- Key Account Academy
- Membership
- Individual member benefits
Individual member benefits
AKAM is your route to recognition as a professional in key account management
AKAM offers you the opportunity to develop your understanding and practice of KAM, which in turn will enable you to demonstrate your competency to employees and colleagues. Whether you are involved in KAM at the frontline as a key account manager or as the leader/enabler of and organisations KAM programme, or as a teaching and researching academic, or in consultancy to support or train those in the frontline, AKAM offers you different ways of developing your knowledge and expertise and growing your network with like-minded people. We have used the network to help practitioners to find solutions to issues and test ideas, connected people who have picked up new ventures together, and found interview participants for researchers.
In addition, AKAM offers a route to the only professional qualification in key account management, the Diploma (see KAM Qualifications for details).
How does it work?
Meetings
There are three meetings a year, which are free to Members: generally two highly participative workshops led by KAM experts and practitioners, and one conference with a wide range of presentations. Meetings are held all over Europe: e.g. Paris, London, Oslo, Dublin, Lugano with more destinations planned for 2018 (see Events schedule).
Only Members can see the presentations and discussion outputs which are all loaded onto the website afterwards, so even if you can’t make a meeting, you can get some good ideas from it whenever it suits you.
Member network
Members have exclusive access to the member network of names, organisations and email addresses so you can contact people you’ve met at a meeting, or even start up a conversation with someone you’ve never met. Meetings are a great place to learn more about KAM in other organisations and to meet people who can help you in the future, either by giving you advice, referring you to someone who can help, or even just being somewhere to download your challenges. We have Members all over the world, particularly in Europe.
On-line Member Resource Centre
We are constantly adding to the materials available to Members only via the website. There are papers and articles, some practical and some academic, tackling a wide variety of KAM topics with a keyword search facility to help you find what you need. There are also tools and diagnostics that you can apply in your own organisation, which will save you a lot of time and trouble. Plus there are case studies, videos and lists of references to make it easy for you to learn more.
As far as we know, there is no other online resource for KAM like it. We expected to double in size over the next couple of years, and we hope Members will let us know what they want to see.
Diploma in KAM
The AKAM Diploma is open to anyone, but members get a 20% discount on fees (see KAM Qualifications for details). In addition, access to the Member Resource Centre on the website gives you a lot of great material to help you build your competencies, both in the job and on paper.
The AKAM Bulletin
The bulletin is not exclusive to members, but you can readily sign up to it and receive directly AKAM news and a couple of thought-provoking articles every month.
AKAM development
We have plenty of ideas about how we would like to develop AKAM, and the best route to value adding support for Members is to have them involved, either by just letting us know how a professional organisation in KAM can support them, or by actively helping us organise that support. For example, we have launched Awards for key account managers (in large companies and SMEs), and we are working on a webinar offering. AKAM is involved in KAM research and would like to hear from its members what topics should be explored.
Individual annual membership fee: €150 pa
(Your membership year runs for 12 months from the date of payment of the membership fee. A reminder about renewal will be sent out before your membership expires which will renew automatically if you have joined through the website, allowing plenty of time for you to cancel your membership if you wish.)