This book contains top-to-bottom techniques for keeping your best customers in-house and happy - and away from your competition. Strategic accounts are your firm's lifeblood; they play a critical role in its success or failure. The Seven Keys to Managing Strategic Accounts is filled with best practices and examples of how to intelligently manage key interactions and relationships with these vital accounts - for greater loyalty, higher profitability, and consistent competitive advantage. Let this hands-on guidebook's compelling case studies and examples help you to: create firm-wide alignment and commitment to meeting the needs and expectations of strategic accounts; develop multi-level relationships within these accounts, from line managers to upper executives; continually quantify and communicate the value delivered to - and received from - strategic accounts.Your firm's strategic accounts are its most valuable customers. Discover how today's marketing leaders are designing and implementing cost-effective, results-oriented strategic account programs, and how you can follow their lead, in The Seven Keys to Managing Strategic Accounts.'This book tells it right...there is no magic pill for handling strategic accounts. The author's seven keys, however, are spot on for ensuring strategic account management success' - Tom VanHootegem, Director, National Account Program, Boise Office Solutions. 'Although all customers are important, there are certain customers you cannot afford to ignore or live without...' - From the Preface. Strategic accounts are your firm's most significant accounts. Chances are they are also your most imperiled. Why? Because as your customer service employees work overtime tending to your most demanding accounts, and as your sales force works overtime searching for new business, your strategic accounts may begin to feel overlooked. Instead of investing your firm's assets to ensure that strategic accounts receive impeccable service, you under-invest - leaving the door wide open to your competitors.The Seven Keys to Managing Strategic Accounts provides you with a step-by-step approach for providing your best accounts with performance that will make and keep them satisfied, even delighted. A synergistic collaboration between S4 Consulting and Miller Heiman, two of today's leading providers of strategic account management and sales development solutions, this hands-on book provides you with front-line benefits including: a market-proven model for developing, managing, and measuring a world-class strategic account program; methodologies for getting everyone in your organization to understand - and buy into - strategic account management; and, human resources solutions for finding, attracting, and compensating your industry's top account managers.'We have listed in this book the challenges we have seen most often in helping clients with strategic account management - as well as keys to overcoming them' - From the Preface. The day-to-day difficulties and distractions of servicing second-tier accounts can divert your attention from the unspoken, but imperative, needs of your top accounts. The Seven Keys to Managing Strategic Accounts details how today's market leaders are successfully reorienting themselves to focus on their most valuable, cash-cow customers. Now let it show you how to avoid or overcome easy-to-miss errors and oversights before they become disasters that deliver your best customers into the arms of your competitors - who will be only too happy to learn from your mistakes and turn your formerly safe customers into their newest strategic accounts.