The Key Account Manager in Finance

In sales, a Key Account Manager or more popularly known as a Key Account Director is a selling role dedicated to a single client. This normally occurs when you have a global giant as a vendor selling to a global giant as a customer. The Business Partnering Institute (BPI) has offered an interesting spin on this strategy by suggesting the model should also be adopted by finance.

What would a Key Account Manager look like when the role is finance instead of sales?

First, we need to explore the value of a Key Account Manager. It is all about being customer-centric and providing your client with a single resource they can rely on for just about anything related to your products/services and the overall relationship. In sales, this is a vital role and always a very senior position as an individual contributor. The role allows the professional to dedicate their working hours to learning about a singular client and how to best expect, react to, and overall service their needs with exceptional attention. This professional has a level of expertise in how to service some demands, but for the most part, they must engage specialists and other members of their team depending on the task at hand. Lastly, the focus on a single client allows the Key Account Manager to foster lasting and impactful business relationships across the client’s business.

Now, let's pivot to how this role could be modified to a finance professional. Unlike in sales, the customer for the finance Key Account Manager would be the lines of businesses within the same company. The purpose of this role is to create a customer-centric approach to how finance supports the enterprise. This allows a single finance professional in this role to own the relationship between finance and a specific business segment.

BPI sheds light on the value this role could provide organizations with:

This customer-centric approach can help to build stronger relationships between Finance and the business stakeholders, and to ensure that Finance is viewed as a strategic partner rather than a back-office function.

Finance organizations that deploy this model will likely be large enterprises or even global conglomerates. Finance professionals given the opportunity to serve in this role will likely accelerate their own careers. This role would represent a high milestone in the individual contributor phase of a finance career. This hands-on experience of operationalizing the finance function in support of specific business areas is a great recipe to mint future CFOs. Some could even argue for those talented finance professionals likely to become CFOs even without taking this path, this added operational experience could be the key to becoming a future CEO.

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