Unfortunately the vast majority of companies only come to assign an account Executive that tries to do his best to coordinate all activities with your client and which is subject to the pressure of achieving more sales. In general, an account manager performance indicators are determined by the achievement of sales, most not by indicators such as the customer relationship manager. If the company is committed, at the comprehensive level, with the development of a relationship with the customer really strategic, it is necessary to define a framework in which all the variables in a comprehensive and strategic attention to such clients are established. For this it is necessary to define a business process that establishes the activities that need to be developed, from the identification and classification of a client as account strategic, to the attention of each of the points of contact you have with this client. This must obey to an action at the level of address through which stipulate issues such as: organizational structure aimed at addressing all points of contact with strategic accounts, business processes that support each of these points of contact, information and tools that will be implanted in order to properly support these business processes, and finally management indicators that will evaluate the behavior of the relationship with each of strategic customers. Therefore, strategic account management must be a corporate initiative and not only in the area of sales, since it implies a consistent and exceptional care for customers considered as strategic by the organization.
The second fundamental concept that needs to be reviewed, under a strategy of key account management, is the way how the strategic accounts are selected. Here senior management must stipulate the criteria that need to be assessed to consider whether a customer is strategic for the company or account. Variables such as size, volume of purchases, volume of billing are the most obvious, but it is also necessary to consider elements as future growth of the account, weight within the industry in which acts, influence that can have on other companies or economic sectors, current and potential profitability of the account, etc.