KAM Strategy: Analyzing Your Key Account Portfolio

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Strategies To Strengthen Your Key Account Relationships

Are You A ‘Standard Supplier’?

If you can tick most or all of the boxes shown in the diagram you are ‘a standard supplier’.

For the ‘standard supplier’ the word transaction is more descriptive than the term relationship. The seller lives from order to order without any long term commitment from the buying organization. The buyer has all the power and is relatively indifferent to the welfare of the supplier. A ‘treat-‘em mean keep ‘em keen’ approach may be adopted.

There is limited engagement or collaboration and getting access to senior executives poses a real challenge. The seller is not considered important enough for the buyer to have a relationship with and is left on the outside looking in.

As far as the buyer is concerned this is ‘just another supplier’. There is a lack of specialization and the supplier is a generalist with another ‘me-too’ proposition. The seller is prone to suffer from an inferiority complex.

The seller’s competitive differentiation is either unknown or unappreciated. That leaves the supplier to compete on the basis of price. A trap that can be difficult to escape, as low margins can starve the business of the resources required to develop a new basis of differentiation (e.g. product or service innovation).