An Exploratory Analysis of Important Corporate Account Management

• Main Authors: Lin, Chung-Ho, 林中和
• Other Authors: J. Chris Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/13795811864923865620

碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 管理研究所 === 93 === In today''s uncertain B2B environment, two challenges faced by business owners and professional managers include obtaining corporate accounts and guaranteed profit growth. Important corporate accounts are crucial to growth of B2B profits for customer-focused and relationship marketing-oriented businesses. In today''s knowledge economy, enhancing core competence and corporate account relationship management have become key to business survival. The objective of customer relationship management lies in improving customer relationships by highlighting dialogue and interaction with them, but the biggest challenge is determining how to well-connect with clients through interaction and dialogue. Therefore, businesses must depend on the interaction of their professional managers and highly effective teams with corporate accounts to build business connections and work shoulder to shoulder with them to create value. This paper uses the qualitative research method to carry out exploratory study mainly on businesses that already implement corporate account management in their B2B business. For this study, documentation from both Taiwan and abroad was consulted regarding Key Account Management and Strategic Account Management, the most common types of corporate account management. Business owners and high-level managers were interviewed and the practical experience promoted in Taiwan by KAM/SAM investigated to understand the implementation strategies, operation methods, achievements, and relevant restrictions of KAM/SAM in hopes of deriving a case model by which businesses in Taiwan can implement KAM/SAM to serve as a basis for Taiwan SMEs in the areas of sales planning and account management. This is the objective of this study. This study found that implementing important corporate accounts is crucial to the sustained operation and profit growth of businesses. Businesses need to build customer-focused organizations and cultures, to establish active interaction between designated important account task forces and existent industrial leading customers, to use relationship marketing to help both parties enhance their learning relationship, and to implement important corporate (Key/Strategic) account management cases. These will enable them to build partnerships in which both parties can unite their efforts to create value to ensure the enhancement of customer shares, make them leaders in their industries, enhance their competitive edge, give them the advantage of customer relationship assets, and help them stay on top of future business opportunities.