Global key account management and systems selling

Adoption of global key account management systems typically represents a response by selling companies to two inter-related structural changes in their business environment: first, the growing internationalisation of their industry and unprecedented levels of foreign competition; and second, the urgent need to retain customers of strategic importance (i.e. key accounts) against a background of centralised purchasing and supply base rationalisation. Global key account management is central to the ongoing, and often acrimonious debate captured in the slogan, “Think Global, Act Local”, suggesting serious implications for organisation structure, co-ordination/control and relationship management. Yet global key account management is under-researched and its efficacy, therefore, only partially understood. Such matters have long preoccupied executives in multi-national companies operating in industries where “systems selling” is a way of life and where practice is ahead of both theoretical development and empirical research.