The Importance Of Account Management

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For this paper I chose an article from the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, which is titled Strategic account management: customer value creation through customer alignment. Account management can be defined as “being the management of dedicated sales and/or marketing processes directed towards important customers” (376 Bauwen/Gosselin). The account management strategy is important to a firm because it determines the plan in acquiring and developing their customers. The authors in the article give new classifications for account management based on the interaction between the seller and customer. These classifications focus on a long-term stable relationship while factoring in the importance of customer value thus creating a competitive …show more content…

The first point of confusion is trying to understand if account management is solely just a sale or marketing activity. According to the article, previous literature never distinguished between sells and marketing, but the actual practice of account management focused on customer driven sales. The second point of confusion deals with account management on a geographical scale. The author believes that “account management, whether implemented from a sales or relationship-marketing perspective, will change dramatically when customers geographic scope changes”(379 Bauwen/Gosselin). Therefore account management doesn’t have the same characteristics worldwide as in comparison to locally. The last confusion revolves around the concept of being able to create one best account management structure that works for all companies. Having factored in these three points of confusions a business will be able to implement a strategy that creates a competitive advantage for …show more content…

Even though this is true I believe that the majority of firms need to put an emphasis on their customer value. A business sector that comes to mind when I think of customer value is banking companies. These companies have to rely on an emphasis in customer value because this will lead to the important factor of customer loyalty. If a customer doesn’t feel appreciated by their bank then they will ultimately take their business somewhere else, and then the previous bank will have a decrease in their competitive advantage. One exception that I believe can be made is towards “companies with a production-oriented business approach favoring high production efficiency, low costs (382 Bauwen/Gosselin). These companies on the other hand are trying to produce a product at a large amount and do not have the time or necessity to put a major focus on customer relations. At the end of the day no company can do wrong by implementing an account management strategy that focuses on the value of their

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