching costs in key account relationships

Conceptual framework and hypotheses

Data collection

Results

Discussion

The strategic buyer: how emerging procurement strategies may support KAM/SAM relationships

Introduction

The strategic importance of purchasing

The economics of trust

Strategic alignment

Power-based relationships

Collaborative innovation

The transformation of purchasing and supply

Implications for future SAM/KAM research

Conclusion

Social and ethical concerns in strategic account management: emerging opportunities and new threats

Introduction

Strategic relationships between organizations

Strategic account management relationships

Broadening the management perspective on SAM

Ethical dilemmas in SAM and how to avoid them

The good of the few versus the good of the many

Moral dilemmas in implementing the SAM executive role

Addressing the moral and ethical dilemmas in strategic account management

SAM and corporate social responsibility

Conclusions

SECTION 2: Value Creation through KSAM

Value in strategic account management

Introduction

The changing role of strategic account management

Value in business relationships

Generating value in business relationships

Managing value generation in strategic account relationships

Conclusions

Value dimensions and relationship postures in dyadic ‘key relationship programmes’

Introduction

Value and key relationship programmes

Key relationship value strategies

Strategic matching of relationship postures

A competence view of key relationship postures

Conclusion

‘Vertical coopetition’: the key account perspective

Introduction

Relational versus transactional benefits

From horizontal to vertical coopetition

Development of theoretical framework

Discussion and managerial implications

Conclusion and directions for future research

Key account management in business markets: an empirical test of common assumptions

Introduction

Key account management

Central constructs and hypotheses

Empirical study

Discussion

Managerial implications

Limitations

Executive summary and implications for managers and executives

Strategic account plans: their crucial role in strategic account management

Introduction

Essential elements of KSAM planning

KSAM plan format and content

Plan implementation

Measuring KSAM value

Conclusion

Using customer profitability and customer lifetime value to manage strategic accounts

Introduction

Customer loyalty does not mean customer profitability per se

Measuring customer profitability

Measuring customer lifetime value

Defining the drivers of CLV

Define the optimal account development strategy

Conclusions

SECTION 3: Developing KSAM Programmes

A configurational approach to strategic account management effectiveness

Introduction

State of KAM literature at the turn of the millennium

An integrative conceptualization of KAM

Sample

Key account management configurations

Key account management effectiveness

Discussion

Conclusion

Appendix

The appropriateness of the key account management organization

Inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of key account management programmes

The concept of key account management

Key account management in the context of relationship marketing

Transaction cost economics and marketing management

The determinants of the decision model

The decision on the most appropriate KAM organization

Conclusion

Organizational structures in global account management

Introduction

Elements of a GAM organization

Different forms of GAM organization

Global account management at Hewlett-Packard

Conclusion

Designing strategic account management programmes

Introduction

Research process

The design elements of a strategic account management programme

Inter-organizational alignment – practices related to aligning with customers

Intra-organizational alignment – practices related to creating a collaborative culture of commitment

Discussion

Conclusions

Global customer team design: dimensions, determinants and performance outcomes

Introduction

Literature review

Conceptual framework of GCT design and performance

Research methodology

Results

Discussion

Conclusions and implications

Limitations and suggestions for further research

Key accountization at Bosch Automotive Aftermarket Italy: managing and implementing a strategic change

Introduction

Robert Bosch's market position

A framework to interpret BAA Italy's KAM-focused change management

Conclusions

SECTION 4: Operationalizing KSAM

Recent developments in relationship portfolios: a review of current knowledge

Introduction

Review of extant research

Contextuality of portfolio analysis

Dynamics and portfolio analysis

Customer lifetime value and other financially derived models

Customer relationship management and relationship portfolios

Segmentation and/or portfolio analysis

Conclusion

Account portfolio management: optimizing the customer portfolio of the firm

Introduction

Account portfolio management

Account portfolio analysis and development of customer strategies

Conclusions

Strategic account management processes at corporate, relationship and annual level

Introduction

Review of earlier literature on SAM processes

SAM processes at the corporate, relationship and annual level

Conclusions and research implications

Developing strategic key account relationships in business-to-business markets

Introduction

Defining key/strategic accounts

A model of relational development

The development of the PPF model and its integration with the relational development model

Discussion

More recent research

Conclusions

The role of the key/strategic account manager

Introduction

The evolution of key account management

The evolving role of the account manager from key account sales to key strategic account manager

Factors that influence the nature of the role of the key strategic account manager

The impact of contextual factors on the role of the political entrepreneur

The importance of the boundary-spanning role

Discussion

Conclusion

The influence of personality on the job performance of strategic account managers

Introduction

Strategic account management

Roles and skills of the strategic account manager

Five-Factor Model of personality

Results

Conclusions

References

Author profiles

Index

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Woodburn, Diana.

