Dealer Parts Manager Book Sale

Why I wrote this book

The focus of this work is to examine the Best Industry Practices in Successful Key Account Management in today’s machinery dealership.

Many dealer principals tell me they don’t feel as though their organization pays nearly enough attention to this challenge.

Every dealership has a small number of very large accounts that contribute significantly to the overall success of the business. Again, a Key Account is an account that if you lost it, 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. However, the definition of a Key Account must include the criteria of providing sustainable revenue, potential for sales growth, and relationship match between the dealership’s positioning and customer expectations.

Most importantly, the accounts fit in the Strategic Direction of the Dealer’s business model.

The days of back-slapping and expensive dinners are receding. This is particularly the case in Europe and North America, where major customers expect tangible enterprise benefits from their supplier relationships in terms of uptime as well as reductions in total cost of ownership and CO2 emissions reductions. Customers expect their dealers to provide cost-effective solutions to their unique requirements.

Trying to “wine and dine” potential new clients is only successful when those types of events surround product presentations, factory tours, industry seminars, etc.  These events are introduced to the customer in an effort to show the value of your product, company, or proposal. 

For example, simply providing tickets to a football game is not going to get it done when trying to win over an account, despite what your salesman thinks.  Those types of entertainment expenses should be reserved for rewarding existing customers to further cement the relationships or further expand relationships deeper into the organization. 

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 that are 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 also meet the requirements of smaller customers. We will review how to build this mindset in your company.

And, of equal importance, we will see how Product Support can play a critical, crucial role in acquiring and keeping those very large, very important customers.

We’ll explore Key Account Management the procedures and policies I have seen that yield the best results.