KEY ACCOUNT PLAN

Key Account Plan



Key Account Plan

1. Introduction

As a reaction to changes in environmental factors, in their customers' purchasing behavior, and also because of their own evolution toward more complex offerings, many suppliers in the business-to-business field have introduced key account management programs. The aim of these programs is to serve strategically important customers in a more individual manner than ordinary accounts. A core assumption in the key account literature is that supplier companies are willing to increase their input into important customer relationships because they hope to enhance the relationship outcome. This paper presents the results of an empirical study among 297 purchasing managers in which this assumption was tested. Based upon the relational exchange framework, the authors analyze whether suppliers dedicate more relational behavior to their key accounts than to their ordinary accounts (input side). This research also examines whether the quality of the relationship (satisfaction, trust, commitment) as perceived by key accounts is higher than that perceived by ordinary accounts (output side).

2. Key account management as a resource-oriented management concept

Resource-oriented management theories increasingly interpret customers as part of a company's assets, particularly when these customers contribute to the creation of competitive advantages. Some customers are also believed to be of higher value to the firm than others: “relational market-based assets are outcomes of the relationship between a firm and key external stakeholders. (...) The bonds constituting the relationships and the sources of them can vary” (Srivastava, Shervani, & Fahey, 1998, p. 5). This focus on a customer's value is reflected by recent contributions to relationship marketing. Different authors have proposed measurement models and studies linking a customer's value to outcome variables such as loyalty (e.g. Cornelsen, 2000, Krafft, 2002 and Werani, 2000).

In a slightly different perspective, resource advantage theory (RAT) posits that - in addition to customer relationships - specific organizational solutions a supplier company implements in order to serve its customers may be interpreted as resources. These solutions may be based upon “specific organizational policies and procedures and the skills and knowledge of specific employees” (Hunt, 2000, p. 189). For an organizational solution to become a valuable resource, it must permit the owning company to serve its customers more efficiently and/or more effectively than its competitors (Hunt & Morgan, 1995). According to RAT, companies having such comparative advantages in organizational resources are able to occupy superior marketplace positions and, in turn, to achieve superior financial performance (Hunt & Morgan, 1996).

Both, the interpretation of customers as well as organizational solutions as valuable resources, contribute to the explanation of the increasing attention suppliers pay to the maintenance and enhancement of important customer relationships. This particular attention is often manifested by the establishment of key account programs (Kempeners & van der Hart, 1999). The suppliers' objective is to occupy marketplace positions of competitive advantage.

In the extant literature, a panoply of different terms are being used to design the specific organizational solutions this paper deals with, e.g. national account management, large account management or strategic account management (Boles, Johnston, ...