1.1 Issues

Nowadays industrial companies face a growing challenge to adopt themselves to an ever increasing competitive market environment. In particular, the battle for large customers bearing big potential will be tougher than ever among competitors. In targeting large customers a company can grow significantly and concentrate its efforts in sales management. Together with them companies might learn to take themselves to peak performance. This learning process strengthens the own fitness for competition and it is of benefit to all customers. This situation requires a professional account management to set itself apart by focusing on carefully selected strategic customers as well as providing added-value solutions to them. The consequent implementation of a superior account management, or to be exact key account management (KAM), proves to be a demanding task for many companies in various industries.

From my 12 years experiences of international sales in the industrial sector I have noticed some challenges when it comes to the execution of KAM. For instance, although many companies are aware of the importance of the long-term development of strategic customers the emphasis is still placed on short-term revenue targets. As a matter of course, so-called strategic customers are treated differently and with higher attention by sales engineers. However, they are selected randomly according to past history like revenue and very seldom sophisticated solution packages, apart from special prices, are offered to those strategic customers. Furthermore, management mostly provides inadequate resource allocation to build up a forceful KAM.

Like the above-mentioned statements I have come across similar issues during my three-year activity as a Regional Sales Manager within Mettler Toledo Process Analytics (MTPRO). Below there is a brief summary of my findings when it comes to account management of MTPRO market organisations;

• The market organisations of MTPRO have a territorial sales force structure. The individual territories have revenue targets in terms of percentage growth versus previous year. There are almost no particular growth targets for stra- tegic customers over a period of years.
• As a consequence, the leverage for sizeable sales growth opportunities with real key accounts (KA) in the mid- and long-term is obviously not appreciated as an asset by the management of many market organisations.
• The only criterion for strategically important customers is sales potential, which represents the only hard factor considered. No other hard or soft factors are taken into consideration.
• In analysing the effort allocation of sales engineers it turns out that most time is not necessarily spent with strategically important [A] customers but more with [B] and [C] customers, who bear less potential. Special actions on [A] customers like, for instance, analysing the customer’s buying centre and their needs in order to be able to create added-value sales proposals is carried out insufficiently.
• All customer categories are approached and treated with the same presentations and type of sales proposals. Very seldom sales engineer’s present dedicated solution packages that go beyond consultation on best product fit and special pricing for bigger volumes.
• Available tools like return on investment (ROI) calculators and total cost of ownership (TCO) templates are not used on a frequent basis.
• There is mostly a lack of a dedicated management to understand the buying centre of customers. Many times sales engineers have no clear transparency on the role and degree of influence of the individual members of the buying centre.
• Sales engineers spent most of their time within their comfort zone, which means talking to existing contacts that use or supervise the usage of our products. Some of them do not feel comfortable approaching mid- and highlevel management, which is a rather influential part of the buying centre.

These findings can be assessed as sort of challenges when it comes to strategic account management. There are several terms beside strategic accounts, such as large accounts or key accounts. From now on only the term key account is employed since it provides the most common term among business professionals.

Learning from all the advantages that KAM can bring to an industrial company have led me to write up this thesis. So this thesis shall demonstrate many beneficial aspects of a KAM concept for MTPRO and describe the different elements that shall be developed and implemented by some selected market organisations.