Key Account Management: Decisions Sciences in Practice

Abstract

Key Account Management (KAM) has been vastly misunderstood, in not just in Indian companies but in many western companies too. India has a slew of multinationals, but they have also fallen into the trap of classifying key accounts by just sorting their accounts in a descending order and drawing a line based just on the contribution of the account to the top line. This paper will examine an alternate method of identifying and categorizing accounts and not just in the form of labels like A, B, C or platinum, gold, silver etc. Procedure: It will be our effort to examine various factors that, in addition to the value contribution to the supplier, that can be consolidated under two main criteria viz: 1) Attractiveness of the account to the supplier and 2) how attractive is the supplier to the buyer(account) under consideration. For this, we will be using a ‘modified’ GE/Shell matrix. An area, which will discuss en passant, is how do we evaluate the key accounts based on the above matrix and the way resources should be allocated for each category as a whole, and subsequently drill down to individual accounts. Implication: This paper should provide an insight to the students of management to understand an alternate way to classify their key accounts and also to the practitioners in industry to have a new look at how key accounts can be redefined.