Account development

Account development is the second element focused on identifying sales opportunities. The focus here is on expanding your relationships within existing customers to identify new sales opportunities in both the same and in other areas within the customer organization.

Account development begins with reviewing your current customers and prioritizing these for focus. Not all customers are equal in terms of value and potential. You should evaluate your existing customers using a simple but disciplined opportunity matrix and triage them into A, B and possibly C target accounts. Your primary focus and most in-depth effort will be your A accounts. B and C accounts can use a limited version of your account development process.

For each target account, you should identify the account team and have the team prepare a written account plan. Such a plan should include a summary of key business trends in the account, identification of known or possible issues you can address, identification of current and desired contact relationships, and a clear action plan with tasks, timing and responsibilities.

The action plan can be similar to many of the tactics used for prospecting, including both relationship marketing and personal relationship development components. With your A accounts, it is frequently possible and powerful to create and convene educational / problem solving sessions with a number of contacts from the account around specific issues or topics. Such sessions can be followed up with summary memos defining the issues to be addressed, and recommending possible solutions to explore. In this way, you can raise awareness and organizational interest around the issues that will lead to sales opportunities.

Comments

[Paul Brown]

Key accounts are an organization's most critical asset and require strong organizational leadership and management to ensure value is obtained from these invaluable relationships. The practice of key account management is now of practical and tactical interest to companies seeking to survive in current economic conditions, achieve competitive advantage and create future growth. Preserving those customer relationships is of strategic importance to a firm's future financial wellbeing.

Key Account Management provides the processes and tools to equip you to engage with your larger customers and your own support organization on a more strategic level in order to build towards a more mutually-profitable and sustainable relationship. The templates below will help you to deliver "win-win" business solutions against these high-potential accounts and produce actionable tools to implement a Key Account Management (KAM) plan in your organization.