Marketing and Sales Education Center

Organizations that have successfully implemented strategic account management programs have made it a top management priority. They make it a priority that each staff meeting includes a review of strategic account plans, priorities and progress. This is pretty basic to any thriving key account management program.  Most successful sales executives understand this. Yes, top level meetings with the client’s top level people need to be held at regular intervals and functional managers on each side of the relationships must work hard at accomplishing the agreed action plans. However, this may not be enough to drive the kind of revenue and profit growth that most organizations require today. We are often asked what other practices should be implmented along with this very basic but important practice.

Key account management will fail for sure without a strongly committed group of C-level executives.  Employees watch C-level executives to determine what the business priorities are.  It is very humbling when you are a C-level executive to recognize that.  What you say is one thing, but really it's what you do that counts.  C-level execs need to lead the key account management process to get the whole organization committed.  They are the people that can make major commitments to key accounts and it shows the commitment as a supplier to support those accounts.