Key Account Management (KAM) is about changing the way enterprise account teams work with your largest, most important clients. Instead of acting like a reactive vendor or transaction-focused salesperson, Key Account Managers have to evolve into proactive strategic advisors and forward-thinking strategic partners for these clients. Instead of focusing on transactions, proactive Key Account Management is about building deeper, broader customer relationships based on mutually beneficial value creation. It’s about surfacing opportunities early and flagging issues before they start.
That core concept of mutual value creation is what Valkre is all about. It’s in the name, “Valkre” (“value creation”). Achieving the ideal of proactive Key Account Management can be accomplished with the right KAM software. Valkre helps enterprise Key Account teams effectively integrate, organize, surface, and visualize customer data from every angle and source. Valkre creates effective workflows and dashboards so everyone on your multifunctional team (and in the C-suite) can have full transparency to see the big picture of what’s going on with your most important accounts. No more data siloes.
And Valkre helps Key Account Managers emphasize the importance of their role in the client’s business. Valkre shows your team how to spot and surface opportunities in the client’s business, how to bring new revenue opportunities to the client, how to share industry insights with your client, how to map stakeholders, and how to conduct more impactful account planning. Ultimately, Valkre’s approach to proactive Key Account Management can help show your clients that you’re thinking ahead about their business, not just your next sale.
If you’re wondering how to be more proactive with key accounts, the team at Valkre can show you how to get there – our team will help you set up your data, use the software, and learn all about the KAM methodology that will set you up for success. We’re more than software, because building a more proactive Key Account Management approach requires more than new technology. It’s about adopting industry-leading practices developed by organizations like the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) and integrating these concepts into your team’s workflows, processes, and company culture.
With Valkre, your organization can shift away from “reactive firefighting” mode and become a higher-value “proactive strategic partner” to your most strategically important and valuable key accounts. Let’s look at a few ways that Valkre KAM software can make proactive Key Account Management a reality for your enterprise sales team.
See How Valkre Can Help You Get More Proactive With Key Accounts
Valkre KAM software is more than just “software.” It’s an execution layer for key account management (KAM). Valkre can help your team implement KAM the right way, based on the industry-leading best practices of the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA). If your company is serious about making the journey to KAM, and you’ve already started segmenting your key accounts and treating your most important clients with a higher level of strategic sales planning and handling, you might be a good fit for Valkre.
Seeing is believing, and your key account or sales team should see for themselves how our KAM platform integrates with your company’s existing sales tools, technologies, systems, and workflows. To get a clearer picture of how this works and what it might look like for your organization, we offer a custom demo environment for teams interested in the shift to proactive key account management.
Talk with our team about your company’s existing workflows and see how Valkre can integrate with your technology stack. Valkre is tech-agnostic; it integrates effectively with any customer relationship management (CRM) system, and a wide range of types of business intelligence (BI) tools, datasets, software, and other business-critical applications for sales planning and strategic account management. Whatever tools and technologies you’re using now, Valkre can build upon your data and workflows for more effective Key Account Management activities.
Proactive Key Account Management means: “empowering our teams to sell smarter and build stronger long-term customer relationships”
“Implementing Valkre account-planning technology has transformed how the Global and Strategic Account team operates and cooperates cross-functionally. It’s not just about efficiency; it’s about empowering our teams to sell smarter and build stronger long-term customer relationships.”
– Elena Veneziani, Director, Sales Enablement at UL Solutions
Valkre KAM software supports proactive Key Account Management for major B2B enterprises like UL Solutions.
Since UL Solutions started using Valkre KAM software, the company has achieved more proactive Key Account Management. With Valkre’s support, UL Solutions has improved the way they build relationships with strategic clients. Highlights include:
- Proactive value-creation plans developed for 100% of global and strategic accounts.
- Enterprise-wide adoption for better internal alignment and improved forecasting – making it easier for the UL Solutions sales team to serve as a proactive strategic partner.
- Real-time updates to account plans – enabling proactive thinking and early surfacing of strategic sales opportunities.
Proactive Key Account Management Step 1: Anticipate Your Clients’ Challenges
A major piece of proactive Key Account Management is simply anticipating a client’s challenges. Strategic partners need to be thinking a few steps ahead about what’s important for their client’s business tomorrow, not just in constantly reactive “firefighting” mode based on what’s urgent today.
To really anticipate your clients’ challenges, you need to have all relevant business intelligence, client data, and market insights in one place, visible to the entire KAM team. The right KAM software can help your team visualize the data from every source, without manually hunting it down or doing a lot of data entry. For example, Valkre gives the entire KAM team a single, shared source of truth for what’s happening with every key account, with data integrated from every available source. Valkre helps by surfacing and organizing all relevant sales, company, and account data in one place.
How many times have your account leaders tried to track down an important piece of business intelligence or client data, only to discover that it was trapped in a spreadsheet or slide deck? Valkre prevents your most important customer information from falling through the cracks. With Valkre’s automated, AI-assisted prep work and real-time visibility, your sales and KAM teams get a tool that they’ll actually want to use, instead of falling back on manual processes and siloed software because it’s what “feels comfortable.”
