Customers are the lifelines for business. Among these, a specific category of clients or accounts consistently bring significant recurring business over the years. These high-worth clients are addressed as key accounts.
Key Account Management aka KAM is a framework to build meaningful engagements with your key accounts to help you drive They are highly crucial for a company’s consistent profitable growth. It helps you maximize customer lifetime value, also referred to as LTV.
Importance of Key Account Management in Sales
Consistent growth in sales revenue is imperative for a business to succeed and function smoothly. This requires an effective sales strategy with a key account management methodology at the core.
This sales process will help your sales team to monitor and develop long-lasting relationships with your key clients. When executed well, you will witness tremendous improvement in your sales as well as profitability.
Why do you need a CRM for Key Account Management?
Adopting the right CRM software for Key Account Management is an important decision to manage your KAM process efficiently. The CRM will empower your teams with necessary information required to build meaningful customer relationships, maximize customer retention, and meet your business goals.
Let us discuss some of these key benefits in detail below.
Business Benefits of Using a CRM for Key Account Management
Maximize Repeat Sales
A CRM system provides your account managers with a complete 360-degree view of your clients. They get visibility into the client’s past purchases, all client interactions, key stakeholders and decision-makers, their business priorities, etc. with ease. This in turn will help your sales team to identify new cross-sell and up-sell opportunities to grow revenue from existing clients. This sales motion is referred to as account farming or mining.
Customer Retention
The role of your sales team and account managers is not just to acquire new clients, but also to retain them and build loyalty for the company’s future growth. High customer turnover can have negative consequences for your company. Here, CRM plays a vital role in determining risks and enabling your teams to take proactive steps to address client issues will in time.
Acquire New Clients
The robust sales methodology built into the KAM framework will help your sales team to acquire new clients. This is referred to as hunting. Following the right sales process will help them improve their deal conversion rates and meet their sales targets.
Improved Profitability
CRM software will help you significantly lower your marketing and customer acquisition costs (CAC). It will also help you reduce the cost of sales operations through streamlined operations and better collaboration between departments. These factors will directly contribute to improving your profitability and margins.
Higher Team Productivity
CRM plays an important role in helping teams to get their jobs done faster. It can help automate some of the time-taking repetitive and mundane tasks. It enables them to achieve more in less time through effective collaboration.
Better Decision Making
CRM software will give you visibility into all your sales operations, customer information, client interactions, sales activities, etc. This 360-degree view will help you make informed decisions for your business. This could be a combination of both tactical as well as strategic decisions for long-term business consequences.
Healthy Sales Pipeline
CRM is an effective tool for your sales team to identify new opportunities and build a healthy sales pipeline. This is a critical factor in enabling them to meet their sales targets consistently. Adopting the right sales process will help them effectively nurture their deals and improve deal conversions.
Accurate Sales Forecasting
Running a predictable business is fundamental to any business. The right CRM will help you improve your sales forecasts to meet this objective. This is achieved through deep client engagements, improved customer relationships, a strong sales pipeline, and high win rates.
Automated Reports
For any business operation, one must be able to evaluate past performance to plan strategically for the future. Sales CRM generates automated sales reports that can help you make critical decisions to optimize business performance. It significantly reduces manual efforts, time, and operational costs incurred to meet this objective. At the same time, it eliminates human errors that could creep in while preparing these reports.
Summary of How KAM Relates To CRM?
CRM for Key Account management provides B2B companies with a comprehensive and scientific methodology to successfully manage their key accounts. It is a strategic tool that is required to build a competitive advantage to build customer loyalty and build consistent growth. It is a must-have tool in your arsenal to run a sustainable and predictable business.
Original Source: What is Key Account Management (KAM)?
