Harish Bijoor

A key account manager is really a supersalesperson who is also a friend, philosopher and guide to the macro-format retailer emerging in the Indian market.

INDIAN retail is on a path of aggregation. In a nation of small shopkeepers, organised retail is making inroads. Slow but sure inroads that hope to get India onto the fast track of aggregated retail. Today, only 2 per cent of Indian retail is in the organised sector. The future is, however, different.

The Mom & Pop stores of today are morphing! Take the case of the kirana store down your lane in the Chetpet or Versova of your life. In the beginning there is the small retail outlet offering you the convenience of shopping for your needs, seven in the morning to eleven in the night. There are 30 of these in a small radius of one km all around. One fine day, in comes a Food World. The first year goes by and twenty of these small stores start crumbling. Business is going if not gone! And in the long run, there will be but one! The supermarket! Till, of course, the day when the hypermarket will come in to stake a claim on the share of the supermarket that ate up the small kirana. And all this is the theory at play.

Aggregated retailing is all about the big fish eating up the small. The fittest ones survive and the long-term game seems to be one of scale. Scale in terms of sourcing of consumers in masses, and certainly scale in terms of procurement of the goods and services consumers will crave for!

As Indian retail marches ahead on the path of aggregation, aiming to convert a whole big chunk of business into the aggregated format, demands on the salesperson at large will increase. There is a complication of the process of selling at play, and this is what I peek into in this piece. The need for the emergence of Key Account Management amidst the fraternity of salespersons in the country.

Who is the Key Account Manager (KAM) then? The KAM is our salesman of yore for sure, but he is a wee bit different. A wee bit more classy. A wee bit more of a manager than a salesman at large. Key account management, as it emerges as a subject of importance in the study of the salesman and his tasks, is a science and an art that our salespersons of the day need to focus on for a while. If you want to remain relevant to the selling effort in the country, time to study this in a little detail. Time to morph yourself into one as well, depending on the category you tout, of course!

Selling is a game that comes with different nuances. Selling to the sophisticated is different from selling to the unsophisticated.

Does this mean that selling to the small Mom & Pop store is all part of unsophisticated retail? Not really. The small Mom & Pop store has been just as professional and sophisticated in its buys. This semantic sophistication we speak of is all about the degree of science that is required to sell to the modern format outlet that demands the attention of a KAM. He is largely a salesperson. He comes with a dog tag of acceptance that the big buyers in the market will give. He is really this super salesperson who not only fulfils the role of salesperson but adds to it the dimension of being a friend, philosopher and guide to the macro-format retailer just about emerging in the Indian market.

The KAM will handle at the most four or five big retail clients, quite unlike his cousin salesperson who operates in the realm of unorganised retail, whose day will not be complete without the mandatory 35 calls! The KAM of tomorrow will cater to the wants, needs, desires and aspirations of big business. Not micro-format businesses that the harassed guy with his bill book in the market will cater to. These five select accounts will be nurtured by him with care. The idea is to offer the best levels of customer service. The idea is to hold the hand of the macro-format retailer as he takes his first few baby steps in the market. The idea is to be the first one out there. The first one to track not only the sales volume of the company you represent, but to track competition and its many moves as well.

The KAM will take charge of store inventory as his own. He will even order for the store on its behalf, once a certain degree of comfort has been established. The KAM will bother about his company's bottom line just as he will equally about the bottom line of the retailer to whom he sells. Remember, this is a win-win relationship he wants to establish. Credibility is the base line of it all!

The KAM will be an entity who can be trusted to deliver the true win-win equation for the business to flourish. The early-day KAM will work form the outside. He will then find a prominent place within the outfit of the retailer. As business grows and booms, the KAM will even run satellite godowns on the rolls of the company to take care of the needs of just-in-time stock the retailer might demand. Remember, the efficiency of big retail will come from low-cost inventory and a quick turnaround of value and volume, in that order!

The KAM will emerge in the days to come an important entity in the business of managing the development and growth of organised retail in India. In the evolutionary curve of the salesperson at large, here is one big opportunity that looms ahead. This is a resource that is bound to be scarce in the future. A resource folks at both end of the polemics of organised retail and the vendor involved will crave for. The day of the KAM is about to dawn. Want to jump onto the bandwagon?

(The author is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)

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