To manage key accounts profitably you need strategic planning that works. This book is the definitive guide to achieving this based on the unmatched practical and research experience of Ryals and McDonald. Key Account Management is proven to deliver substantial benefits to the bottom line. Best practice companies know that real results from managing powerful customers are not achieved through short-term cost cutting. Instead, as the best companies understand, it depends on fostering carefully developed and profitably managed relationships with an equally carefully selected group of key accounts. This is a genuinely strategic activity that goes well beyond sales management and the simplistic use of budgets to generate targets. It is about the behaviours and practices that make predictable, profitable and sustainable Key Account Management possible.