KAM Strategy: Analyzing Your Key Account Portfolio

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Strategies To Strengthen Your Key Account Relationships

Here are some questions to help you to analyse what KAM Relationship Matrix is telling you. If you haven’t been able to complete it yet you can download it here. Otherwise simply refer to the example on the previous page:

How strategic are you as a supplier?
Is that a good position for your company?
Is that where you want to be?

In the example shown earlier the company in question was strategic for 2 of the Top 10 customers, for 5 the company is a preferred supplier and for 3 it is ‘just another supplier’. So, for 70% of its top 10 customers the company is at least preferred. That would seem to be a pretty strong position, but let’s continue the analysis.

Are you moving in the right direction?

In the earlier example the relationship is under pressure and the company could be moving backwards not forwards in 7 out of 10 customers. That should raise alarm bells – it suggests that the graph could look quite different in 12 months. Key questions that arise include:

What are the top 3 factors pulling you left (toward ‘standard supplier’)?

What factors are the top 3 factors pulling you right (towards ‘strategic supplier’)?

Pin-pointing the factors driving relationships left or right is an important first step in implementing a strategy to develop certain key accounts. It is also essential to answering the next question.

What are the top 3 things you can do to become even more strategic to your customer?

Here are some of the different dimensions to this question:

What is it that makes the company strategic to some companies (Pieme and FurboNex in the example shown earlier) and not to the rest?
What do we need to do more / less of to become strategic to the others?
Do the companies for which we are ‘just another supplier’ conform to the company’s target customer profile, or sweet spot?
How important are they to overall sales and profitability?
Can or should they be developed?
Which companies ‘value our value’ or appreciate the level of service we offer?
Where should key account development efforts be focused for maximum effect?