London Workshop

Value creation, key account teams and KAM in professional services

Queen Mary University, London 7th June 2016

This workshop was the second of the occasions when AKAM members – and non-members – met and talked together. Practitioner speakers stimulated lively discussion on value creation and the issues that prevent its realisation in some cultures. Our academic presenters uncovered counter-intuitive dynamics in KA teams that affect their performance, and also looked at what happens when a key customer is deprioritised, an issue that many companies agonise over without much evidence to support their decisions, until now. While KAM's opportunities and issues are similar across many sectors, professional services firms do have their own culture which doesn't readily align with KAM. These specific problems probably exist elsewhere, but may not be easily recognised.    

Catch up if you missed the workshop

The workshop sessions looked at:

  • the nature of value in KAM and how it is created (Mike Green, RM Results)
  • the importance of networks for key account managers, particularly internal networks, and how they use them (Björn Ivens, University of Bamburg)
  • the effects of deprioritising customers and the factors affecting subsequent performance (Sebastian Forkman, Queen Mary’s University, London)
  • issues in professional service firms that impact on KAM success (Richard Hinwood, Withers Worldwide).
Background

The case study on key account management networks was published in Industrial Marketing Management in 2015 by Björn Ivens, Alexander Leischnig and Barbara Niersbach of the University of Bamburg in Germany and Catherine Pardo of EM Lyon in France.