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128 • The 100 Greatest Ideas for Building the Business of Your Dreams

is consultancy, be it management consultancy or recruitment for example. The key
is that you are a selling team, and that you are selling to a buying team. It is, of
course, a logical extension of big ticket selling, but this is the joined-up version
where you are active in a key account all the time, continuously taking orders from
them and always in some way involved in delivering or implementing what you have
sold.

Key account customers for many businesses supply 80% of the orders taken in
any one year. The loss of any of them causes problems, the loss of the biggest or
more than one of the others could be catastrophic. (BNFL in 2000 claimed to have
some 30 customers and therefore to be secure despite losing all their Japanese busi-
ness. The Japanese business just happened to put into the shade all the other cus-
tomers put together.)

So we need a system or business process that monitors and ensures customer
satisfaction and, at the same time, builds the overall relationship and finds new
opportunities preferable before the competition.

The position of BNFL is not uncommon. It is easy to become too dependent
on one customer. After all it is much easier to make sales to people who know you,
and finding a new prospect in the same organisation takes much less effort than
finding a new customer altogether. And, by definition, the key account is pleased
with you. Your business processes are in synchronisation, regular delivery means
that your people and theirs are working in familiar areas and so on.

Indeed some companies become too dependent on a small number of custom-
ers because the customer is delighted to assist in making this happen. Their negoti-
ating position becomes better and better, whilst, although the short term may show
larger profits, the supplying company's negotiating position is becoming worse and
worse. Even if there is absolutely no malice aforethought, the world changes and a
big-company strategy that has worked for many years can suddenly go phut. Think
about Marks and Spencer who carried their buy-British strategy on for so long that
their share price crashed and their leading directors left to spend more time with
their families. The effect on those who depended too much on them was catastrophic.