To manage key accounts profitably you need strategic planning that works. This book is the definitive guide to achieving this based on the unmatched practical and research experience of Ryals and McDonald. Key Account Management is proven to deliver substantial benefits to the bottom line. Best practice companies know that real results from managing powerful customers are not achieved through short-term cost cutting. Instead, as the best companies understand, it depends on fostering carefully developed and profitably managed relationships with an equally carefully selected group of key accounts. This is a genuinely strategic activity that goes well beyond sales management and the simplistic use of budgets to generate targets. It is about the behaviours and practices that make predictable, profitable and sustainable Key Account Management possible. To achieve this the book is constructed to deliver- * Clear descriptions of the various techniques and the reason for their importance * A hugely powerful step by step approach to using the key techniques to build strategic skills * Templates for building real plans * Cases, examples and vignettes to show best real world practice Based on wide application in the business world, and the world class research at Cranfield Management School this book will be an essential introduction to the principles and reality of Strategic Key Account Planning. For senior managers, key account managers at all levels as well as those on executive and MBA courses it will be an essential guide and text.

Lynette Ryals, Malcolm McDonald

The Plan; Chapter 1 Why You will Lose Your Best Key Accounts if You Don't Prepare a Strategic Plan for them; Chapter 2 Which Key Accounts Need a Strategic Plan; Chapter 3 How to Collect Information in Order to Understand the Needs of the Key Accounts Prior to Preparing Strategic Plans for them; Chapter 4 How to Understand the Marketing Processes of your Key Accounts; Chapter 5 Assessing Forecast Revenues and the Future Profitability of Key Accounts; Chapter 6 Assessing the Riskiness of Key Accounts; Chapter 7 Developing key Account Objectives and Strategies; Chapter 8 Tactics and Action Plans; Delivering World-Class KAM; Chapter 9 Organizing for KAM; Chapter 10 What Needs to be Measured, Managed, and Reported; Critiquing Plans; Barriers to Successful Key Account Planning; Chapter 11 Knowing how Customers Think about their Suppliers will make you a Better Key Account Planner; Chapter 12 How to Evaluate Your Suitability as a Key Account Manager; Chapter 13 How to be a World-Class Key Account Planner; Chapter 14 A Step-by-Step System for Preparing a Strategic Plan for A Key Account Templates for What Should Appear in a Strategic Key Account Plan The Process Templates for what Should Appear in a 1-year Key Account Plan;