Professor Lynette Ryals of Cranfield School of Management, is an acknowledged authority on Key Account Management (KAM) and conducts ongoing research into this field. She also runs management courses on best practices in KAM. As she said:
"The role of the key account manager has become more important, but also much tougher during the past few years as customers become more demanding, more sophisticated and frequently global in their operations."
This interview explores some of these challenges and the dilemmas that are faced by firms hoping to develop stronger and more collaborative ties with their strategic customers.
A brief history of KAM and product centric issues
Lynette said that references to Key Account Management first surfaced in the mid 1990’s and paradoxically the term had both widened and narrowed in the intervening years.
The vast majority of firms are still organised along product lines. For such firms what often happens is that in one division a customer might be a 'key account', whereas in another division the customer may be less significant.
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