About this Course

Top accounts come with a double edged sword – while they contribute a sizeable portion to your company's bottomline, they become the target of competition that constantly tempt them with better offering and price discounts.

In addition to the competitive attacks, key accounts often exercise their heavyweight pressures by demanding more for less as they know their bargaining power with the strategic vendors. It is quite common that account teams while managing the key accounts become too operational in the day-to-day and lose sight of the need to be proactive, nurturing and developing the account more strategically.

Sophisticated buyers today have access to a borderless market and more information through the power of the internet. As the business environment becomes more competitive, vendors are now seen as a critical extension to help the client achieve their goals. With an effective key account plan, vendors unwittingly corner themselves into accepting price discounts as a retention strategy without realising that they could be booted out by the next vendor who can provide a better price or a better value proposition.

As we enter a turbulent economy of wobbly fundamentals and a shaky economic outlook, we need to adopt a proactive approach to handling our core assets, our top customer base by systematically crafting a clear plan of action to achieve the competitive edge for your customers' needs and their business outcomes.

Transform your organisation from a vendor to a trusted advisor.

When your organisation takes a pro-active, opportunity-driven approach to managing their account, you feel empowered that the organisation is customer-centric and strive to develop a long-term customer relationship with your key customers. As such, even the usual pains of limited resources and fire-fight problems will be viewed more positively because a mission and strategy has been structured.

Collaborative teams with a clear vision are in a stronger position to spot new opportunities and expand their accounts with profitable and value-led offerings the customers want.

As such, the initial step in aligning your account team's efforts is to create a consistent account methodology to size up your knowledge of every key account. This is different from the monthly sales management reports that monitors the progress of ongoing opportunities in the sales pipeline.

Learning Outcomes:

• Create a paradigm shift to handle key accounts from a customer-centric view and provide systems to understand the complexities of your account dynamics and its business
  
• Constructively analyse account potential relative to its business attractiveness vs. its potential, the competitive background you're positioning relative to your competitors
  
• Craft a value proposition that can address the needs of customers and become a competitive defensive strategy concurrently
  
• Consider competitive and growth strategies to nurture your key account
  
• Tools and template to follow through to assess ongoing performance
  

Participants will be immersed in a workshop that is relevant to the Asian context in terms of tough price-sensitive customers and lean organisations. They will be able to:

• Uncover different approaches to view a key account beyond revenue and margin
  
• Learn new concepts about drill-down key account analysis and intelligence
  
• Practise and try out templates and relate them to their current business scenarios
  
• Apply and adapt the model when they return to their workplace
  

Course Outline:

Part 1: How to use key account management as a tool beyond the planning process

Part 2: How to understand your customer profile besides their annual purchases

Part 3: How to build customer intelligence to understand the health of the account

Part 4: How to create an effective key account team in your organisation

Part 5: How to dive deeper to fully understand the unspoken needs of the key account

Part 6: How to develop a compelling value proposition that impresses your customers

Part 7: How to transform your competitive attacks into a strategic advantage

Part 8: How to prepare ahead to ensure that I have traction to follow through and see results

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