Key Account Management and the Relationship Lifecycle: Towards a Framework for Collaboration

Nick Ashill, Earl Naumann, Deepak Sirdeshmukh and Paul Williams

Marketing Working Papers from School of Business Administration, American University of Sharjah

Abstract: This paper examines the strategic drivers of effective key account management (KAM) and their integration into the relationship lifecycle. Previous KAM initiatives have tended to be focused on the sellers’ perspective, resulting in bias, resistance and subsequent failure of many KAM systems. We contribute to previous research by first, identifying a set of processes relevant to the strategic co-creation of relationship value and the role of KAM in this process. These processes include the relational co-creation of value, collaborative inter-firm communication, and joint problem solving. Secondly, we consider the moderating implications of KAM relationship lifecycle phases on the influence of these key processes. Recent research has established that relationship development transitions across phases of exploration, build-up, and maturity with variations in underlying relational dynamics across the phases. KAM systems thus need to factor in the relationship cycle when directing resources towards their key accounts.

Keywords: Key account management; Co-creation; Relationship lifecycle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dspace.aus.edu:8443/xmlui/bitstream/handle ... liams.pdf?sequence=1 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to dspace.aus.edu:8443 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sha:mktwps:09-06/2013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Marketing Working Papers from School of Business Administration, American University of Sharjah Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hamza Saleem ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).