Handbook of strategic account management : a comprehensive resource / Diana Woodburn and Kevin Wilson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-50908-1 (hardback)

1. Selling–Key accounts. 2. Marketing–Key accounts. 3. Customer relations. 4. Sales management. I. Wilson, Kevin, 1947– II. Title.

HF5438.8.K48W66 2014

658.8–dc23

2014002694

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-118-50908-1 (hbk) ISBN 978-1-118-50907-4 (ebk)

ISBN 978-1-118-50905-0 (ebk)

Cover designed by Cylinder

Acknowledgements

Our heartfelt thanks go to the contributors to this book for their generosity in devoting their time to this project, most especially those contributing new material and extensive syntheses of work for the benefit of interested parties in the hot topic of key strategic account management.

We also acknowledge the patience, guidance and forbearance of all at Wiley, particularly Rosemary Nixon, Ashton Bainbridge and Jonathan Shipley.

Lastly, we thank Cuiling Jiang, research assistant at Kedge Business School, for her amazing dedication, speed and accuracy in combining all the references into one list and rationalizing their almost random presentation in the papers citing them.

The editors

Diana Woodburn, BSc MSc MBA PhD

Diana Woodburn is a key/strategic account management (KSAM) specialist, who has been a major influence on Cranfield University School of Management's initiatives in KSAM since 1997. In 1998 she founded Cranfield's KAM Best Practice Club with Professor Malcom McDonald, which is still running today, and in 2000 she established Marketing Best Practice (MBP), a consultancy that became entirely dedicated to KSAM work, not only teaching and developing people (about 3,000 key account managers and company directors) but also helping companies develop their KSAM programmes and processes.

Working through MBP and Cranfield as a Visiting Fellow, Diana has taught KSAM in numerous diverse sectors all over the world, in major change programmes for global companies and focused support for national companies. At the same time, she has conducted research projects into poorly understood but critical areas of KSAM, resulting in a series of substantial reports and new concepts with theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. Together with Professor Malcolm McDonald, Diana has written one of the most popular books on KAM, Key Account Management: The Definitive Guide, as well as a quantity of shorter reports and articles.

Before becoming an academic/consultant, Diana's career spanned most aspects of marketing, several B2B sectors and four continents. She graduated from Manchester University with a 1st Class Honours BSc and MSc in biological chemistry.

Contact: [email protected] or [email protected]

Kevin Wilson MBA PhD

Kevin holds the Chair of Selling and Customer Relationships at KEDGE Business School in Bordeaux. He is a researcher, writer and presenter with an international reputation in the field of strategic account management.

He has spent the past 20 years exploring the nature of strategic, national and global account management in more than 1,200 companies and has in excess of 60 refereed and other publications to his credit. He is the author of four books on the subject and has published numerous articles in academic and practitioner journals.

For several years Kevin was a board member of SAMA (The Strategic Account Management Association, based in Chicago), the CEO of the Sales Research Trust, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the creation and dissemination of knowledge in the field of selling and sales management, and the editor of The Journal of Selling and Major Account Management. Kevin has also held full-time academic posts variously at Sheffield, Southampton and the Isle of Man Business Schools.

Contact [email protected]

About this book

We, the editors, have long felt that key strategic account management, which we will call KSAM, is sorely overlooked by academia, with the exception of a few experts like those contributing to this book.

As a rule of thumb, products are bought and sold five times over before they reach their final destination with the consumer. There is, therefore, much more commercial activity and many more companies involved in business-to-business (B2B) transactions than in consumer sales. You would not think so, however, if you looked at most universities' business and marketing courses, or even the UK Chartered Institute of Marketing's agenda and publications, in spite of the fact that a majority of its members operate in B2B markets.

Just rebalancing attention between consumer and B2B markets would quickly highlight a key difference: the huge range of customer size and revenues in B2B businesses, which cannot be ignored. All customers are indisputably not equal, and frequently a very few are individually critical to a B2B supplier. The world is littered with companies that have lost one key customer and their whole business with it, whereas consumer marketing does not, and does not need to, consider such a possibility.

