Simplistic, so I want to go and then explain what I mean about models. The first thing is when you're selecting your key accounts or go into it, I would suggest honestly ladies and gentlemen that it’s really should be I mean less than 25 that you’d put in there, less than 25. And not just the ones you deal with, I mean you wouldn’t have put maybe Microsoft in there 20 years ago, you might not have put Virgin in there 20 years ago and not just the ones you deal with currently, who should go into your key account program?
Now we’re dealing with those top 15, 20 or 25. Now I just want to talk about them from now on the really big ones. And you will see I've called them—I’ll explain what I mean by these expressions a bit later on. But these down here, don’t worry I’ve called them stators, this people I’ve called streamline, this people called stand, this people I’ve called strategic. Now this costumers are awful believe me, awful but even if they come through to a call center and someone says you're at a stream line costumer what they don’t say you are Mr. and Mrs. Horrible aren’t you, we hate your guts they say “You’re a stream line customers” the costumer “Oh, thank you very much indeed” even though it's really an insult.
But you see what I'm saying, find names for them that are actually complimentary, so I want to explain the model that we have used for many, many years. It isn't a straight line like I've got it on there. Basically what this means is you’d like to deal with them but you don’t—you got some basic stuff with them, it's transactional. Here you're a preferred supplier but only one of many. Here you are a major supplier but they can still get rid of you. Here you are a major supplier and they can get rid of you because you sort of join them almost like one and the same company.
So if you take that simple model and you take my representations of different states and I want to talked to through this very, very quickly because if you look at this one it's clearly you’d like to deal with them but you don’t. And it's mostly going to be about the key account manager and the pitching managers. It’s going to be about product and it's going to be about price. It's going to be about the normal things, it's going to be out of selling and negotiating. Here you got some business but it’s not very stable it’s a bit like the docking of the space station in the spacecraft not very stable. If that person leaves or that person leaves often the relationship falls apart.
Now most of the relationships that we found ladies and gentleman over the years have been of this kind the corporative kind and you get two responses from this you get companies who are rushing around. This people have read books somewhere about relationship marketing and they're rushing around pampering this people giving them free advice, giving them free this and free that. The response from this people is one of two things they either sit down laugh this off and then take it because your not charging for it or they got fed up with it and they send out time to mess around with this badly organized mob here and the say to the key account “Can you going to do sensor for us” and the key account manager says “Oh, I’m going to have to go back and asked my mom or my dad”. The answer is they're not a key account manager so you know run away play we don’t want to deal with you.
But there’s another consequence of that most relationships are actually like that badly organized, whole two years of research it showed that the one state where you are almost certainly going to loose money is at this cooperative stage here this one. So my advice to organization or it has been and always will be, if you are at that stage either move it forward to one of this or move it back to that otherwise you’ll loose loads and loads and loads of money. All right pretty straight forward advice isn't it and major relationships are like that which is sad isn't it. Because people that thinking the structured about how they deal with big customers.
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