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by ArabianBusiness.com staff writer on Monday, 10 December 2007
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The Middle East's growth and development of modern retailing is on track as regional and multinational players continue to expand, while consumers become ever more familiarised with international products.
However, the dynamic evolvement of the industry has propelled changed in many stages of the supplier-customer relationship, and the sophistication in which the supply chain operates.
The skills displayed by people within an organisation remain a central differentiator in the sales process, and concerns over whether the individuals driving change at the core of businesses will be ready and prepared in the future are prominent.
The role of the modern customer manager is to lead the customer interface and act as the facilitator in developing the business agenda alongside the customer, by bringing together the constituent parts from both organisations," according to industry stalwart Mark Tully, the founder of Gameplan, a new Dubai-based sales competency development service.
Tully adds that when this process has been undertaken successfully, relationships and category strategies move from short term tactical to long term strategic, and significant growth can be achieved.
The primary sales interface between supplier and customer is central to future challenges, according to Tully, with a plethora of job titles given to the primary point of contact from the supplier organisation to the customer organisation, for example the account manager, the key account manager, and the business development manager.
Regardless of the descriptive term used, the key tenets of the role remain the same; to differentiate the products and services on offer from their company, provide compelling business reasons for the customer to buy their products, and critically to facilitate a long term and mutually beneficial business partnership with the customer organisation," he explains.
The development of the retail sectors in many markets has seen a shift in emphasis in the supplier representation, as the role of the account manager has evolved in parallel with the development of the retailers. The account manager role has been transformed by a number of important factors:
• Growth in the multiple retail operators and modern retailing concepts
• The emergence of category management as a business process between manufacturer / distributor and the retail customer
• The impact of technology in areas such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Efficient Consumer Response (ECR)
These powerful forces have, essentially, restructured the role of the modern customer account manager to manage and coordinate a much broader business-centric agenda.
According to Tully, account managers must garner a broader range of skills and knowledge than ever before in a bid to foster relevant relationships in the retail world.
"The account manager can therefore be regarded as more of a generalist, but still requires prerequisite specialist skills and knowledge that are now actively being sought and enhanced through internal and externally driven training and development programmes tailored to their needs," he says.
In response to mounting debates over why suppliers should adapt to change, Tully comments that the evolution in modern retailing in the Middle East, similar to any other market, is designed to influence and impact consumers' purchasing behaviour.
With so much choice and accessibility to both the physical and virtual world of products and their supply, it is definitely a ‘buyers' market'. The buyer is the consumer and the consumer is still King.
Loyalty is a word much harder to find in the consumers dictionary, and retail organisations are now seeing that simply doing what they did last year or even yesterday may not be enough in a world that is living in times of almost ‘exponential' change.
Consumers are steering change back up the supply chain, he says, rather than the opposite, as "the pressures placed on the customer organisation to adapt are naturally being pushed back up to the supplier organisation.
According to Tully, as the retail sectors develop to captivate their consumers, the role of the supplier account manager will predictably evolve in order to provide the appropriate level of customer service and representation.
The supply partner has the opportunity to engage with the retail customers to create partnerships, which form and exploit synergies in demand and supply management, which can also have a direct benefit to the consumer.
Mohamad Safieddine, general manager of the supplier Gulf Food Trade in the UAE has welcomed change in the company's approach to customer management.
We see the opportunity to work with our key customers in new ways so that category development can now be taken forward in a collaborative manner.
Although we have experienced strong growth in the U.A.E market, it is through working more closely with customers that we can establish new opportunities that each can profit through enhanced category performance, which in our opinion will also benefit the consumer.
Tully believes that defining the modern-day role of the account manager can be achieved by drawing insights from other markets, as the role has transformed into a broader business development focus that requires additional skills.
The role of the account manager can bring more value to the relationship between the supplier and the customer through a change in emphasis. This entails the account manager having both a deeper understanding of category and consumer insights, and a balanced approach between the day-to-day operations and longer term business development.
There is a burgeoning number of stakeholders involved within both parties in decisions such as range, supply chain and marketing, Tully explains, and although some of the disciplines are not necessarily the competence of the account manager, this is the primary way of facilitating the dialogue in order to engage the functional expertise on both sides.
This requires the account manager to become more customer-centric through understanding the customers' relevant strategies, plans and business processes in order to identify areas of commonality and opportunity," he explains.
In this respect, the modern account manager can form part of the supplier value proposition, by identifying and developing new areas of opportunity shared between the supplier and the retailer, which can create more efficient operational practices and more effective execution of the consumer marketing programme.
Has this trend started to bring change within the suppliers and distributors? Safieddine at Gulf Food Trade says: "If we are to identify and create further opportunities to drive incremental growth across the product categories in which we are present, then we see the role of the account manager as playing a key part, and to do so, the account manager requires new skills.
Tully says the time is now for these changes to take place in the Middle East, as research conducted in other markets indicates that the supplier organisation will profit from developing a new approach to customer management.
There is no doubt that the role of the account manager can become an additional component of the value proposition if given the right skills and knowledge.
Conventional training is only one tenet of the competency building solution to develop the account manager role.
Tully says that as the position becomes more pivotal in terms of engagement with the customer to attain enhanced business results, consideration of supporting tools and business processes as well as the skills of the individual is obligatory.
Gameplan and its analogous website at gameplan.ae have been established as a service provider to manufacturers and distributors - with a mission to provide competency solutions in aspects of sales, customer management and business development processes - which should lead to the development of the joint business agenda.
This dual initiative increases the value addition that manufacturers and distributors are able to bring to customer relationships," Tully says.
The development of the supplier - customer interface can ultimately benefit each element of the demand chain: the supplier - the retailer - the category in question - and the consumer.
Tully argues that modern customer management has shown itself to provide additional sources of competitive advantage to manufacturers and distributors.
Trends from other markets have shown that suppliers and customers working through a common, mutually agreed business agenda can benefit all parties through identification of opportunities that reduce costs, or improve performance and that ultimately benefit the consumer.
Retailers should embrace the change in emphasis of the account manager role. In other markets, a collaborative approach has resulted in product and category developments and many supply chain innovations have been achieved.
These breakthroughs have happened through a joint-ventured approach with the account manager at the centre, steering the business agenda," Tully says.
Mohamad Safieddine of Gulf Food Trade certainly sees the mutual remunerations: "We see the development of the customer management process as a benefit to our retail partners through an additional added value approach.
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