INTRODUCTION
Today, more than ever, B2B firms need to focus their business growth effort on the highest potential customers.
That handful of your customers represents both your current business and future growth. They represent higher potential, but are typically more demanding. And they attract the attention of your competitors.
But firms struggle to establish KAM programmes that deliver results.
They undertake a series of actions that make it challenging to develop a viable alternative business model. Consequently, they fail from the outset.
What a shame! KAM can be a supplier's superpower, but somehow it has been dumbed down by many to be glorified "selling."
It is not.
Here are three ways to rethink and reignite your approach to KAM, and then accelerate your sales.
The correct, proven and robust way.
The three things that kill performance...
1. The most important thing
Offer Development & Innovation
All business is driven by understanding the customer and adding value. This is the most important thing and should be the focus of any KAM programme. In effect, KAM needs to develop a value proposition that is honed for every key customer—it is not simply taking an offer that is developed to promote your products and brands. However, they may be a big part of your customer proposition.
The problem is that most KAM programmes fail when they present customers with a generic "product-focused" offer. That is what you want to sell, not what the customer needs.
KAM starts by understanding what the customer needs and then providing a solution. Value-Based KAM focuses on understanding what the customer needs (values) and then creating customised offers to meet those needs.
But here's the critical difference: if your offer is strong enough, and the customer buys you, then you must capture the value you delivered and report it back. Failing to do that will cause value to "evaporate."
This leads us to a new definition of Value-Based KAM: it is the intersection of sales, strategy and innovation, underpinned by an organisation-wide business model.
Your organisation needs to shift to being value-focused and willing to invest in its key accounts. This isn't about having better products—it's about creating solutions that customers can't imagine living without.
When you get this right, you move from vendor to strategic partner. When you get it wrong, you're just another supplier competing on price. The difference between these two positions isn't marginal—it's the difference between thriving and surviving in competitive markets.
The reality is harsh: if you're offering the same thing to every key account, you're not doing KAM, you're doing mass marketing with a fancy title. Each key account requires its own unique value proposition based on its specific challenges, opportunities, and strategic direction.
This means saying no to profitable opportunities that don't align with key customer strategies. It means investing in understanding industries, not just products. It means your KAM team needs to think like consultants, not salespeople
2. The hardest thing
Leadership & Culture
Shifting to a focus on Key Customers and Value is hard.
This is a different business model. Your country leaders, those heading up specialist divisions and functions, typically do not like this shift in power.
And yet, get this wrong and your KAM programme will struggle to get attention, support, investment and alignment of the best brains.
You need a KAM Strategy, investment, a clear understanding, and support for your Key Account Managers for each customer they manage.
One of the big issues in this area is that some of the KAM literature is not "adaptable" for all suppliers. Much of the KAM literature focuses on large organisations supplying other large firms. However, if you are an SME, you will not have the resources of salespeople available to work in this way.
The secret? Lighten up the thinking, and adopt the principles, but be realistic. Consider focusing on a small handful of key customers and accepting that one key account manager can handle several.
This is a big problem with KAM thinking today. Most approaches assume unlimited resources and perfect organisational alignment. The reality is messier.
But the real killer here is leadership that says they want customer focus but rewards product push. I've seen brilliant KAM strategies sabotaged by leaders who talk about strategic customers but measure success purely on quarterly revenue numbers.
Value-Based KAM requires courage from leadership. The courage to say no to profitable opportunities that don't align with key customer strategies. The courage to invest in long-term relationships over short-term revenue spikes. The courage to change how the organisation actually works, not just how it talks about working.
Culture change is difficult because it challenges existing power structures, established ways of working, and comfortable assumptions about success. Traditional selling pushes products to markets. Value-Based KAM creates solutions for specific customers. Instead of maximising short-term revenue, you're investing in long-term relationships. Instead of competing on features and price, you're competing on value and insight.
Without strong leadership commitment, your KAM programme becomes an expensive overhead that everyone tolerates but nobody truly supports. Marketing continues to develop standard campaigns. Operations optimise for efficiency over customer-specific solutions. Finance questions every investment that doesn't show immediate returns.
The two-level challenge is real: you need strategic leadership to establish vision and create organisational conditions for success, and operational leadership to provide day-to-day coaching and remove obstacles. Miss either level and the whole system fails.
3. The people who make the hard things happen
The Key Account Manager
I used to have the mantra that "Key Account Management is more than just the Key Account Manager." This is true—you do need a business that supports and invests time and energy.
But any business also needs skilled, capable key account manager talent.
They just get things done as they align teams in the customer with teams in their own organisation. This is called "Zippering."
They know how to talk to customers about value, how to speak at C-suite level, how to influence, pitch, lead teams and get innovation in the offer.
We describe the 8-skills of the key account manager: strategist, value-ambassador, innovator, change agent, rainmaker, silo-buster, team builder, and planner.
Great KAM programmes focus on recruiting, coaching, developing and empowering Key Account Managers—but they also accept that these are the people that make the hard things happen.
The truth is uncomfortable but unavoidable: Key Account Managers are not salespeople with bigger territories. They're hybrid professionals who need to operate at a fundamentally different level.