Some academics claim that KSAM is just part of relationship marketing, and while it owes a great deal to that stream of thinking, there is much that is different: lumping them together is very misleading. At the same time, sales research literature contributes some valuable ideas to KSAM, but it generally assumes a substantial quantity of unconnected customers and opportunities. That is reversed in KSAM, where opportunities are far fewer, bigger, wide-reaching, linked to the past and the future, critical, and often demanding of significant change in the supplier's business. Also intrinsic to KSAM is its impact on the internal organization and the rest of the company, to which neither relationship marketing nor sales research give much consideration.

Hence this book. Through it, we hope to demonstrate that KSAM is a distinctive and important domain of business that needs to have a place in the minds of academics as substantial as the attention it attracts in companies. This teenager has grown up and deserves a home of its own.

Of course, the philosophy that high-spending customers should receive a different treatment from the norm has been instinctive since the dawn of trading. It began to emerge in academic research in the 1970s and 1980s, so KSAM is not new. However, it is complex in many ways, and while recent years have seen some blossoming of research work, much more is needed. Additionally, students with knowledge of KSAM will be welcomed by all sectors, almost all of which are struggling to implement this poorly understood, difficult and fascinating discipline that severely challenges traditional beliefs and adversarial approaches in business. More universities and business schools should take the opportunity to introduce KSAM to their marketing and management students.

The Handbook of Strategic Account Management aims to provide a good look across the KSAM domain so that, in one place, interested parties can see the elements and the issues involved and something of the state of knowledge about them. Authors have been encouraged to include plentiful references to the work of other authors, to make it easier for students and researchers to follow up their streams of enquiry. The reference section at the back of the book therefore provides a definitive list of sources of KSAM research which will be invaluable for students of the subject.

We have solicited contributions from authors as geographically dispersed as possible, although the vast majority have come from across Europe and North America, which seems to be where the bulk of KSAM research originates. Material from Asia seems to be scarce to date, so it would be good, in any future editions, to include Asian perspectives, e.g. how the Chinese concept of guanxi relationships relates to KSAM.

The book is comprised of papers by established academics who have made major contributions to our understanding of KSAM. The listing of authors in the section at the back offers a useful guide for those wanting to locate researchers active in KSAM. We have aimed to cover KSAM as broadly as possible, in four sections that group papers addressing similar levels of KSAM:

Section 1: Strategic dimensions of KSAM: looks at the fundamental issues of what and why.

Section 2: Value creation through KSAM: focuses on this core rationale for KSAM success, without which it will fail.

Section 3: Developing KSAM programmes: views KSAM as an organizational change with internal impact across the entire business.

Section 4: Operationalizing KSAM: considers critical elements of execution, wherein lie many of the success/failure points.

Interestingly, while the concept of KSAM is simple, execution generally seems to be much more difficult and complex, and therefore it is doubly important that KSAM principles and practices are clear and agreed, in order that execution might have a chance of success.

The papers vary in their format as authors have necessarily made their own choices over what to communicate and how to present it. Some offer new work and empirical evidence, e.g. Mahlamäki, Uusitalo and Mikkola, and Guenzi, while others offer a thorough review of one aspect of KSAM to identify what we know about it and where to find further information, e.g. Zolkiewski, and Ojasalo. KSAM fails if senior managers are not behind it, so Capon and Mihoc, and Brehmer and Rehme look at making the case for it.

Seminal papers that are as true now as ever are exemplified by Sengupta, Krapfel and Pusateri, and Jensen, Workman and Homburg, with an update on their widely cited findings. The work of the IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing) Group, which has done so much on buyer–seller relationships and value exchange since the 1980s, is well represented by La Rocca and Snehota, Ivens and Pardo, and Henneberg, Pardo, Mouzas and Naudé, while Lacoste contributes a different angle on the vital topic of value creation and competition.

The external context of KSAM can have profound implications, as demonstrated by Piercy and Lane (social and ethical concerns), Croom (customer perspective) and Yip and Bink (global view). Wengler, Storbacka and Woodburn all wrestle with the complexities of internal changes at a programme level, while others consider key issues of execution: Atanasova and Senn (teams), and Wilson and Holt (KAM role) consider people issues, while others look at activity in individual customers, i.e. Gök (account selection and strategies), Wilson (relationships), McDonald and Woodburn (account plans). Lemmens and Vanderbiesen wrap up all those issues in terms of the all-important outcome: customer profitability.

