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This paper aims to explore the links between revenue management and business‐to‐business (B2B) relationships and explains how revenue management can both support and damage B2B relationships.

A single case study method was employed to conduct qualitative research into a company and its key accounts. In‐depth data were collected from three divergent sources (company revenue managers, company account managers and nine of the company's key accounts) through semi‐structured interviews, observations and document studies.

The research findings reveal that from the company's perspective, managers acknowledge that revenue management has positively influenced the process of identifying and analysing key account activities and conducting contractual decision making with key accounts. However, from the key accounts' perspective, revenue management practices were found to have significant negative consequences which damage trust and undermine long‐term relationships and commitment.

Although the research findings cannot be generalised to other service sectors because of the single‐case study research method, the implications of this study suggest that the impact of revenue management practice on B2B relationships should be further investigated in a wide range of organisational and industry settings.

The research findings confirm the long‐held assumption that revenue management can negatively affect B2B relationships. The benefits of revenue management primarily reward the company, whilst long‐term B2B relationship development suffers from the short‐term consequences of the company's opportunistic behaviour.

This paper bridges the gap in the literature between revenue management and key account management. It also explores the conceptual incompatibility between revenue management and a long‐term relational approach to B2B relationships and provides evidence to support this proposition.

The paper seeks to present research that examines the success factors for key accounts within firms, i.e. what factors lead to successful versus unsuccessful key accounts.

Data from a consulting firm are analyzed to examine the success factors for key accounts within firms.

The results suggest that marketers' relational assets, personal/social bonds, dissatisfaction, and change in environment are the primary drivers of key account success.

The paper summarizes one's understanding in this area and provides additional data that will allow firms to re‐evaluate their strategies regarding success of specific key accounts. In the light of the sample, additional studies are suggested.

Marketers need to invest more in relational assets, personal/social bonds, and satisfaction activities as well as monitor changes in the environment.

Key accounts have become an integral part of most business firms, as key account teams are created to provide extra attention to important customers and to allow a consolidation of selling activities to geographically dispersed large customer firms. Previous research has examined the success factors of key account programs between firms and this paper provides data on the success factors of key accounts within firms.

Recent interest in relationship marketing and customer retention has refocused the attention of marketing academics and managers towards key account management (KAM) systems as a means of operationalizing long‐term buyer/seller relationships. Examines the nature of KAM in industrial markets structured around several strategic issues elicited from two main sources: first, empirical research in the area of industrial sales management and selling to major accounts; and second, observations from running a series of management development programmes for account managers. There inter‐related conclusions have emerged from this work. First, most of the literature and debate on KAM has taken the seller′s perspective. Second, there appears to be inadequate matching of the seller′s total offering with the buyer′s increasingly strategic and dynamic context. This is particularly evident in the short‐term focus pervading some seller companies and in their failure to keep abreast of the kind of supply‐chain issues currently facing industrial buyers. Third, key account managers are often ill‐prepared for the wider and more demanding roles which take them into areas of business development, industry/market analysis, benchmarking, relationship management and so on.

Salespeople are frequently required to manage a wide range of complex internal relationships. This paper seeks to explore one aspect of the key account manager's internal selling role which has not been addressed before, specifically how the key account manager handles multiple incidents of simultaneous conflict while carrying out their internal selling duties.

The research uses the critical incident technique together with an interpretive framework for data coding in order to explore the complex behavioural sequences adopted by key account managers while managing the many incidents of conflict which they frequently encounter within the organisation. Twenty‐nine key account managers from seven participating FMCG, Blue Chip organisations in the UK and USA participated in the research describing 112 incidents of conflict.

The research provides further insight into the complexity perspective of conflict management, suggesting that conflict episodes do not occur as discrete, isolated, incidents, rather incidents occur simultaneously requiring a combination of behaviours in their management.

The implications for a complex role such as selling are that, while carrying out their internal selling duties, rather than adopting a single managerial style or single combination of styles, key account managers are able to adapt and use a combination of management behaviours which can be modified throughout and across conflict episodes.

In contrast to the majority of research into personal selling, this research takes an interpretive approach through the analysis of transcripts from a series of CIT interviews with key account managers in the field.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how does key accounts managers’ (KAMs’) customer orientation affect customers’ repurchase intention and how do tie strength and structural holes in KAMs’ client networks moderate these linkages.

Paired data of 208 dyadic relationships between KAMs and customers in several Chinese industries are subjected to multiple linear regression analyses.

KAMs’ functional customer orientation can directly increase customers’ repurchase intention, whereas relational customer orientation cannot do that. With strong ties in client networks, KAMs’ relational customer orientation could promote customers’ repurchase intention, whereas when there are many structural holes in a client network, relational customer orientation would constrain customers’ repurchase intention. In addition, structural holes can enhance the effectiveness of functional customer orientation in facilitating customers’ repurchase intention, but tie strength has no impact on this.

