Strategies To Strengthen Your Key Account Relationships
Key Account strategies are more important than ever before. But the strategy must be based on an analysis of your position within key accounts. Doing this will enable you to identify opportunities to become a preferred, or strategic supplier. In this insight we will show you how.
What Kind of Supplier Are You?
What kind of supplier are you? Take a moment before you answer – the question is not aimed at finding out the sector you supply, the products you carry, or your company’s pedigree. Rather it aimed at better understanding the relationship you have with your customers. By asking ‘What kind of supplier are you?’ what we are really asking is ‘which of the 3 categories in the diagram below do you belong to?’
We will define each of these types of customer-supplier relationships in quite some detail, but first let’s take a high level view. To do this we will use a clever approach used by a participants in one of our workshops recently, who drew parallels between supplier relationships and the different types of romantic relationships.
As shown in the diagram the ‘standard supplier‘ relationship involved little commitment and amounts to no more than a series of one night get togethers. The ‘preferred supplier‘ relationship involves a deepening commitment, while the ‘strategic supplier‘ relationship involves a long term partnership, or ‘growing old together’.
That is a nice simple way of getting the idea across, now lets put some science behind it on the following pages.
