PSMG: Key Account Management- Hearts and Minds not Bells and Whistles

Managing complex key account management (KAM) programmes - growing cross-practice revenue, delivering consistent client service, strengthening loyalty and identifying the client's unique value expectations - is the greatest business development challenge facing professional services firms today. For many reasons - cultural, behavioural and organisational - very few firms can claim genuine success in this field as progress is limited.

The key elements of an effective KAM programme are relatively straightforward to grasp.  At heart, though, the obstacles to successfully implementing KAM are behavioural and not organisational.  Creating the right system and process is the easy part; winning partner commitment is a disproportionately greater task.

The purpose of this seminar is to strip away the paraphernalia of KAM - the relational databases and client feedback activities, the value propositions and the analysis - and instead to confront the core challenges that it presents to BD professionals.  Where do the real obstacles lie?  How, in practice, are they impeding and derailing KAM activity? 

Then, drawing on the particular experience and insights of the participants, the session will identify effective, practical responses to these challenges.  How has partner resistance and scepticism been overcome?  What levers have been used successfully to do so?  What are the implications for the way in which partners are rewarded?  What role should senior management play?  And where should directors' energies be most effectively directed?

The session will be led by Meirion Jones.  For the past four years Meirion has had overall responsibility for Reed Smith's global KAM programme, helping cross-border client teams to build stronger and deeper relationships with a client base of demanding, highly complex multinational organisations.  Meirion has over twenty years of professional services experience including senior roles at Coopers & Lybrand (one of PwC's predecessor firms), Allen & Overy and Lovells.

Meirion is also in the unique position of having a foot in both camps!  He has recently established his own consultancy, Client Critical, focusing on assisting professional services firms to realise their international KAM aspirations.