Two questions sit at the heart of every customer relationship you have.
- Are they getting what they paid for?
- Is this whole relationship worth having?
They sound almost identical.
They’re not.
And the gap between them is the difference between Customer Success and Key Account Management.
I’ve sat through enough strategy meetings to know how this one plays out.
Sales says the big accounts need the white-glove treatment. Product says we’ve got to look after everyone, at scale. The VP of Revenue says we need both. Now. With no extra people.
Everyone nods. Nobody actually agrees what either word means.
So you hire into the fog. A year later you’ve got three people with overlapping titles, a handful of expensive customers who somehow feel ignored, and a renewal that just wobbled out of nowhere.
This one’s for whoever has to make the call. Whether you’ve got customer success, key account management, both, or neither.
And I’ll use the actual research, not opinions — because most of what’s written about this is published by companies that sell customer success software. Which is a bit like asking a barber if you need a haircut.
Customer Success in a Sentence
Customer Success makes sure the customer gets what they paid for.
That’s it. Someone bought your product to fix a problem. CS makes sure the problem actually gets fixed.
Under the bonnet: onboarding, adoption tracking, health scores, checking in before things go wrong, a playbook for the wobbly accounts, and a nudge towards buying more when the moment’s right.
What makes CS different is scale.
A good CS team doesn’t build relationships one handshake at a time. It builds machinery. Health scores catch customers before they bolt. Onboarding runs itself, so nobody has to chase. Playbooks let a week-one hire handle an account nearly as well as a ten-year veteran.
That sameness matters more than people think. Without it, a customer’s experience is pot luck — it all rides on which CSM they happened to land. We’ve all seen how that film ends.
CS leads when:
- You’ve got hundreds or thousands of customers
- The journey repeats
- Churn is spread thin across the base
- You need one view of who’s healthy and who’s not
A CSM might carry 30 to 200 accounts. Only possible because of tools, automation and repeatable process.
Strip those out and you haven’t got Customer Success. You’ve got knackered people trying to be nice at scale.
Key Account Management in a Sentence
Key Account Management makes sure the relationship is worth having.
Not one product. Not this quarter. Everything, between the two of you, for years.
A key account isn’t a big logo. It’s a relationship that’d keep your CFO up at night if it vanished. Big, tangled, loads of stakeholders, long buying cycles, real room to grow.
KAM doesn’t scale. That’s the point.
A good key account manager owns two, three, maybe five accounts. They know the org chart cold. They know which VP is pushing to spend more and which one’s quietly briefing against it. They know who really decides — even when it’s not the person with the title.
And here’s what most people miss.
A key account manager doesn’t run the account. They rally everyone else who touches it.
Researchers sat down with 43 key account managers to see how they really work [4]. One said he’s as close to his own factory managers as he is to the customer — because he can’t cut the customer’s costs without them. Another gets technical, legal, finance and ops in a room to build a single deal.
One of them leans on his own customer success managers to tell him how the customer’s really using the software.
Read that again. A KAM using CS as a spy network. Which tells you something about whether these two are meant to be rivals.
KAM leads when:
- One relationship can be worth millions a year
- Growth needs senior people on the same page
- Losing a single account would really sting
- Partnership or preferred-supplier status is actually on the table
When everything’s strategic, nothing is.
Customer Success vs Key Account Management: At a Glance
| Customer Success | Key Account Management | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary goal | Adoption, retention, churn prevention | Growth of high-value accounts |
| Account volume | 30–200+ per CSM | 2–5 per KAM |
| Engagement style | Proactive, repeatable, scalable | High-touch, relationship-led, tailored |
| Typical contract value | Under $100K | $250K–$1M+ |
| Automation role | Central — health scores, playbooks, triggers | Supporting — reports and alerts |
| Key metrics | Net Revenue Retention, churn, adoption | Account growth, account plan progress, share of wallet |
| Best for | SaaS, high-volume B2B | Enterprise B2B, professional services, complex accounts |
| Org model | Scalable team with tools and playbooks | Small, senior relationship team |
Start Here: Put Your Customers in Tiers
Before you pick CS or KAM, answer a blunter question.
Which customers are worth what?
