Your largest customer lets you know they will put next year's contract out to tender. The relationship seemed good, but the signs were scattered: support complaints, late deliveries, payments arriving later and later, and a product line they stopped buying. Nobody connected the dots in time.
Key account management exists for exactly that: serving your most important customers with a plan and a data-driven quarterly review, the QBR.
In this guide you'll find criteria for choosing your strategic accounts, templates for an account plan and a QBR agenda, and how to build the meeting with data from your ERP and BI.
What key account management (KAM) is
Key account management (KAM) is the way you work with the customers that carry the most weight in your business, today or in the future: each one has an owner, a written account plan and regular reviews with the customer, in order to retain and grow the relationship, not just close the next order.
| Selling to new customers | Key account management | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Win the opportunity | Retain and grow the account |
| Time horizon | The sales cycle | 12 months or more |
| Primary metric | Win rate | Account retention, growth and margin |
To win new customers, see Odoo CRM to close more deals; to place the KAM role within your sales structure, see how to manage a sales team.
Strategic account management and strategic accounts
Strategic account management is almost a synonym; when the two are distinguished, it is reserved for a handful of strategic accounts, with senior management from both companies involved and multi-year plans.
How to choose your key accounts: value, potential and risk
Not every large account is a key account. Rank your customers using data from the last 12 months:
- Current value: sales and, above all, margin. High volume with a low margin or a high cost to serve is worth less than it looks.
- Potential: what they currently buy from another supplier and whether their business is growing.
- Risk: how much you would lose if they left, and what warning signs there are: falling purchases, complaints, late payments, a change of contact or an upcoming tender.
Add a qualitative filter: the customer has to want a long-term relationship and give you access to the decision-maker. If the account executive can't properly prepare a QBR for each account every quarter, the list is too long.
Account plan: a template to copy
An account plan is a one- or two-page document covering where you stand with a customer, what you want to achieve in 12 months and how. It is updated before each QBR.
| Section | What it includes |
|---|---|
| Summary | Industry, locations, product lines purchased, sales and margin over the last 12 months |
| Customer goals | What they want to achieve this year, in their own words |
| Account goals | Measurable targets: growth, margin, new lines, renewal |
| Contact map | Who decides, uses, pays and influences, and who on your team owns each relationship |
| Opportunities | Additional sales with an estimated amount, logged in the CRM |
| Risks | Open complaints, overdue balances, an active competitor, a change of contact |
| Action plan | Three to five actions, each with an owner and a date |
The contact map contains personal data: record only what is necessary and limit who can see it (Chile's data protection Law 21.719 and your CRM).
What a quarterly business review (QBR) is
A quarterly business review (QBR) is a formal meeting held every three months with a key customer to review, with data, the quarter, your service levels, the customer's plans and both parties' commitments. The focus is the customer's business, not your catalog.
It helps you spot problems before they end in a tender, align expectations with the decision-maker and make well-grounded proposals. The content depends on the industry: a distributor reviews stockouts and complete deliveries; a services company, tickets and response times; a manufacturer, lead times and quality.
Attendees: the account executive, their manager and, if there were issues, operations or support; from the customer's side, your main contact and someone with decision-making authority.
An 8-block QBR agenda (template)
This QBR template runs about 75 minutes. Send the numbers two or three days ahead: the meeting is for talking, not reading.
- Objectives (5 min): the goals of the meeting and the customer's priorities for the year.
- Quarter summary (10 min): purchases by line versus the previous quarter and the same quarter last year.
- Service levels (15 min): deliveries, complaints and tickets, with their response times.
- Administrative items (5 min): outstanding invoices, credit notes and payments; the point is to unblock things, not to collect.
- Previous commitments (10 min): what was delivered from the last QBR, on both sides.
- Customer plans (15 min): projects, changes and concerns. This is where the customer talks more than you do.
- Proposals (10 min): improvements and opportunities that respond to what you heard.
- Agreements (5 min): every commitment with an owner and a date, and the next QBR on the calendar.
Data to bring to the QBR
| Data | Where it comes from | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Purchases by period and by line | Sales and invoicing | See whether the account is growing or shrinking |
| Account margin | Sales and costs | Decide what to offer |
| Delivery performance | Inventory and shipping | Measure whether you delivered what you promised |
| Complaints and tickets | Support | Learn what bothers them and how long you take to respond |
| Payments and overdue invoices | Collections | Spot administrative friction |
| Open opportunities | CRM | Show what is under discussion |
| Previous commitments | Minutes from the last QBR | Hold both sides accountable |
Prepare two versions: an internal one, with margin and risk, and one for the customer.
How to prepare the QBR with ERP and BI data instead of a hand-built PowerPoint
The usual approach is to request exports from invoicing, support and logistics, cross-reference them in a spreadsheet and paste charts into a presentation. It takes days, it only gets done for the largest accounts, and the meeting is spent arguing over which number is right. If you run on an ERP, the data already exists: what's missing is a per-customer view.
- One record per customer. If the account is duplicated or its tickets aren't linked to it, the QBR shows only half the relationship (see customer history and the 360-degree view).
- Dashboards instead of exports. In Odoo, Keep BI adds prebuilt dashboards such as "Customers: Overall & by Customer", "Profitability", "Ticketing (Support) Status & Performance", "Shipping Status & Performance" and "Collections", with direct drill-down to the transaction.
- Alerts between one QBR and the next. Keep Checking warns you in Odoo ahead of the meeting with alerts such as "Customers at risk of churn", "Customers with invoices overdue beyond X time", "Late deliveries" or "Tickets open for more than X days". In the quote builder you put together your selection and request a quote; the method is covered in automatic threshold alerts.
- Subscriptions and renewals. According to its release notes, Odoo 20 (September 2026) shows the customer's subscriptions from their leads and creates upsell or renewal quotations from them (checked in October 2026). This depends on your version, your plan and whether you use the Subscriptions app.
- If you don't use Odoo. Podiux, KPB's BI ecosystem built on Power BI, connects to other ERPs such as SAP, Defontana or Dynamics, as well as to your CRM, your e-commerce store and your spreadsheets.
After the QBR: commitments, tasks and account KPIs
The next 24 hours determine whether the QBR was worth it: send the minutes, log each commitment as an activity in the CRM with an owner and a date (the customer's commitments too) and update the account plan. The checklist, and how AI carries the minutes into the CRM, are in AI for sales meetings.
Key account KPIs
- Retention: the percentage of key accounts still buying at year-end.
- Growth: sales versus the same period last year, so you don't mistake seasonality for a trend.
- Share of wallet: the portion of the customer's spend in your category that goes to you; you estimate it by talking with them.
- Account margin: so that growth doesn't mean selling at a discount.
- Commitments met: the percentage of QBR agreements closed on time, on both sides.
Why do it with KPB Solutions
A reliable QBR requires sales, invoicing, shipping and support to live in the same database. As an Odoo Gold Partner, KPB delivers the Odoo implementation that brings them together and activates Keep BI: plans with 3, 5 or 10 dashboards (10 to 25 UF + VAT per month; the UF is Chile's inflation-indexed unit of account) and installation in 7 days. With another ERP, we work with Podiux.
So that agreements don't depend on who takes notes, an AI agent from Kersify, such as the CRM & Sales Agent, can turn the QBR minutes into activities and account plan updates, in Odoo or in another CRM, with a person reviewing everything before it is sent.
Want to walk into your next QBR with the numbers ready? Book a meeting and let's look at how to build the view of your key accounts.
