Account manager

An account manager (Sales) is a person in a business who is responsible for the management of the sales and relationship with particular customers. They are usually allocated particular customer accounts, especially key accounts that provide the most business.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of an account manager vary depending on the nature of the business. The account manager builds client relationship by acting as the interface between the customer service teams and sales teams within a company. The goal is to maintain the company's existing relationship with a client or group of clients, so that they will continue using the company for business. The account manager also tries to identify potential new clients and business opportunities and to persuade new customers to place business with the company.

Account managers are responsible for working with clients to identify their needs and work out how the company can best meet those requirements, in order that the client does not decide to place business elsewhere. Normally an account manager looks after existing customers (called "farming") and leaves the creation of new accounts to the sales team (called "hunting").

Depending on the size of the company, account managers might manage a single account or they may have a variety of clients. An account manager might have responsibility for an account at national level or at global level. Global account managers and national account managers may work together in a hierarchical or matrix structure. The trend is to move responsibility for the major key accounts to the global level.^[1]

Key account manager

Key account management includes sales but also includes planning and managing the full relationship between a business and its most important customers. An account manager who works in this role will engage in a variety of tasks including project management, coordination, strategic planning, relationship management, negotiation, leadership and innovative development of opportunities.^[2] keeping record of transaction of sale and purchase goods

Key account management model

The basic assumption for a key account management model is the correct classification of the key accounts. A basic model often used in the period of 1950-1970 was the classification model of Webster, this model has been adapted by Milman and Wilson into a two dimensional model and was paramount in the period of 1970-1990. Bensaou has tested this model empirically by his research of carmakers in the United States and Japan and corrected the fundamental flaws. De Blick synthesized the adaptations into the 4S-model, which is at present the dominant key account classification model.^[3]

References

This marketing-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e