Everything we teach, build and sell comes from one observation and one conclusion. The observation: transactional business-to-business buying is being automated, and the pace of that automation has doubled twice. The conclusion: if what you sell is transactional, the days are numbered, if not already up, and the only way out is to change the conversation to value. That is why we started Value Matters, and why we built the tools: to audit, design, develop and deliver both the processes in your business and the capability of your people to do it.
Three accelerations
- 1AutomationPortals, e-tenders and reverse auctions, before 2020.
- 2The pandemicThe meeting room went away, and buying moved online early.
- 3Procurement's AIBuyers benchmark, summarise and negotiate with the same AI as you.
A great deal of selling was being automated before the pandemic: procurement portals, e-tenders, reverse auctions, the buyer who has read everything about you before you know they exist. Gartner was already predicting that most supplier and buyer interactions would happen in digital channels by 2025 (Gartner, The Future of Sales, 2020). Then the pandemic took the meeting room away and made the prediction true early.
And then came the third acceleration. Procurement now wields the same AI as its suppliers. A buyer can benchmark your price, summarise your proposal, and draft the negotiation before a human on their side has read it. What used to take a procurement team a quarter takes an afternoon. The information advantage that good salespeople traded on for a century is gone, and it is not coming back.
None of this is bad news, unless you sell the way you sold in 2019.
The companies that adapt will grow. The rest will rebuild.
sales organisations rebuild their key account programme every few years to fix the same underperformance.Gartner, (re)building KAM programmes for growth, 2021
They bought training when what they needed was a capability, and a capability is something the organisation can do on a Tuesday without the trainer in the room.
Where should that capability point? At the customers you already have. Ansoff's matrix has said it since 1957: existing products to existing customers is the lowest-risk growth there is (Ansoff, 1957). Every business development team spends its life trying to build from cold what a key account already holds: a contract, a relationship, references, and a history. Yet most account plans say "retain", and most of the wallet is sitting untouched. Run the numbers on your biggest customer and see how much.
If the conversation is not about value, price wins
The economics are unforgiving. When a customer cannot tell your offer from the next one, you are selling a commodity, and the price of a commodity is driven towards the cost of producing it. Every conversation that lands on price is a conversation nobody moved somewhere better. It is up to us, the people who sell, to centre the conversation on the value we create. Nobody else will.
Which means answering the only question a customer actually asks: what is this worth to me? Not what your product does. What changes in their numbers because they chose you. We call the answer a customer value proposition, and most companies cannot state theirs in two sentences. Your product plus your customer equals value-in-use, and the third term is the one you sell. Nobody wants the drill. They want the hole.
Your product+Your customer=Value-in-use
This is the missing part of many MBAs. Strategy is taught, finance is taught, marketing is taught, and the thing that connects them to revenue is left to the sales team to work out. A company must be able to deliver value to its customers and measure that it has, or every conversation it has will be about price.
The key account manager sells twice
Once to the customer, and first to their own company. Solve a problem for a customer and you have very often created one for your own business: a delivery team that has to do something new, a finance director who has to price it, a product manager whose roadmap just moved.
An offer that has not been sold inside your own company is not an offer. It is a rumour.
So the job is bigger than the job description, and it needs training that most account managers never get: to co-create value with a customer rather than present it to them, to measure it after the sale in the customer's own numbers, and to communicate it in both directions so that the customer keeps paying for it and the board keeps investing in it. Develop the offer, sell the value, capture the value. That is the whole of our method, and it is taught at Cranfield, not just sold.
Supply chains are where the money is
The largest companies in the world are now valued in the trillions, and every one of them is a supply chain: thousands of suppliers, each with an account manager somewhere trying to be more than a line on a purchase order. Supply chains are complicated things, and complicated things are where value hides. A key account is the place where your business meets one of those chains, and how you are treated there, as a supplier to be squeezed or a partner to be kept, is decided by the argument you bring.
Why we build tools, and why most are free
The technology that made procurement faster can make the account manager faster too, but only if someone does the filtering. The pace and depth of what is arriving, models and agents and whatever is next, is fast and confusing even for people who do this all day. So we build the tools ourselves, on the method, and we keep up with the technology so that you do not have to. What reaches you has already been tried on real accounts.
We keep as many of the tools free as we can. The ones we charge for are the ones that cost us to run: tokens and servers are not free, and a tool that reads your account plans every week has a bill behind it. Nothing free is a demo of something paid. The Prompt Guide, the Value Edge Diagnostic and the Whole Wallet are complete, and useful on a real customer this week.
Three practitioners, one argument
We met through Cranfield, where we all still teach. Mark spent a career proving that value-based key account management works. Sue researched it and taught it to a generation of key account managers. Rich spent his career on the supplier side of the table and now builds the tools that take the admin off. We kept reaching the same argument from different directions, so Mark and Rich made it a company, and Sue works with us as an Associate.
Mark Davies
Chair of the Association for Key Account Management and Visiting Fellow at Cranfield and Aston. Thirty years across engineering, operations and commercial strategy, advising blue-chip firms including MSD Animal Health and Zoetis. Author of Infinite Value and co-author of Implementing Key Account Management. He proved the method works before anyone wrote it down.
Richard Brooks
Author of AI Strategy for Sales Teams (Kogan Page, 2026) and Visiting Fellow at Cranfield. Thirty years leading international technology and services businesses, including FTSE 100 accounts and the UK/EU Public Sector. Consultant, builder, serial entrepreneur and teacher, working to improve sales and key account management. He builds the tools that put the method to work.
Dr Sue Holt
Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management and former Visiting Professor at IESEG. Completed her PhD in key account management at Cranfield and directed its KAM Best Practice Programme for over fifteen years. Co-author of Implementing Key Account Management and Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page). She brings the academic rigour.