This study pays attention to the emerging topic of KAMs’ customer orientation and introduces KAMs’ client networks as a new contextual factor. The findings not only address the outcomes of KAM’s customer orientation but also indicate the vital role client networks play in determining the effectiveness of KAMs’ customer orientation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relevance to situated managerial practice of the implementation frameworks contained in the global (key) account management (GAM) literature and to explore what specific GAM-related issues may be faced by key account managers working for an MNC based in Japan.

Following a critical literature review, including a discussion of sales management in Japan, an exploratory case study is conducted of a chemical supplier that claims to be making the transition toward GAM.

The findings confirm that intra-organizational contextual and cultural factors appear to influence the adoption of GAM programs by the focal firm. This suggests there is not a “one size fits all” strategic pathway to implementing GAM, and that western theoretical perspectives on KAM/GAM do not appear to have permeated the sense-making of some Japanese managers.

While the study indicates that the US/European approach to KAM and GAM does not appear to fit well with the Japanese business culture, this conclusion must come with the caveat that this is not necessarily a generalizable case.

Much of the prior B2B marketing literature on KAM and GAM has investigated only western firms. This is possibly the first empirical research on GAM in a Japanese company. The paper offers a number of implications for theory and ponders the wisdom of making recommendations from such a culture-bound study.

This study aims to examine what the role of key account teams is in the management of international key account customers in terms of customer knowledge processing behaviours of the supplier, esprit de corps of employees and supplier's key account performance.

Survey data from large industrial firms in Finland are used to compare the differences between supplier firms having a team and those not having a team for managing the key account customer.

The results reveal a higher perceived level of customer‐knowledge acquisition, dissemination and utilisation, and of suppliers' key account performance, in the group representing team‐based key account management compared with the non‐team group.

The article is one of the first studies in which the role of teams in the management of international key account customers is examined based on empirical, quantitative data.

This study aims to identify the organizational antecedents of intra‐organizational customer knowledge dissemination in the context of key account management (KAM).

The data were collected from large industrial companies in Finland by means of a structured survey. Linear hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

The findings of the study show that esprit de corps among employees and the formalization of key account management facilitate customer knowledge dissemination in industrial key account organizations. Moreover, the findings show that the intra‐organizational dissemination of customer knowledge is positively related to the supplier's KAM performance and dissemination fully mediates the relationship between esprit de corps and KAM performance.

The study contributes to research on key account management in providing quantitative empirical evidence about the antecedents and consequences of the intra‐organizational dissemination of key account‐related knowledge.

Building on previous research on customer knowledge management, market orientation and key account management, the study identifies customer‐specific knowledge dissemination as an intra‐organizational determinant of the successful management of industrial key account relationships.

The concept of key account management (KAM) has received considerable attention from practitioners and scholars for well over 20 years now. However, numerous articles build on a set of tacit assumptions for which we lack empirical evidence. This paper seeks to propose an empirical test of several of these assumptions.

The contribution draws on a study conducted among 297 purchasing managers in two industries (packaging goods, market research data).

The findings indicate that parts of the foundations of KAM are not as solid as they may appear at first sight.

This paper invites managers of KAM programs to carefully consider the objectives they assign to such programs by integrating the idea of value created both for key customers and for suppliers implementing such programs.

The paper extends knowledge of key account management in the business field by providing new – and, in the light of the extant literature, sometimes rather counter‐intuitive – insights in this important management phenomenon. It does this by systematically comparing key account relationships and non‐key account relationships.

This paper aims to address an identified gap in hospitality literature. It examines hotel key accounts' perceptions towards revenue management practice and its impact on key account relationship development.

A qualitative research approach was adopted for the investigation through in‐depth interviews with account managers from an international hotel company and its key accounts from nine international companies across three main market segments: airlines, corporate and leisure.

The findings of this study show that revenue management practice has reduced relationship stability and the trust between hotels and their key accounts due to a number of reasons. These include: opportunistic behaviour such as unexpected contract rate increases and/or blocked room availabilities during high‐demand days; imposed contractual restrictions; and undisclosed cheaper rates being available via other distribution channels from the same hotel.

The findings provide limited evidence of total commitment between the two parties and support the “states theory” of relationship development, which appears to be more applicable than the “stages theory” since the hotel key relationships did not necessarily follow a predictable stage‐by‐stage development process and any major incidents could lead to an abrupt termination of the relationship. The in‐depth research findings are limited to one international hotel company's key accounts, which cannot be generalized since it lacks the breadth required for comparability with other organisations.

This paper bridges the gap between revenue management and key account relationship management literature by providing an insight into the key clients' perceptions towards the effects that hotel revenue management practice has had on relationship development.