Not all customers are equal, and pretending they are is exactly how your biggest account ends up getting the same treatment as your smallest. The old “customer pyramid” research nailed this years ago: a small handful of customers throws off most of your profit, while a long tail costs more to serve than they’ll ever hand back [5]. Blend them together, treat everyone as one grey “customer base,” and you serve them all to the same beige standard.
So don’t. Sort them first. The version I use is four tiers:
- Gold: your most valuable, most strategic customers. Big, growing, painful to lose. Your key accounts.
- Silver: solid, profitable, worth proper attention, but not strategic yet. High-touch CS.
- Bronze: steady and standard. Scaled, lighter-touch CS.
- Iron: high-maintenance, low-value, sometimes costing you money to keep. Standardise, automate, or wave goodbye.
Get this wrong and everything after it breaks. Drop a Bronze customer into a Gold seat and you burn a pricey key account manager on someone who’ll never pay it back. Leave a Gold customer in the Bronze pile and a rival’s taking them to lunch while your CSM fires off a health-score email.
Your tiers are the foundation. CS and KAM aren’t rival strategies — they’re the different service levels you build on top.
- KAM for Gold.
- High-touch CS for Silver.
- Scaled CS for Bronze and Iron.
When you’re starting out, the pyramid is plenty. Sort by value, serve each tier differently, and you’re already ahead of most.
But as your offer grows up — and you get a clearer read on what your CS and your KAM actually deliver — you’ll want to look past size. The sharper question isn’t which accounts are too big to lose. It’s which ones could become real partners: your growth accounts, the ones worth building around. A giant, steady account you’d hate to lose isn’t the same as one you can grow with, and sooner or later you’ll want to tell them apart.
That’s a deeper cut. When you’re ready for it, I’ve written a whole guide on how to spot your key accounts. For now, just get the four tiers down… everything else in this article assumes you have.
The Bit Everyone Skips
Here’s a question that stops most CS teams dead.
Customer Success makes sure the customer gets what they paid for.
Paid for according to who?
If nobody wrote down what “success” looked like on the day the deal closed, your CSM is aiming at nothing. So they’ll pick their own target. And it’ll be a usage number, because that’s what’s on the screen.
Then they’ll send you a lovely green dashboard — right up until the renewal dies, because the customer was measuring something else entirely and nobody thought to ask.
The research is blunt about it: running customer success without pinning down a clear, numbered promise during the sale makes no sense [1]. You can’t hit goals nobody set.
No health score fixes a promise that was never made.
Try this today. Pull your last ten deals. For each one, can you show me the outcome the customer expected (in their numbers?)
If you can’t, that’s not a CS problem. That’s a sales problem in a CS costume. And hiring customer success managers won’t fix it. It’ll just give you someone new to blame.
Where it Falls Apart
These aren’t two strategies. They’re two different jobs.
A brilliant CSM who lives in dashboards can sink in a key account role, where it’s all politics, senior relationships and a three-year plan. And a twenty-year key account manager can be miserable in the automate-everything world of CS.
Neither’s broken. They’re solving different problems.
Use one for everything and you’ll do both badly.
You know the classic. Company’s got 500 small customers and 10 big ones, hires CSMs, tells them to “keep an eye on the big ones too.” The big accounts feel dropped, because their CSM is spread thin. The small ones get ignored, because the CSM’s busy playing strategist. The CSM feels like they’re failing at everything — because they are.
The other way round costs just as much. Hire pricey KAM talent, give them 50 accounts each, and watch them run strategy workshops for customers who just wanted decent onboarding and someone to pick up the phone.
It’s not about which one’s better. It’s about fit.
KAM isn't a "Tinker Round the Edges" Strategy
That last one deserves its own warning, because it’s the mistake that quietly sinks most first goes at Key Account Management: treating it as a hire.
You bring in someone with “key account manager” on the business card, or you grab a safe pair of hands off the service team, hand them the same customers, and tell yourself it’s sorted. It isn’t. You’ve filled a chair, not built a plan.
Key Account Management isn’t a job description. It’s a company-wide plan that happens to have a job title stuck on it. The KAM is the face of it — but the actual work runs through product, finance, legal, ops and support. Every team that touches the account. If they’re not in on it, the KAM’s stranded.
