Grow your sales to existing customers with key account management.
It’s far more profitable to sell more products to existing customers than to invest time and effort into finding new customers. Therefore always be looking to grow your sales numbers out of your existing key accounts. Key Account Management or KAM is a strategic approach distinguishable from standard account management and is used to ensure long-term development and retention of your most important customers.
By implementing a KAM strategy, you create opportunities for both you and your clients to sustain and grow your business - as well as opportunities to bring in more revenue.
Identifying your Key Accounts.
You need to be sure to see the difference between a real Key Account and Standard Account. A Key Account is represented by a person or a group of people to which your business has built more than a standard business relationship based on the trust level between you and buyers. Ideally the dynamic of the relationship has changed from that of vendor-buyer to much more of a partnership where the more your buyer (and other contacts at the company) succeeds, the more your product or service you sell.
Understanding your Key Accounts
A key account management process is required to manage key accounts, which may require more nurturing, different skills and utmost attention than other accounts. What resources to invest and how and where, are the key questions you need to answer. Automated systems and processes will work best for 80% of your accounts, whereas, you can safely invest and focus your personal time on the sales process to the remaining 20%, these being your Key Accounts.
The way to a client’s heart is through its business – not your business. As a minimum, the customer expects its key suppliers to understand:
• Its marketplace
• Its strategies
• What its customers want
• How it adds value in its business
• Where it makes its money.
Another important factor in Key Account Management is the people involved within the account. In addition to the basic hierarchy—which is obviously important—different individuals may have substantial influence on the purchase despite higher or lower positions in the company.
Studies show that businesses rarely sell to just one individual; rather, they sell to a group of decision makers who hold different positions throughout their entire company. Part of a strong key account sales strategy should involve contacting each of these decision makers and discussing the benefits of your solution.
Strengthen your Relationship by Adding Value
Strengthen your relationship by showing how you can add value to your client’s company. Adding value can happen in various ways, such as saving the company money, bringing in more revenue, managing risk, mitigating competition, and building deeper relationships with account members.
As you continue to invest in the success of your partners business, you’ll help each other to add innovation and value, which ultimately results in both you and your clients becoming deeply invested in each other’s future. When you develop this kind of partnership, both parties have a better chance at success.
Creating a Key Account Management Strategy
For most B2B companies, the bottom half of the ‘hourglass’ generates 80%+ of the revenue in a given year. The most commonly used nomenclature is ‘Hunting’ & ‘Farming’. Hunting is acquiring new customers while Farming is growing business from existing customers. Key Account Management is farming at its best!
With this in mind it is important to develop good strategy to farm these key accounts and grow your sales. If you need assistance on how to go about doing this, please contact me.