Look at what we're asking them to do: think like strategists, sell like rainmakers, innovate like entrepreneurs, and manage like general managers. We want them to build relationships across organisational boundaries, influence without authority, and deliver results that matter to people they've never met.
Then we act surprised when traditional salespeople struggle with the role.
A Key Account Manager is essentially running a business within a business. They're responsible for strategy, operations, innovation, and results. They need to think like owners, not employees.
This creates both opportunity and challenge. The opportunity is that successful KAMs develop incredibly valuable, transferable skills. Many go on to senior management roles because they've learned to operate at that level.
The challenge is recruitment and development. Promoting your best transactional salesperson alone won't guarantee success. The skills, mindset, and measures of success are all different.
Organisations often make the mistake of looking outside for KAM talent, assuming they need to hire general managers and teach them to sell. This rarely works. It's better to start with your best relationship builders and business developers, then systematically develop their strategic thinking, innovation capabilities, and change management skills.
It's easier to teach a great salesperson to think strategically than to teach a strategist to build customer relationships. But the key is recognition: you're not developing salespeople. You're developing business leaders who happen to focus on key customer relationships.
This changes everything about how you recruit, train, measure, and reward these critical roles.
Do you want to avoid KAM death?
Try adopting these ways of working:
The journey through understanding why traditional KAM fails brings us to essential principles for building programmes that create genuine competitive advantage. Start by acknowledging the failure rate reality: Gartner's research showing 80% of KAM programmes require rebuilding isn't an indictment of the concept; it's a wake-up call about execution.
Make Offer Development and Innovation your engine. Customers don't buy relationship management; they buy value. Your ability to create unique, customer-specific solutions that competitors cannot easily replicate determines whether your KAM programme becomes a strategic asset or expensive administration.
Select for value creation potential, not just size. The largest customer in your portfolio might not be the best candidate for strategic relationship investment if their needs can be met through standard offerings. Value-Based KAM prioritises customers where unique value creation is possible.
Focus on co-creation, not just customisation. Move beyond delivering customised versions of standard offerings to genuinely co-creating value with strategic customers. This collaborative approach creates switching costs, generates mutual competitive advantage, and produces the causal ambiguity that protects your strategic position.
Build cross-functional integration as a core capability. Operations, R&D, marketing, finance, and other departments must work together seamlessly to deliver customer value. This integration capability becomes a competitive advantage in itself.
Transform account managers into value creation facilitators. The role in Value-Based KAM is fundamentally different from traditional sales positions. These professionals must combine business consulting skills, innovation facilitation capabilities, relationship orchestration abilities, and strategic thinking competencies.
Measure value created, not just revenue generated. Traditional KAM metrics focus on revenue, growth, and relationship health scores. Value-Based KAM requires measuring the unique value created for customers, the competitive differentiation achieved, and the strategic positioning enhanced.
Design for cultural transformation, not process implementation. Moving to Value-Based KAM requires fundamental cultural changes that extend far beyond the sales organisation. Customer-centric thinking, collaborative leadership, innovation orientation, and long-term strategic patience must become embedded in how your organisation operates.
Create organisational memory as a strategic asset. Develop systems for capturing, sharing, and applying the insights, experiences, and knowledge gained through strategic customer relationships. This becomes a competitive advantage that accumulates over time and enables increasingly sophisticated value creation.
Final thoughts.
Much of KAM focuses on "The KAM Plan"—a market segment of one.
But be realistic: how often do Key Account Managers really spend time developing a 20-page plan, especially if no one looks at it?
A better model? Have a 1-page summary and spend your time in cross-functional coaching sessions discussing the Key Account strategy. If there are gaps in the thinking, then dig deeper using the KAM toolkit of frameworks as suggested ways to improve.
But this slavish thinking that a 20+ page KAM plan is productive, Key Account Management really needs to stop.
The beauty of this three-phase approach is its adaptability. Not every customer needs the complete treatment. Sometimes you can skip straight to Value Sell because the offer is obvious. Other times, you might cycle back to offer development based on what you learn in the selling process.
It's a framework for thinking, not a rigid process for following. In a world where customer needs change rapidly and competitive advantages are temporary, flexibility isn't just helpful, it's essential.
Here's the paradox: the very difficulty of implementing Value-Based KAM is what makes it such a decisive competitive advantage. If it were easy, everyone would do it. Because it's hard, because it requires sustained leadership commitment and cultural change, most organisations give up or settle for KAM-lite.
Those who persist, who build the culture and develop the capabilities, create something genuinely difficult to replicate. They don't just win customers; they create customer relationships that competitors can't touch.
Shift to coaching and fixing these three things and your KAM programme will flourish. But it starts with leadership having the patience and conviction to build something that matters, not just something that looks good in quarterly reports.
In a world where products are increasingly commoditised and price pressure is constant, the ability to create unique value for chosen customers isn't just nice to have. It's the difference between thriving and surviving.
That's what matters. That's why it's worth the effort. And that's why the organisations that master Value-Based KAM will have advantages their competitors will struggle to understand, let alone replicate.
Next steps
If you liked this article or would like to make comments, please get in touch with me.
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And if you would like to work with me for coaching and training around Value-Based KAM and Offer Development & Innovation for you/your team, visit the website and get in touch!
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