Have you been in this situation before?

You have managed to serve your clients for years. These clients are your key accounts that drive your business growth. Unfortunately, a few of these key accounts have left to work with others. Losing a small account may not seem significant to the bottom line of your business. What about if 80% of your business sustainability depends on the top 20% key accounts of yours? To top it off, acquiring new customers is getting more expensive, more time consuming, longer and harder.

Reflecting the current situation

A few basic and yet significant questions came into mind:

• Have you built relationships with buyers inside your key accounts continuously over the years?  
• Do you truly understand who they are, what problems they have and how your product and services could help them to achieve their desired outcomes? 
• Did everyone who came across the functions serving the key accounts listen to the customer voices in terms of their future plans, concerns, and risks?

What can you do to retain your key accounts to continue doing business with your company?

Findings have shown that key account management is one of the critical success factors for organizations to keep their strategic customers.  It is a customer-centric approach to building a deeper relationship with your key accounts through understanding their needs, obstacles and challenges they faced, and supporting them with value-added services.It is beyond completing activities such as fulfilling orders from key accounts on an ad-hoc basis by the suppliers to meeting sales revenues year after year. 

How to do next?  

• Identifying and selecting the significant accounts that matter most to your company
• Sending a clear message that you are more than a vendor, in order to work with them for current and future outcomes. This involves high level management engagement (e.g., face to face contact) with the senior management of the key accounts.
• Investing in time to engage in collaborative relationships with key accounts in setting business understandings, expectations, common goals and results for joint-success.
• Tracking, managing customer goals/needs/requirements and taking actions to offer maximum value from your product and services to help them 
• Understanding the key accounts by continuously capturing data (via CRM, customer research, multi-channels touch points, feedback etc) on customers' new expectations, situations, decision-making power and matching your value proposition to their new changes.
• Collaborating with customers to assure them you are their partners/trusted advisors and developing action plans to support them in times of needs and challenges.
• Getting management commitment to offer company-wide resources and form a key account team to personalize services that serve the different needs of the important contacts within the key accounts.
• Appointing someone to champion the key account management program and drive the implementation.
• Training the key account managers for the new roles they played.

In short, the key account management approach not only helps customers to be successful, but also helps you save the expensive cost of acquiring new customers, make more profit from generating new businesses from your existing accounts, and improves your relationship with them.

Bearing in mind that key account management is an organizational change, it requires B2B sellers and buyers' commitment to work collaboratively to make it a successful implementation.  

By Cecilia Sim

Strategy Training Partner, Facilitator, and Consultant 

www.softskillsnet.com.sg