Strategic account management (SAM) is a difficult, fascinating, highly topical and enduring field that has so far attracted the attention and interest of a limited number of academics, much less than it deserves.  It is a distinctive and important domain of business that needs to have a place in the mind of academics as substantial as the attention it attracts in companies. 

Some academics claim that key strategic account management (KSAM) is just part of relationship marketing, and while it owes a great deal to that stream of thinking, there is much that is different: lumping them together is very misleading. 

At the same time, sales research literature contributes some valuable ideas to KSAM, but that generally assumes a substantial quantity of unconnected customers and opportunities: it is quite the reverse in KSAM, where opportunities are far fewer, bigger, wide–reaching, linked to the past and the future, critical, and often demanding of significant change in the supplier s business. Also intrinsic to KSAM is its impact on the internal organisation and the rest of the company, to which neither relationship marketing nor sales research gives much consideration.

The Handbook of Strategic Account Management is a unique and comprehensive collection of the current body of knowledge in KSAM that gives the most up–to–date and complete review of established knowledge in the field, while separating genuine knowledge from opinion and myth.

The book will prove to be an invaluable resource for students, lecturers and researchers in strategic account management, as well as serious practitioners. 

Diana Woodburn researches, writes, teaches and consults in Key/Strategic Account Management. She started exploring the subject in 1997, and in 1998 she set up Cranfield s KAM Best Practice Club with Professor Malcolm McDonald, with whom she wrote Key Account Management: The Definitive Guide (3^rd edition 2011). She has taught thousands of key account managers and directors about KSAM and developed much of the teaching material used in the subject. Her prior career in marketing covered a wide range of sectors and continents. 

Kevin Wilson is a Professor of Marketing at Kedge Business School in Bordeaux where he holds the Chair of Selling and Client Relationships. He is a researcher, writer and presenter of over twenty years standing in the field of strategic account management, a past board member of the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) and a founder of the Sales Research Trust. He has published over 70 academic and practitioner articles and two books on the subject, Harnessing Global Potential for SAMA (2000) and Successful Global Account Management Wiley, (2002).

Contributors: Yana Atanasova, Audrey Bink, Per–Olof Brehmer, Noel Capon, Simon Croom, Osman Gök, Paulo Guenzi, Stephen Henneburg, Sue Holt, Christian Homburg, Björn Ivens, Ove Jensen, Robert Krapfel, Antonella La Rocca, Sylvie Lacoste, Nikala Lane, Régis Lemmens, Tommi Mahlamaki, Malcolm McDonald, Florin Mihoc, Toni Mikkola, Stefanos Mouzas, Peter Naudç, Jukka Ojasalo, Catherine Pardo, Nigel Piercy, Michael Pusateri, Jakob Rehme, Sanjit Sengupta, Christoph Senn, Ivan Snehota, Kaj Storbacka, Olavi Uusitalo, Tom Vanderbiesen, Stefan Wengler, Kevin Wilson, Diana Woodburn, John Workman, George Yip, Judy Zolkwieski