We, the editors, have long felt that key strategic account management, which we will call KSAM, is sorely overlooked by academia, with the exception of a few experts like those contributing to this book.

As a rule of thumb, products are bought and sold five times over before they reach their final destination with the consumer. There is, therefore, much more commercial activity and many more companies involved in business-to-business (B2B) transactions than in consumer sales. You would not think so, however, if you looked at most universities' business and marketing courses, or even the UK Chartered Institute of Marketing's agenda and publications, in spite of the fact that a majority of its members operate in B2B markets.

Just rebalancing attention between consumer and B2B markets would quickly highlight a key difference: the huge range of customer size and revenues in B2B businesses, which cannot be ignored. All customers are indisputably not equal, and frequently a very few are individually critical to a B2B supplier. The world is littered with companies that have lost one key customer and their whole business with it, whereas consumer marketing does not, and does not need to, consider such a possibility.

Some academics claim that 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 it generally assumes a substantial quantity of unconnected customers and opportunities. That is reversed 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 organization and the rest of the company, to which neither relationship marketing nor sales research give much consideration.

Hence this book. Through it, we hope to demonstrate that KSAM is a distinctive and important domain of business that needs to have a place in the minds of academics as substantial as the attention it attracts in companies. This teenager has grown up and deserves a home of its own.

Of course, the philosophy that high-spending customers should receive a different treatment from the norm has been instinctive since the dawn of trading. It began to emerge in academic research in the 1970s and 1980s, so KSAM is not new. However, it is complex in many ways, and while recent years have seen some blossoming of research work, much more is needed. Additionally, students with knowledge of KSAM will be welcomed by all sectors, almost all of which are struggling to implement this poorly understood, difficult and fascinating discipline that severely challenges traditional beliefs and adversarial approaches in business. More universities and business schools should take the opportunity to introduce KSAM to their marketing and management students.

The Handbook of Strategic Account Management aims to provide a good look across the KSAM domain so that, in one place, interested parties can see the elements and the issues involved and something of the state of knowledge about them. Authors have been encouraged to include plentiful references to the work of other authors, to make it easier for students and researchers to follow up their streams of enquiry. The reference section at the back of the book therefore provides a definitive list of sources of KSAM research which will be invaluable for students of the subject.

We have solicited contributions from authors as geographically dispersed as possible, although the vast majority have come from across Europe and North America, which seems to be where the bulk of KSAM research originates. Material from Asia seems to be scarce to date, so it would be good, in any future editions, to include Asian perspectives, e.g. how the Chinese concept of guanxi relationships relates to KSAM.

The book is comprised of papers by established academics who have made major contributions to our understanding of KSAM. The listing of authors in the section at the back offers a useful guide for those wanting to locate researchers active in KSAM. We have aimed to cover KSAM as broadly as possible, in four sections that group papers addressing similar levels of KSAM:

Interestingly, while the concept of KSAM is simple, execution generally seems to be much more difficult and complex, and therefore it is doubly important that KSAM principles and practices are clear and agreed, in order that execution might have a chance of success.

The papers vary in their format as authors have necessarily made their own choices over what to communicate and how to present it. Some offer new work and empirical evidence, e.g. Mahlamäki, Uusitalo and Mikkola, and Guenzi, while others offer a thorough review of one aspect of KSAM to identify what we know about it and where to find further information, e.g. Zolkiewski, and Ojasalo. KSAM fails if senior managers are not behind it, so Capon and Mihoc, and Brehmer and Rehme look at making the case for it.

Seminal papers that are as true now as ever are exemplified by Sengupta, Krapfel and Pusateri, and Jensen, Workman and Homburg, with an update on their widely cited findings. The work of the IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing) Group, which has done so much on buyer–seller relationships and value exchange since the 1980s, is well represented by La Rocca and Snehota, Ivens and Pardo, and Henneberg, Pardo, Mouzas and Naudé, while Lacoste contributes a different angle on the vital topic of value creation and competition.

The external context of KSAM can have profound implications, as demonstrated by Piercy and Lane (social and ethical concerns), Croom (customer perspective) and Yip and Bink (global view). Wengler, Storbacka and Woodburn all wrestle with the complexities of internal changes at a programme level, while others consider key issues of execution: Atanasova and Senn (teams), and Wilson and Holt (KAM role) consider people issues, while others look at activity in individual customers, i.e. Gök (account selection and strategies), Wilson (relationships), McDonald and Woodburn (account plans). Lemmens and Vanderbiesen wrap up all those issues in terms of the all-important outcome: customer profitability.

The first part of our editorial addresses KSAM as a whole. We offer a definition of KSAM, which has been sorely missing from the domain: to date we have definitions of key accounts, specification of the KAM job, descriptions and recommendations for ideal KSAM, but no agreed definition of what KSAM is, as a definitive minimum. The lack of a widely agreed definition certainly hampers communication of KSAM from the outset, and it would be a step forward if our proposal were to be generally adopted by the academic community and used by business. The second part of the editorial reviews and summarizes the four sections of the Handbook and provides you with a ‘fast track’ guide to the contents to help you to plan your reading.

Hence the Handbook of Strategic Account Management offers a broad and wide-ranging picture of KSAM in terms of researched knowledge. It will be invaluable to students, lecturers and researchers in KSAM, and to rather serious practitioners. Clearly, there is much to be said about KSAM, and much more to be found in the future, and we hope this book will stimulate more academics and practitioners to become engaged in developing our understanding of the domain.