A friend of ours is an $8M risk to his company, and they’d tell you he’s their biggest asset.

Watch: The key account handoff and the strategy that stays with one person

A friend of ours is an $8M risk to his company, and they’d tell you he’s their biggest asset.

He’s a key account manager who crushes his goals every year. His clients love him. He’s built vital partnerships where he’s genuinely essential to the customer’s success. He updates the CRM, keeps meticulous records and documents everything.

Here’s the problem. If he leaves or gets promoted, the records transfer and the strategy stays with him. His tools and documentation are a history book of the account. The path forward and how the relationship actually works live in his head. If he walks, the customer starts over with someone new, and an $8M book of business built over 10 years could be gone in about 3 months.

I’ve watched versions of that story play out many times in 30 years. In most of them, the company was running the account on records alone, with nothing to hand the next person.

That’s the gap in how many Key Account Teams are structured. The CRM, account plans, QBR templates and relationship maps are all worth having, and they’re built for managing sales activity. Growing key accounts takes a strategic layer those tools run on: one growth strategy the whole account team can see and execute, so the account keeps growing when the people change.

If your best key account manager left tomorrow, what would the next person inherit? That question is worth five minutes before planning season.

Our system, the Vitality Index, gives your team all of this in one place and scales across your entire organization. Schedule a free 30-minute consultation and ask for a demo.