Authors: Sylvie Lacoste
Piercy and Lane (2003, 564) note that traditional sales forces are under pressure from the emergence of a new customer-facing activity: key account management (KAM). Workman, Homburg, and Jensen (2003, 6) define KAM as the “need to be more responsive to the needs of important (strategic) customers and to have intra-organizational programs, systems, and procedures in place to treat key accounts differently from other accounts”. If some extensive academic research has been and still is carried out on KAM as a program (see, for instance, Guesalaga and Johnston (2010) for a review), research on the role of key account managers (KAMers) compared to standard selling in BtoB is scarce, particularly on the perception of the KAMers’ specific features and their evolution. In some academic papers, the word “salespeople” is sometimes used in a generic way to refer to both salespeople and key account managers. For instance, Rapp et al. (2014, 245) write, “Salespeople also have had to modify the nature of their interactions with customers and key accounts.” The purpose of our paper is to review how key account managers are perceived, compared to the selling activity, in the academic literature and how this perception has evolved.
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Publish Year: 2018
Conference: Marseille, France (2018)