The first part of our editorial addresses KSAM as a whole. We offer a definition of KSAM, which has been sorely missing from the domain: to date we have definitions of key accounts, specification of the KAM job, descriptions and recommendations for ideal KSAM, but no agreed definition of what KSAM is, as a definitive minimum. The lack of a widely agreed definition certainly hampers communication of KSAM from the outset, and it would be a step forward if our proposal were to be generally adopted by the academic community and used by business. The second part of the editorial reviews and summarizes the four sections of the Handbook and provides you with a ‘fast track’ guide to the contents to help you to plan your reading.

Hence the Handbook of Strategic Account Management offers a broad and wide-ranging picture of KSAM in terms of researched knowledge. It will be invaluable to students, lecturers and researchers in KSAM, and to rather serious practitioners. Clearly, there is much to be said about KSAM, and much more to be found in the future, and we hope this book will stimulate more academics and practitioners to become engaged in developing our understanding of the domain.

Key strategic account management: where are we now?

by Editors Diana Woodburn and Kevin Wilson

Key account management has been around a long time. Obviously, business people from time immemorial have recognized the importance of their big buyers, but it took academics a while to acknowledge this simple fact; indeed, it is possible to accuse marketing in academia, which is overwhelmingly focused on consumers, of some responsibility for losing sight of it. Nevertheless, research into key account management kicked off in the 1980s, arguably initially in the USA and soon after, in Europe, fuelled by the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group's work. At the same time, Citibank's first attempt at global account management (GAM) had been tried, proved successful with customers, been defeated by country managers and reinstated under pressure from strategic customers, all by 1985 (Buzzell). So it is surprising that many companies think key account management/key strategic account management is new, and that there is not a bigger body of research and greater recognition of the economic importance and potential for academic interest in it. We believe that the time has come for both business and academia to give KSAM the position it merits: hence this book.

We suppose that business-to-business (B2B) marketing is overlooked in favour of consumer marketing because anyone may have personal experience of the goods and services explored and the brands are household names, but we have no explanation for why the enormous wallets and life-giving or life-taking demands of key strategic customers have not attracted more attention from B2B marketing and sales research. Losing such a customer because it has not received the treatment it wanted, or keeping it at too great a cost, can both have devastating effects on suppliers, even large companies. For example, the knitwear manufacturer Baird was forced to close 14 factories in the UK and three in Sri Lanka when Marks and Spencer ended their 30-year relationship (Chapman 2004). Uniq (previously Unigate) made an operating loss of £3.6m on a turnover of £736m in 2007 when Marks and Spencer represented nearly 30% of the company's sales and other major retailers contributed most of the rest (Hawkes 2008). Marconi's loss of the BT contract signalled the demise of that business in 2006.

Key strategic customers may be few in number, but the inexorable developments in their increasing power and sophistication, globalization, consolidation and market maturity mean that they are crucial to suppliers in terms of present and future profit. These buyer–seller relationships are arguably the most interesting because of the scale of the rewards and risks and the organizational complexities involved. It really is inappropriate to subsume these relationships into general customer relationship management (CRM) research. KSAM should be seen as a business and research domain in its own right, albeit learning much from other areas of business research, including relationship marketing, selling, management and organizational theory, supply and demand chain management, to list just some of them.

The domain has probably not been helped by the failure to agree a name for it: key account management (KAM), national account management (NAM), global account management (GAM) and strategic account management (SAM) have all been used fairly interchangeably. In the USA, management of the most important accounts is termed SAM or GAM, and key accounts are somewhere down the customer pyramid below national accounts. Elsewhere in the world, KAM is taken to include all the most important accounts, with subdivisions into strategic, global and national accounts. The widely accepted definition of key accounts was formulated by Millman and Wilson (1995a) as ‘customers in a business-to-business market defined by selling companies as being of strategic importance’, linking the terms ‘key’ and ‘strategic’ together. Removing issues of geography, i.e. ‘global’ and ‘national’ (these customers are not necessarily key or strategic, although the size and complexity of global customers means they are more likely to be key strategic accounts), we therefore wish to propose a term for universal use for the activity under discussion in this book: key strategic account management, or KSAM.

A definition of KSAM

Clearly, KSAM requires a definition, and the literature is curiously lacking in this respect. While descriptions of good practice and full interpretations abound, they go well beyond a definition of the minimum that qualifies as KSAM. Furthermore, since the treatment of individual key strategic accounts will depend on the nature of each account and vary considerably, we feel that the definition should be positioned at the level of the organization. Companies can then see whether they are, or are not, implementing KSAM, by definition. They may be doing it well or badly, but it should be possible to be clear about whether they are executing what is generally agreed to be KSAM, rather than key account selling or something else. We believe that such a definition does not currently exist, and we therefore offer the definition of KSAM as follows: