Key Account Plans: The Practitioners Guide to Profitable Planning

To manage key accounts profitably you need strategic planning that works. This book is the definitive guide to achieving this based on the unmatched practical and research experience of Ryals and McDonald.

Key Account Management is proven to deliver substantial benefits to the bottom line. Best practice companies know that real results from managing powerful customers are not achieved through short-term cost cutting. Instead, as the best companies understand, it depends on fostering carefully developed and profitably managed relationships with an equally carefully selected group of key accounts. This is a genuinely strategic activity that goes well beyond sales management and the simplistic use of budgets to generate targets. It is about the behaviours and practices that make predictable, profitable and sustainable Key Account Management possible. To achieve this the book is constructed to deliver-



Clear descriptions of the various techniques and the reason for their importance


A hugely powerful step by step approach to using the key techniques to build strategic skills


Templates for building real plans


Cases, examples and vignettes to show best real world practice

Based on wide application in the business world, and the world class research at Cranfield Management School this book will be an essential introduction to the principles and reality of Strategic Key Account Planning. For senior managers, key account managers at all levels as well as those on executive and MBA courses it will be an essential guide and text.





Readership
Marketing Managers Key Account Managers Marketing Directors Strategy Directors

Contents
Introduction The Key Account Strategic Planning Process Selecting and Categorising Key Account Analysing the Needs of Key Accounts Assessing Forecast Revenues and Profitability Assessing the Riskiness of Key Accounts Developing and Implementing Key Account Objectives The Knowledge and Skills for World Class Planning How to Categorise Suppliers Measuring the Effectiveness of Key Account Plans

Author Information
By Lynette Ryals, Professor of Strategic Sales and Account Management, Cranfield School of Management, UK; and Malcolm McDonald, Until recently, Professor of Marketing and Deputy Director of Cranfield School of Management and formerly Marketing Director of Canada Dry, UK.