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Paper info: KAM Units As "Sibling Rivals": An Empirical Investigation Of Experiments In Key Account Management In Two UK Business-To-Business Service Suppliers

Title


KAM Units As "Sibling Rivals": An Empirical Investigation Of Experiments In Key Account Management In Two UK Business-To-Business Service Suppliers

Authors


Norman Brady
Regents Business School
United Kingdom
Norman Brady

Place of Publication


The paper was published at the 19th IMP-conference in Lugano, Switzerland in 2003.

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Abstract


The context for this paper is a research programme (36 months) encompassing four case studies of large UK service-supplier companies trading in diverse B2B markets. The focus here is on two of these service-supplier companies i.e. Romalia (1), a large (£8 billion turnover) distribution provider (parcels and packages) and Hexel, a medium sized (£35 million turnover), fleet supplier, trading exclusively in the UK. Hexel and Romalia created new discreet key account management (KAM) units in 1997 and 1999 respectively. The reference in the title to "sibling rivals" is indicative of the cultural resistance and general enmity experienced by these newly created KAM units from other older and more established functional units within their organisations. In addition to the problems of inter-departmental conflict experienced by the focal companies, their KAM strategies were also undermined by processual problems centring on KAM strategy formulation. Following a brief description of the KAM strategies themselves, an analysis of how and why these problems occurred will be included in the case study findings. The phenomena under discussion will be located in the extant literature, in particular the literature on key account management, market orientation and internal marketing. One of the sub-aims of this paper, therefore, is to identify linkages between some of the disparate strands in relationship marketing literature.