We often hear from organizations who need to establish a process for client services or Key Account Management (KAM), but are not yet operating at a scale where they need purpose-built technology to support their efforts.
First we want to say: Congratulations! It takes foresight and big-picture thinking to realize that even if you’re just starting out on your KAM journey—maybe you’re a smaller organization, a start-up, or just beginning to expand your offering—it’s important to lay the foundation for future growth by establishing clear internal processes designed to strengthen customer engagement from the outset. These are the processes that help you drive organic growth and scale seamlessly when the time comes.
KAM also helps establish a culture where customers come first. We find the earlier this is ingrained in an organization’s DNA, the better. A customer-centric approach sets you up to stay competitive, even as customer needs and expectations change. It also helps refine your decision-making as you grow.
If you’re not ready to invest in a KAM platform yet, or if you’re still just wondering how you might implement KAM at all, we’ve developed a free, portable tool to help you establish strong practices around key account management, so you can begin building customer engagement now—and set yourself up for future success.
The KAM To-Go Tool
We always say Kapta is both an app and a roadmap designed to help you strengthen customer engagement. But if the app piece doesn’t make sense for your business right now, you can still use our roadmap to implement best practices around Key Account Management. That’s where the KAM To-Go Tool comes in.
Another name for our roadmap is Our KAM ProcessTM—it’s a proven methodology for building customer engagement through Key Account Management. The KAM To-Go Tool is essentially a checklist, organized around the 3 main pillars of Our KAM Process: Know, Act, Measure.
Within each section (Know, Act, Measure), we’ve organized our checklist the same way we organize Action Plans within Kapta. We start with the big picture: What is the business goal you are trying to accomplish? Then we break that down into a smaller objective: an interim accomplishment that helps you get to your bigger goals. From there we show the action you can take, and the tasks you can assign to individual owners.
This process of breaking down big-picture goals into manageable units is important to apply both internally and with your clients. When you’re ready to build an action plan for them, use the same stepwise approach to ensure a clear, actionable plan forward, where every task your team takes on, no matter how small, adds up to meaningful accomplishments for you and your clients.
Just like pilots use checklists to stay safe and on task before and during each flight, you can use KAM To-Go to stay focused on your customers and organized towards your end goals—not only across the duration of a project, but also throughout your relationship with every major client.
Rinse, Repeat
KAM isn’t a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing method that helps strengthen customer engagement and drive organic growth. It’s an approach that puts customers first so you succeed when they do. And it never stops—as soon as you finish measuring your success with one initiative, you’re hopefully already starting the next one.
When to Try KAM To-Go
KAM To-Go is free and easy to use. There’s no reason not to download now and see if it’s a good fit for what you’re trying to do.
If you’re brand new to Key Account Management, you can also download our Big Book of KAM, another free resource that dives deeper into the fundamentals of KAM, including the who, why, and how of Key Account Management.
When to Invest in Kapta
There’s no hard-and-fast rule about when you need to bring purpose-built technology on board in order to run most efficiently. Some companies opt to start when their team grows—after all, the more people you have running multiple accounts at once, the more important it is to have a single source of truth to visualize the health and productivity of each project and account. You could also bring tech on board when you land an extremely high-value client, and you don’t want anything to fall through the cracks. We find there’s a sweet spot in your growth curve for implementing Kapta, and it’s when you’re large enough for the investment to make sense, but still small enough that Kapta is baked into your process and onboarding before you scale rapidly.
To see Kapta in action, and talk through whether it makes sense for you organization, schedule a personal demo. We’ve been doing this long enough to know when our tech is a good fit, and when you’d be better off with something lighter, like the KAM To-Go tool. We’ll help you find the right approach for your organization, no matter where you are in your KAM journey.
