Successful Key Account Management

Hughes David

Description

Successful Key Account Management is the culmination of David Hughes' nearly forty years of experience in a B2B (business to business) sales environment, with the last thirty years spent in a variety of key account management roles looking after strategic customers based in the UK and Europe. The ability to sell effectively is fundamental to the success of any business, and the role of account managers is to develop robust, long-term relationships between customers and their preferred suppliers. This book will benefit new account managers still developing their skills as well as more experienced colleagues looking to ensure that their abilities are well rounded and up-to-date. It gives numerous examples and easy to follow advice that can then be adapted to the readers' individual circumstances.

Sujets

• Employabilité, métiers et formations

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 02 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838596569
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2020 David Hughes

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Throughout this book, some details, names, etc. have been changed to respect theanonymity and privacy of the individuals/organisations concerned.

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ISBN 978 1838596 569

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To Sandra and Iain for always being there.
Contents

Introduction
Health and Safety
What is Sales?
Customers and Why You Need Them
Key Account Management – Best Practice
Time Management
Visit Preparations
Negotiation
Keep on Top of the Numbers
Management
Mother Knows Best
Annual Appraisal
The Ten-Point Plan
Let’s Talk About Money
Summary and Lessons Learned
Introduction

The ability to sell effectively is fundamental to the success of any business, and the role of account managers is to develop robust, long-term relationships between customers and their preferred suppliers. On the surface, managing and developing such relationships appears to be straightforward, although, in reality, this can be quite different. In fact, many former colleagues have previously expressed bewilderment as to the role and function of the external account managers.
This makes a sales role simultaneously the simplest and one of the most difficult jobs within any company.
In sales, there are generally no right or wrong answers. The only thing that matters is that we secure the sale, preferably whilst making a profit. In a business-to-business (B2B) sales environment, we are not talking about one-off sales, instead we are looking to develop long-standing partnerships with our customers, which will then return on a regular basis to purchase more of our products and/or services.
I have retired recently after more than thirty years in a B2B key account management role, working in the European chemicals and plastics industry. In the run-up to my retirement, I was managing a portfolio of our key customers with an annual turnover of circa €100 million. Prior to leaving, I was asked to hand over my customer responsibilities to other colleagues within the organisation and, at the same time, to pass on some of my experiences and best practices – in particular to the younger, less experienced members of the team.
During this period some of my former colleagues suggested that I should be putting my experiences to good use by either going into a training role or by writing a book. Over the years, I’ve changed roles and responsibilities several times, and, whilst handing over my previous responsibilities, other colleagues had also suggested both of these options.
In the past, though, while I was giving up one role, I was usually preparing to take on a new function, and so I have generally just moved from one set of products/customers to another, with little or no downtime in between and certainly no time to be sitting around writing a book.
This occasion, however, was different, as there was no follow-up activity, except to plan for and enjoy a well-earned retirement. Having enjoyed a working life of forty-seven years (based on my National Insurance record and state pension forecast from the Government website; https://www.gov.uk/check-state-pension ), both my wife (who has also retired recently) and I agreed that what we needed first was a rest.
For the first two years of my working life, from age sixteen, I worked part time on Saturdays in a local supermarket, while still studying at school for my A-levels. Nevertheless, my employer at that time had registered my National Insurance number and so my working life had officially begun!
At age eighteen, I left school to join the first of the two main employers I have had during my working life. For the purposes of this book, I’ll refer to them as Employer 1 and Employer 2. I stayed with the first for twenty-five years and only moved on to the second as consequence of a joint venture. I was then with my second employer for exactly twenty years.
The first eight years of my adult working life at Employer 1 were spent working in customer technical service within the UK textiles industry. At the time, this industry had gone past its heyday, was already in decline, and offered little in the way of career opportunities for a young, enthusiastic and ambitious young man in his mid-twenties. So, in November 1982, I transferred to the new, fledgling plastics sales sector and spent the next four years in an internal (office based) sales role.
The years 1987 and 1988 saw my wife and I move to Germany, while I was working at the global headquarters of my first employer. During this period, two became three as our son was born in Germany in May 1987.
On returning to the UK at the start of 1989, I started my first of many external sales roles. Initially, I was looking after customers in the north of the UK, which later became the whole of the UK. Further career steps followed, either in more senior sales roles within the company, or taking on different and diverse product/customer responsibilities.
However, by the mid-1990s, the plastics raw-materials-supply industry had already undergone significant rationalisation and, although I didn’t know it at the time, more was to come, and my role was impacted by three joint ventures in as many years!
After the first, my boss said to me, “Don’t worry. We will find you something else to do.” After the second, my boss said to me, “Don’t worry. We think we can find you something else to do.” And after the third, it was, “Don’t worry. There is a job for you at Employer 2.”
In each case, I took the conscious decision to carry on doing the best job that I could, thereby making it difficult for my employer not to find me something else to do. Basically, I had taken a leap of faith that my bosses would be true to their word. Fortunately, they were, and I was able to carry on working uninterrupted.
I realise that I have been incredibly fortunate to have worked for two such companies. Both are highly regarded in their respective markets, and both have excellent reputations for providing good, clean and safe working environments, and for treating employees fairly.
Now that our working lives are behind us, my wife and I agreed that we would definitely need something to keep the old grey matter active and engaged, but to start looking for something immediately would have probably led us back to something with exactly the same constraints that we had both just left, and neither of us wanted to be essentially back where we started!
For me, writing a book would seem to be the perfect option, so here goes!
Please note that this book is not meant to be an instruction manual of what you must do in order to be a successful key account manager. It’s more of a personal account of my working life, detailing the working practices used and general experiences gained over the last forty-plus years.
I am not a highly respected academic who has spent decades studying what to do, compiling and analysing data, and then making clever conclusions. I am just an ordinary guy who has spent the last thirty years working as a key account manager, and generally doing it quite well, although with little in the way of a formal academic background. I did not particularly enjoy school and this was reflected in my O- and A-level results. I also had no interest in going to university (although, with my A-level results, I doubt that I would have been accepted anyway).
My experience has come largely on the job or through “learning by doing”, as some of my continental friends call it. This is better known as experience.
What I’m about to describe are the things that I have learnt along the way and that I have found helpful/useful. As they have worked for me and have been largely positively received by the colleagues I have handed over to through the years, then they might be helpful for you too.
Many of the books I have read on sales, negotiation or related activities have often been the result of some form of “academic” study, where the authors have collected and reviewed a large number of examples of a particular activity, then looked for a common link and offered this as the solution to that particular problem. In many such books, I have found several examples of situations where, in my experience and work environment, the solutions offered would not be suitable for the challenges I was facing and, by using the options suggested, we would not have achieved an optimum outcome for our business.
Sales is not a defined process (although many will try to tell you that it is). It’s more of a fluid art form. Or, if you prefer, it’s like a game of chess. Now, I’m no chess grand master, but I know the basics. When starting a game of chess, for each side to make just one move there are 400 possible combinations. In any sales conversation, there are a great many ways to start, and so covering every possible combination b