On the 12th day of Christmas my key account said to me “you can sharpen terms on the doves and pear trees”.

When a lot of your business is controlled or dependent on a few large accounts, it is not hard to find yourself in a position of dependence with key customers and on the wrong end of demands that verge on coercive power.

If managed proactively using key relationship triggers and builders these pressures can be turned round to your advantage.

Over time the relationship develops into inter-dependence with increased levels of trust and mutual commercial benefit.

The demands that used to be part of the common everyday interaction haven’t gone away, however can be managed within a jointly developed approach to mutual value.

Your key account teams are involved within joint business planning, co-creation, co-delivered cost release and co-ordinating cross functional teams that work within the relationship.

Our booklet “The Trust Ladder” explains in detail these levels of inter-dependent relationship based on trust – you can download it for free!

Done properly come this time next year you could also be delivering the pear tree, doves, maids, geese, hens and golden rings – and celebrate successes like leaping lords!

Let us know if you found this useful – we would love to hear from you!

Have a view on this? Tweet to @customerattune or Tweet to @MarkHollyoake

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Dr Mark Hollyoake

Mark is a co-founder and Director of Customer Attuned Ltd. He holds a Doctorate from the University ofSouthampton, his thesis focused on Trust as a dynamic within business to business customer relationships.

He is an expert in B2B Customer Experience and Customer Management. This includes CM strategy development; execution of improvement plans (incl. organisational modelling for customer management); programme design; and partnership & alliance development.

Mark's applied work across FMCG, industrials, medical devices, financial services, business services and construction has led to organisations making, significant improvements to their customer management. A large focus of this work has been moving organisations up the Trust Ladder to enable them to benefit from reduced cost to serve, while continuing to innovate and deliver mutual value.

Mark is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and Member of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management. He holds an MBA in strategy from Henley Business School.

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