Compensating New Sales Roles

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A Configurational Perspective on Key Account Management

Most firms struggle with the challenge of managing their key customer accounts. There is a significant gap between the importance of this organizational design problem in practice and the research attention paid to it. Sound academic research on key account management (KAM) is very limited and fragmented. Drawing on research on KAM and team selling, the authors develop an integrative conceptualization of KAM and define key constructs in four areas: (1) Activities, (2) Actors, (3) Resources, (4) Approach Formalization. Adopting a configurational perspective to organizational research, the authors then use numerical taxonomy to empirically identify eight prototypical KAM approaches based on a cross-industry, cross-national study. The results show significant performance differences between the approaches. Overall, the paper builds a bridge between marketing organization research and relationship marketing research