Yue Lighting Group Key Customer Relationship Management Program

HaoLe Illumination Corporation (HLIC) is the earliest domestic company to manufacture and supply series of optic glass lamps. It provides professional illumination design, consultation, installation, testing, and maintenance of prism lamp to markets including advertisement, gas station, municipal administration, commerce and industry and so on. HLIC had planed in the development draft and financial purpose to achieve the sales income of RMB 60 millions in 2003.However, the result turned out to be disappointing. The company was eager to find out the key problems to improve its performance in the next business year.After retrospecting and summarizing the trade records of HLIC in 2003, the present dissertation investigated the product market structure and sale strategy of HLIC in detail. Three characteristics of its market were found. First, the market of HLIC is not the end consumer as ordinary commodity, but industrial accounts. Second, It`s market can be subdivided by its product series, different series facing different market. Last, its markets are relatively stable, which make its accounts limited. Its performance to a large extent depends on the construction and maintenance of its account relationship, and the dependence is becoming more and more vital following the intensifying of the market competition. Some series, such as the municipal ones, the accounts are relatively constant and their purchase amount is extraordinary large and trade frequency is high. As a result, the retention of such accounts directly determines the performance of the company. It will cost much more to develop new accounts than reserve old ones. The current sale strategy of HLIC stresses "the advance of technique". This made the construction and maintenance of its account relationship relatively neglected. Although HLIC enhanced its advertisement and made other efforts to improve its brand value, a few previous key accounts were lost in 2003. Based on previous consideration, HLIC must realize the importance and urgency of the maintenance of key accounts in the future to improve its performance. In this study the management of key account relationship was investigated combined with the reality of HLIC, and an improved management scheme was proposed in which the recognition, screening, and maintenance of key account were elucidated. A new sale strategy "relationship to account" was hoped to be constructed for the company, to serve as an approach to help it to achieve its strategic goal.The present dissertation was subdivided into five chapters. The first chapter described the background of the total domestic illumination industry and its development trend. This gave a basic knowledge of the external environment of HLIC. In the second chapter, the internal organization structure and product series of HLIC were analyzed. This gave the information of its internal environment. Chapter three found out the weakness in the management of its key account relationship by analyzing the cause of the lost of key accounts combining with the significance and the manner of the management of the key account relationship. In the following fourth and fifth chapter, the analysis was focused on the market of the gas-station sub-series of municipal series (GSMS). Chapter four elucidated the recognition and screening of key accounts of GSMS using the bifactorial method of account attraction and relative advantage, and compared HLIC to its main business competitors to identify its advantage and disadvantage in the competition. In Chapter five, rational advices related to the management of key account relationship were given in seven aspects: company organization structure, staff setting, information collection and analysis, maintenance and management of account relationship, increasing the additional value by the combination of the product quality and service, and information technology.