Key Account Management – A Domain Review

Key Account Management (KAM) is a natural development of customer focus and relationship marketing in business-to-business markets. It can offer critical opportunities for profit enhancement for both the seller and the buyer, if it is managed with integrity and imagination. The scope of KAM is widening and at the same time becoming more complex. This means that the skills of those involved, both at strategic and operational levels, need to be continuously updated and developed.

This paper traces the anticedents of KAM and describes the several stages of development through which it has passed leading to the state-of-the-art in the twenty first century.