Key Account Management: Planning and Strategies Seminar

Dr. Wesley J. Johnston
CBIM RoundTable Professor of Marketing
Director, Center for Business and Industrial Marketing
J. Mack Robinson College of Business
Georgia State University

More effective, profitable management of your most important assets...

Key account management drives the profitability of business-to-business marketing

Building quality key account strategies is the heart of successful business marketing programs. The role of the salesforce in establishing and nurturing these relationships is vital. The sales environment is rapidly changing. Long selling cycles, complex propositions, and high value sales make new methods necessary. This seminar provides the latest thinking in key account and customer relationship strategy for companies who want to differentiate their product and service by value-added elements tailored to customized solutions for key customers.

Objectives

• Enable participants to better define their key account management and customer relationship programs and how to better align their sales efforts with specific customer needs and requirements for which the customer is willing to pay.
• Help participants develop better targets for their key/strategic accounts and develop a better understanding of the resource levels that should be allocated to these accounts.
• Provide participants with tools to design key account and customer relationship strategies.

Who Should Attend

The seminar is especially designed for key account and salesforce managers in charge of developing and targeting customer relationship programs and for any manager determining the criteria for developing a key/strategic account program, and which customers should be included in that program. All decision-makers involved in supporting key/strategic account and customer relationship management programs can benefit from attending this seminar.

Seminar Content

Transforming the traditional sales approach with key account management

• Changing sales environment
• Decline of the middle
• Price/Quality pressures
• Customer expectations
• The benefits of key account management
• Relationship marketing and selling
• Building value into the sale for all customer levels
• Different tasks-different skills (partnering, negotiations, identifying account desires)
• Creative approaches to key account management
• The importance of getting partnering right: relationship assessment

Managing complex sales situations

• Managing the long selling cycle, complex, high relationship sale-case study
• Customer relationship management tools: opportunity planning
• Technology and communication in account management
• Measuring customer-lifetime value
• Partnering with key accounts

Key account planning strategies and control

• Personal relationships and account management
• Company-to-company relationships in account management
• Case study on key account relationship marketing

Developing the key account master plan

• Increasing key account program effectiveness
• Account selection and classification
• Resource allocation by type of account
• Auditing the key account program—audit checklist

Format

The two-day seminar meets from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. each day. It combines lecture and discussion, real business and industrial examples, case studies, and exercises. The class size is intentionally kept small to provide ample time for extensive discussion and interaction. Participants are encouraged to bring specific account situations to examine and work on during the seminar.

Instructor

Dr. Wesley J. Johnston is the CBIM RoundTable Professor of Marketing at Georgia State University. He is internationally recognized for his research and case studies on managing sales people in relationship sales situations. He has lectured on sales management strategy in over twenty countries.

Dr. Johnston is considered one of the leading experts in the United States on key account management. He has conducted seminars in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Australia. Some of the companies he has worked with include Ryobi, Honeywell, DuPont, Arkema, Alfa Laval, UPS, Skanska, Ruhrgas, Siemens, and Scientific Atlanta.

For more information contact:

Paula Dorminy or Gary Holler
Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM)
Smeal College of Business
The Pennsylvania State University
484 Business Building
University Park, PA 16802-3603

Phone: 814-863-2782
Fax: 814-863-0413
E-mail: isbm@psu.edu