Manage customers according to their segment-specific needs
The main task of marketing and sales is to steer customers toward a purchase. Ideally, customers should serve as the basis and focus of all activities. Customer benefits and processes are an important point of reference here. Superficial knowledge of the customer or overly broad approaches to service quality will fall short in the long run.
Successful key account management (KAM) is vital if a company wants to experience above-average growth. Concentration processes, rising customer expectations and the need for higher growth and profitability rates make optimizing key account management essential. This involves a systematic management of key customers that goes beyond the mere sale of products and services.
Typical challenges
- Companies set the wrong priorities in their customer portfolio by exclusively selecting their top customers on the basis of sales revenue.
- Key account managers lack the internal clout needed to ensure the performance of services for key customers.
- Growth potential cannot be fully tapped, as key customers insist on price discounts.
Our approach to supporting you
We use our KAM performance check to analyze your approach to managing key customers. This check is based on the scientifically proven St. Gallen KAM concept. Afterwards, we prioritize the areas of activity to optimize your KAM approach and work with you to develop a tailored solution for your company. Depending on the scope and objective, this will take place over a period of 3 to 6 months.
Results
- Development of an integrated selection model to systematically prioritize your key accounts.
- Development of a company-specific KAM plan as a precondition for the strategic analysis, planning and management of key customers.
- Clarification of the collaboration in virtual KAM teams in order to ensure uniform customer management.
Small customers are often underestimated. The ambitious goal is to keep the cost of collaboration as low as possible for both sides. Companies that do not utilize smart account management lose money and cannibalize their own key account management.
Typical challenges
- Small customers only generate low volumes but have heterogeneous needs and thus require substantial management effort.
- Companies often do not have suitable solutions and profitable processes for interacting with small customers.
- Suppliers assume that the small customers of today are the large companies of tomorrow and hence tend to manage them inefficiently.
Our approach to supporting you
We identify the relevant levers and use them to derive the critical success factors for your company. Based on this, we develop various initiatives to optimize your smart account management as well as cost-effective, innovative, and tailored interaction models for small customers.
Results
- Segmentation of small customers and development of a holistic management concept for each customer segment.
- Implementation of service provision that is both profitable and based on needs.
- Orchestration of digital sales channels for optimal access to customers.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is intended to support customer-based business processes and provide reliable customer information. Particularly in lead management, activities in marketing and sales can be closely interlinked. At the same time, CRM projects are extremely complex and result in company-wide changes. This is often underestimated during implementation.
Typical challenges
- Companies hastily adapt themselves to system requirements instead of first defining their own requirements and then adapting the system as needed.
- Managers hope that automated customer management processes will ease their burden, but stumble over the fundamentals in the implementation thereof (e.g. inadequate data quality, lack of system compatibility, etc.).
- The roadblock to efficient CRM is rarely the system itself but rather the way that system is used.
Our approach to supporting you
Based on your company’s strategy, we identify the specific marketing, sales, and service requirements of your business. These requirements form the basis for aligning all customer-focused processes and optimizing seamless customer management. In addition, we will support you in determining a suitable solution and assist you closely with the implementation of this solution.
Results
- Improvement of the customer experience through a data-supported, 360° customer view, tailored customer contact, and real-time processing of requests.
- Development of the underlying principles and rules to efficiently map marketing and sales activities within the IT system (e.g. interfaces, end-to-end processes, etc.).
- Ensuring customer-focused and cross-unit collaboration of marketing, sales, and services.