Key account management: Overcoming internal conflict
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ywords: key account management, leadership, organisational structure, teamwork
Key account management: Overcoming internal conflict Lynette Ryals and Lindsay Bruce Received (in revised form): 8 June 2005
Abstract The need for an integrated, cross-functional approach to customer management is well recognised. Managers have tried numerous structural and cultural adaptation methods to achieve it, but with limited success. Strategically important customers are becoming more prevalent and are demanding more sophisticated, integrated (often international) solutions. As a result, the internal conflicts that naturally arise from attempts to integrate across functional and national barriers now risk leading to customer dissatisfaction on a critical scale. Key account management (KAM), developed to meet the broader needs of those large, strategically important customers, has succeeded in overcoming internal conflict where other approaches have failed. KAM success relies on cross-functional teamwork and key account managers with a unique blend of boundary-spanning qualities. Not only does this combination help to solve the problem of internal conflict within the KAM team itself, it also extends beyond the KAM team, reducing cross-boundary conflict and infighting in the wider organisation. While not an easy or simple solution, and not one that is necessarily suitable for all companies, it seems that where KAM is strategically appropriate the benefits are culturally as well as financially profitable.
Introduction
Professor Lynette Ryals Cranfield School of Management Cranfield Bedford MK43 0AL, UK Tel: +44 (0)1234 758087 E-mail: lynette.ryals@cranfield.ac.uk
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Many managers find their efforts to develop an integrated customerfacing solution frustrated by internal organisational conflict. In some organisations the conflict has outlasted the managers who tried to resolve it and has become an embedded part of the corporate culture. Frustrating as this internal conflict may be for those who work within it, many companies still survive and even thrive for years despite the lack of integration. So, do we really need to resolve the conflict? And, if so, how can we do this? The reason that many companies are currently struggling with the need to provide integrated customer solutions is the growing significance of large and strategically important customers, and research shows that these big customers are getting bigger, more powerful and more sophisticated in their purchasing.1 Moreover, many of these big, powerful customers actively demand international or global servicing capability from their suppliers, along with an unprecedented breadth of support. Suppliers who are not able to meet these standards rapidly find themselves sidelined and even relegated to second-tier supplier status.2
& PA L G R AV E M A C M I L L A N LT D 1 7 4 6 - 0 1 7 4 V O L . 7 N O . 4 PP 344–351.
Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice
Key account management: Overcoming internal conflict Many organisations struggle to provide the level of support
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