Intraorganizational Determinants of Key Account Management Effectiveness

While there is a significant amount of research on determinants of selling effectiveness for individual salespeople, there is a surprising lack of study of factors that affect selling effectiveness in team-selling situations. The context of key account management (KAM) is discussed, and a conceptual model of factors that affect KAM effectiveness is developed. An hypotheses with data from 385 firms using structural equation modeling is tested, and it was found that firms should: 1. seek to build esprit de corps among those involved in KAM, 2. should proactively initiate activities with key accounts and do these activities more intensively, 3. should ensure that key account managers have access to key resources within the marketing and sales organization, and 4. should involve top managers of the firm.