Edwas

although I agree that building and maintaining relationships are the foundation of successful key account management, I have some troubles with definitions like the one you quote from Financial Times. In my humble opinion they make key account management almost sound like an altruistic exercise. Such definitions also suggest that building relationships is the objective of key account management.

However I can have good relationships to people in a customer organization and never get any business out of these relationships. Furthermore, as our friend Jill Konrath says, customers today are frazzled, having little time to enter into or to maintain relationships just for the relationship’s sake. So I would add that relations must at least must be created and maintained with the intention of creating value to the customer.

Relationships are the means to an end. Bluntly said, the end from the sellers perspective is to make money. To make money, eventually something has to be sold. It is a characteristic of key account management that the perspective for selling something need not be in the short term but there must be a perspective that the key account manager can also get value out of the relationship and that is to sell something at some point in time .

I have the feeling that sometimes people shy away from using the term selling in the context of key account management. Maybe we still have the stereotype of selling to be pushing products and solutions in our minds. That type of selling certainly is not compatible with key account management. Selling understood as getting money for solving the customer’s problem though is. This approach even strengthens the realtionship but it is selling nevertheless.

Christian