Axel Michael Thoma

In this age of tough, global competition, companies in business-to-business markets need to rethink the way they manage their customer portfolio and interact with their customers. Customer managers with mainly sales- or relationship-oriented roles cannot leverage their business relationships with customers who seek co-creation. For such co-creation relationships, companies need to install network-oriented managers who systematically create value and reduce risk together with the customer. This article distinguishes three customer asset management perspectives (i.e., sales, relationship, and network) that may be employed by customer managers at the supplier-customer interface. Following an explication of the evolving network perspective, it describes how firms can nurture the network perspective and the corresponding customer manager role in terms of mindset, context, and competence.

Customer integration into the innovation process, including the fuzzy front end, is increasingly being adopted by firms in search of new innovation and value-creation opportunities. Through a case study of Altana, a specialty chemicals company with worldwide R&D and sales operations, we find that a closer collaboration between R&D and key account management (KAM) unlocks synergies and value creation potential while avoiding the negative side effects of customer integration. Specifically, we describe the motivation for leveraging synergies between R&D and KAM, the location of potential synergies in the innovation process, and ways to foster meaningful alignment and engagement. Following an explanation of observed outcomes of the collaboration, we derive managerial implications.

The role of the salesperson in business-to-business is changing; from an advocate and seller of products and services to an advisor and consultant who creates value in dialogue together with the customer. Digital, tablet-based applications support salespeople in such direct customer conversations. What such applications can accomplish, and which factors influence their adoption and usage are explored in this paper, based on a multiyear case study of FRONERI, a joint venture of Nestlé and R&R Ice Cream.

Today’s health care environment is marked by system cost pressure and complex networks of care. Pharmaceutical companies respond to this reality by transforming their go-to-market and sales force models. While the adoption of e.g. key account management by pharma has been discussed, the question yet to be answered is: How are role(s) and respective capabilities of those at the customer interface, now primarily mandated with value creation, evolving? A multiyear case study with a pharmaceutical drugs company illustrates the evolution of oncology sales representatives into therapeutic specialists and documents the emergence of an entirely new role called ‘oncology network manager’.

Strategic account management as a firm’s strategy and approach to jointly create value with its most important customers depends profoundly on the strategic account managers at the supplier-customer interface. They have the mandate to explore and realize new value creation opportunities, often without the power to formally command the resources required to do so. Whether strategic account managers succeed is largely based on their ability to operate deftly in a boundary spanning role and inter-firm context in which they have little to none authority. Based on structured interviews with thirty strategic account managers from different international firms, this paper explores ‘impact without authority’ as a key individual capability for creating value with strategic customers. We conceptualize impact without authority as a complex bundle of distinct knowledge, skills, and routines and then discuss managerial implications for appointing and developing strategic account managers.

For firms competing in high velocity business markets, global account management (GAM)-that is, a supplier's program to centrally leverage its value creation and appropriation worldwide with its strategic customers-is an important matter. When they attempt to implement GAM, firms often face significant challenges in bringing about sustainable change and embedding GAM programs. Many GAM programs run into severe and costly difficulties, ranging from (multiple) relaunches to termination. Adopting a capabilities perspective, we develop through multiyear case study research a model that conceptualizes a firm's global change capability as a key determinant of GAM implementation success. Specifically, we propose that higher levels of a firm's global change capability are associated with a higher degree of GAM program institutionalization, and that higher levels of GAM program institutionalization are associated with a greater degree of GAM program effectiveness and efficiency. We then test this model in a cross-industry survey of 154 multinational firms that have implemented GAM. The results support the conceptualization of a firm's global change capability (i.e., strategic alignment, top management engagement, reward alignment, resource securing, and conflict management) as a meta-capability that embeds GAM and increases program effectiveness and efficiency.