Choosing the right digital account planning solution to implement these best practices of Key Account Management is a crucial aspect as well.

Here are a few things to keep in mind for the ideal digital account planning solution

If one decides to adopt these Key Account Management best practices, then knowing its business impact is important.

The correct adoption of Key Account Management by an organization can help in providing long-lasting strategic benefits. To create better results, organizations use Key Account Management software to succeed in adding higher value, efficiency, and growth to their key accounts.

Here are two major benefits and impacts of having an efficient Key Account Management practice within an organization:

Losing a client is never good, but losing a Key Account can put a dent in those revenue figures. Not to mention all the cost and effort added to acquire a new client to make up for the loss of revenue. Key Account Management helps you identify and nurture your most important client relationships, hence ensuring their retention.

As explained earlier, Key Account Management leads to increased revenue. By cross-selling and up-selling, you help decrease customer retention costs and grow revenue from Key Accounts.

While it may seem like Key Account Management is a long and cumbersome process, there are ways to kickstart your journey. Having a step-by-step approach to manage your key accounts and building them up can positively impact your revenue in the long run. Not to mention, customer retention increases significantly. A few important parts of implementing a Key Account Management process includes:-

Based on where you are on your Key Account Management Journey, your approach to incorporating the best Key Account Management practices will change.

Here are a few stats to get you thinking:

i) 65% of sales time is spent on non-revenue generating activities (Capterra, 2020) ii) 92% rate their current account planning as only slightly or moderately effective (Gartner, 2020) iii) 33% of sales planning is not led by data-driven inputs (LinkedIn State of Sales Operation, 2021)

If any of the above stats resonate with you, then you are in need of a phased approach to Key Account Management.

In our experience working with 300+ clients in their digital transformation journey, a phased and modular approach based on client priorities and readiness is vital to tackle issues of change management and adoption when it comes to Key Account Management.

Impaired Relationship Intelligence In this state, your primary focus should be in knowing who to look at, which key accounts to consider. You don’t have visibility into client organization, hierarchy or power. So you can’t leverage decision-makers in your biggest accounts.

In this state, you might already have relationship intelligence, but lack standardized account planning. Your data is still in silos and you don’t have a lot of visibility into it. Planning across the organization is disparate leading to growth bottlenecks.

In this state, you already have a mature practice of account planning and you wanna get more from digital Account Planning solutions. This may include monitoring competition and building proactive plans to counter threats.

In this state, although you have a matured account planning, you lack focused opportunity planning. Prone to improper prioritization, no standardized opportunity management practices in place which makes wins more unpredictable.

Being aware of your experience, and maturity level helps in having a phased approach to Key Account Management in your digital transformation journey.

Key Account Planning & Management requires strategic thinking. This involves concentrated, strategic efforts that begin with understanding not only the customer’s need for products or services but also in how the customers want to be served and treated. Looking beyond dollar numbers, Key Account Management processes reinforce the need to strengthen relationships with customers. Customer needs and wants evolve over time, and account management strategies have to change accordingly in order to keep everyone satisfied. Hence, evaluating & course-correcting your KAM process is just as important as implementing it. Analyzing what strategy works best and spaces for improvement is vital.

Measuring your Key Account Management performance regularly is critical to keeping your plans on track and pivoting in case of changes. Focusing on short-term and long-term goals, measuring results against your Key Performance Indicators, monitoring your performance are all integral to ensure how well you fulfill your obligations to the key account and vice versa. Mutual long-term benefit is the main reward from analyzing your key account management strategy.

Watch Now:  Anees Merchant, EVP, Global Growth from Course5i sharing their experience around building processes & strategies for Key Account Management.