Successful Key Account Management: Machinery Dealer Manager’s Handbook

Excerpts and Insights:

“Who is on the Dealer Key Account team? It should always include someone from sales, senior management, and product support. Bi-monthly or quarterly team reviews of your overall Key Account program, including the issues in this text, are highly recommended.”

?“The Dealer Sales Manager helps coordinate activities of the Key Account Management team including adequate and intelligent sales coverage, the inclusion of Product Support in major meetings with the customer, monitoring customer satisfaction studies, and encouraging the customer to pursue a “fix before fail” maintenance strategy with Product Support.”

?“The Service Technician(s) who work on the account should also be consulted for their ideas and suggestions on what could be done to improve dealer support for this particular account. They can also alert you to personnel changes, signs of trouble, and, the overall status of the relationship with the account. Because the service technicians often have the most frequent contact, they can make extremely valuable contributions to the success of the relationship.

”Many thanks for the tremendous response to our newest publication, Successful Key Account Management—Machinery Dealer Manager’s Handbook. I appreciate all the encouragement and the many generous contributions to this book by Machinery Industry Executives, making this concise and timely information available to all Machinery Managers.

ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

The focus of Successful Key Account Management is examining the Best Industry Practices for Machine Dealer Managers in today’s industrial equipment dealerships. The very definition of a Key Account must include their providing sustainable revenue. The Key Account should have the potential for sales growth. And, there has to be a relationship match between the dealership’s positioning and customer expectations. The account fits in the?Strategic Direction of the Dealer’s Business Model. That is, does the Key Account take your dealership where you want to go?

Every dealership has a small number of very large accounts that contribute significantly to the overall success of the business.? A key account is one which, if you lost a large (key) account, this loss would have a catastrophic impact on your business. Hopefully, your dealership has strategically avoided the risk of having 80% of your business in only 2 or 3 accounts.? My Successful Key Account Management Handbook will delve into examining and identifying ways to avoid this unfortunate outcome.

What are the Best Practices in Key Account Management today?? The concept of “high-tech/high-touch” is proving to be a very successful approach to developing and keeping those accounts essential to your long-term financial success.? However, the challenge in Successful Key Account Management is to simultaneously ensure dealer resources, offerings, culture, and systems simultaneously meet the requirements of smaller customers.? We will review how to build this mindset in your company.

Of equal importance, we will examine how Product Support can play a critical, crucial role in acquiring and keeping those very large, very important customers.? We’ll explore the Key Account Management procedures and policies we’ve seen yield the best results, as well as the Quantitative Dealer Performance Metrics that contribute most to Successful Key Account Management.

We'll help you conduct a Key Account performance self-assessment. Then, we'll examine the essential steps in Key Account Management from assembling the team, gathering important facts, defining the roles of key customer influencers, identifying their individual preferences and fears, and establishing Product Support as a Competitive Strength. We'll review how large accounts evaluate a potential dealer vendor. We'll specify the necessary selling skills and structure a contact strategy to successfully service all accounts to optimize market share. And, we'll discuss how deal participation rate directly impacts market share.

We'll study how to avoid the biggest mistakes in Key Account Management as well as how to dodge the biggest vulnerabilities in your dealership. We'll conclude with special reports on how to sell large, complex engineered systems, perform life-cycle costing, optimize rental profits, and avoid major pitfalls in used equipment business management.

Thank you again for your interest in our work. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

Walter McDonald-[email protected]