Less time spent on data entry and administrative processes frees up your teams to spend more time thinking about the strategic big picture. Valkre can give your sales team a clean slate, a clear view, and fresh perspectives. This opens up space for creative, strategic, proactive thinking. That’s where the opportunity arises to bring new insights, industry trends, solutions, and revenue growth opportunities to your clients and stakeholders.
Proactive Key Account Management Step 2: Map Your Client’s Organization
Good KAM software should help your team understand the full decision-maker landscape with accurate, up-to-date, comprehensive stakeholder mapping tools. These maps should show your team how to navigate the client’s organization, drive conversations with key people, and build supportive relationships with advocates and allies across different departments and divisions of the client’s company.
Valkre offers a wide range of Key Account Management tools to help your sales team to better understand your clients’ organizations. These capabilities for relationship mapping and Stakeholder Management include:
Visualizing Stakeholders and Key Contacts:
Valkre’s relationship-mapping features help you be more proactive by finding the right people within the client’s company. This can include decision-makers (who control the budget), influencers (who you want to have on your side), and champions (who love what you do and will advocate for you).
Tracking Conversations and Engagement Levels
Another way that Valkre enables proactive Key Account Management is by giving visibility into how each important account relationship is going. Valkre can track how often your team is interacting with each decision-maker or other stakeholder. This can open new opportunities for outreach and give the sales team a comprehensive view of where they need to devote more time and attention.
Proactive Key Account Management Step 3: Conduct Regular Proactive Strategic Account Reviews
At too many enterprise organizations, account reviews happen on a quarterly basis, or even less often than that. Many times, the account manager is using an old binder or barely-updated slide deck to have casual “check-in” conversations with their most important clients.
But this way of doing account reviews doesn’t maximize mutual value creation. It’s not strategically focused enough. It’s not creating enough insight. It might even put you at risk of losing that key account.
To achieve a higher standard of proactive Key Account Management, teams need to check in with their key clients more often, and with fresh data and insights. This is another way that Valkre can help you add value: with automated slide deck generation and easier reporting of client account data and insights, your team spends more time on insightful thought and in-depth planning, and less time on manual work.
Strategic account reviews shouldn’t be an afterthought or something that gets neglected or ignored until it’s too late. These should be timely, focused, relevant conversations backed by fresh data and forward-looking insights. Every account review should be seized as an opportunity to talk about the client’s long-term goals, to surface and spotlight new opportunities, to offer solutions to emerging risks and challenges, and to deepen and broaden your relationship with that customer. Valkre can equip your KAM team with data-driven reports and impressive presentations to bring new opportunities to your most valuable clients.
Trusted by the best Key Account Management teams
Trusted by SOME OF THE BEST key account management teams
Ready to Get Proactive With Your Key Account Management? Talk to Us First.
The Valkre team is ready to show you how our KAM software can help your team achieve the vision of proactive Key Account Management – and how we can serve as your strategic partner along the way. We are happy to offer you a free custom demo to explain how Valkre works and how our KAM platform integrates with your existing technology and processes. Book a KAM software demo today.
Proactive Key Account Management: FAQs
Valkre’s KAM software supports proactive Key Account Management by automating manual tasks like report building, centralizing insights, and reducing the need for disconnected spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations. Getting all the information in one place with a shared source of truth helps sales teams be more proactive with their key accounts.
– Centralized KAM Workspace: A central hub for planning, stakeholder mapping, and account health tracking – Valkre makes it easier to understand what’s going on with your key clients, all in one place and one shared source of truth. .
– Data Integration: Combines CRM, ERP, and BI data for a unified view of your customers – by getting all this data into a unified view, Valkre helps your sales team think ahead and achieve proactive Key Account Management.
– AI-Powered Insights: Uses AI to help identify growth opportunities and risks. Bringing new opportunities to clients – and spotting risks and proposing solutions – is a valuable component of proactive Key Account Management.
– High-Level Reporting: Provides leadership with actionable insights into KAM program performance. Valkre will show sales managers and C-level executives a higher level of visibility into how your KAM efforts are progressing, and spot opportunities to improve. This makes it easier to achieve goals for proactive Key Account Management.
Can we use Valkre for customer collaboration?
Yes. A major part of developing a more proactive Key Account Management approach is to share strategic plans with clients and make sure you’re aligned on goals. Valkre makes it easier to collaborate with key clients and identify opportunities for mutual value creation.
About Valkre: the Key Account Management Platform
Valkre is an enterprise SaaS platform purpose-built for Key Account Management (KAM) and Strategic Account Management (SAM), established in 2014. For over 15 years, Valkre has served as the execution layer that bridges the gap between high-level sales methodologies and traditional transactional CRM systems (like Salesforce and Dynamics).
Valkre’s software platform provides enterprise KAM teams with a centralized, “Live Doc” digital workspace to automate deliverables and centralize data from any number of disparate systems for complete visibility. Valkre saves account managers 20–30% of their administrative time, freeing them up to focus on customer engagement.
Valkre also structures historically fragmented account data into a digital format that enterprise AI models can easily utilize. As a certified technology and training partner of the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA), Valkre embeds proven KAM frameworks directly into the daily workflow.
Trusted by global enterprises like Pfizer, Owens Corning, and Dexcom, Valkre gives organizations the tools to stop managing obstacles and start achieving faster mutual growth, higher profitability, and deeper strategic partnerships.
