Customer management

Customer management is the fourth theme of the Value Edge Diagnostic and the one that separates a KAM programme from a sales team with bigger accounts. Across runs customer intelligence: how structured, current and strategically relevant your knowledge of each key customer actually is, as opposed to how much of it lives in one person’s head. Up runs offer strength: whether your offers address the customer’s real business challenges, or promote your own capabilities with the customer’s logo on the cover.

Low on both is Transactional, the commodity-focused supplier waiting for the next tender. Strong intelligence with weak offers is the Value-Void, where the insight gathers dust while the proposals stay generic; it is more common than it should be, because gathering intelligence feels like progress and turning it into an offer feels like risk. Weak intelligence with strong offers is Product Focused, a good product looking for a problem. Customer Focused, high on both, is where the best propositions come from, and they are not written for customers. They are co-created with them.