And here’s the part everyone misses: the job comes with influence, not authority.
A key account manager can’t order product to shift the roadmap, or finance to bend a payment term, or support to jump the queue. All they can do is make the case and ask nicely. So if the rest of the business hasn’t agreed these accounts matter and signed up to help, you’ve handed someone the blame for something they can’t control. That’s not a job. That’s a scapegoat.
It’s also a long game. A proper way of running your biggest relationships:
- real account plans
- a service model of their own
- a senior sponsor
- targets that span years
KAM takes months to build and years to pay back. Slap it on someone on a Tuesday afternoon and all you’ve done is raise hopes you can’t meet.
And no, being small doesn’t let you off. Bootstrapping isn’t a reason to skip the plan — it’s the reason you need one.
When you can only look after three accounts properly, picking the wrong three sinks you. A long-term plan is how a small team punches above its weight: it stops you spreading yourself thin, and ensures your KAM strategy delivers a solid ROI, not just throw money away. Without it you’re just keeping you fingers crossed (and burning out your team in the meantime).
Want the full picture of a proper KAM foundation: service, sales and long-term growth, all balanced? I’ve mapped it out in the definitive guide to implementing key account management from scratch.
Short version: build the engine before you print the business cards.
The Trap that Catches Good Key Account Managers
There’s a way KAM goes wrong even when you have built the plan — and it looks like a roaring success right up to the moment it doesn’t.
Those same 43 interviews found two very different foundations for a customer relationship [4].
Some are built on being good. You’re credible. You deliver. You do what you said you would.
Some are built on being liked. They enjoy you. You’re good company. You remember the kids’ names.
Both feel great. Only one is safe.
Lean too hard on being liked, and the customer’s buying because of your account manager — not because of what you do for them. One KAM described customers placing orders just to do him a favour. Lovely for the quarter. Useless to the customer.
And it doesn’t survive people leaving. When another KAM’s favourite buyer moved on, it walloped her business. Rapport walks out the door with whoever built it.
Being good doesn’t. As one of them put it:
“It’s your credibility, your ability to deliver good strategies with your customer, that will make your company credible and not the person you are.”
Build it on being good, and a colleague picks up the account on Monday. Build it on charm, and the account leaves with the charmer.
CSM vs KAM: Can They Co-exist?
Most firms answer this with money. Above a certain deal size, it’s a key account.
Bad answer. Here’s a better one.
Give CSMs a product. Give KAMs a customer.
That’s the rule. It’s the clearest thing to come out of the research [1], and it’s worth sticking on a wall.
If you sell a few products, a CSM owns a product and goes deep. They learn it inside out. They know what good looks like, what breaks, and what “working well” means for everyone running it.
A key account manager owns the customer — the whole relationship, across everything that customer buys.
They’re not scrapping over the account. The KAM sits above it, holding the full picture. The CSM sits inside it, making one thing sing.
"But we only sell one product"
Then that rule doesn’t work, and you need a different line. Most SaaS firms are right here.
With one product, don’t split by what they own. Split by when.
- Customer Success owns now. Is it working today? Are they using it, getting value, hitting the thing they bought it for?
- Key Account Management owns next. Where’s this going over three years? What else could we do together? Who should know us and doesn’t? What’s changing in their world that we should get ahead of?
Same customer. Two jobs. One’s watching the dashboard. The other’s watching the horizon.
If you can’t explain that difference clearly enough for both of them to say it to the customer, you haven’t got two roles. You’ve got one role and a spare salary.
When they disagree
They will. And nobody plans for it.
Your CSM says green. Usage up, tickets down, users happy. Your key account manager says it’s rotting — the CFO’s gone quiet, a new procurement boss is asking odd questions, and a rival just took their COO to lunch.
Who’s right?
Both. And the KAM wins.
Because they’re measuring different things. Green usage tells you the product works. It doesn’t tell you the relationship’s safe. A customer can be using your product beautifully on the very day they sign with someone else.
That’s the whole reason you’ve got two functions. If CS could see everything, you wouldn’t need KAM. So when they clash, that’s the system doing its job — not one of them being wrong. The dashboard tells you yesterday’s news. The relationship tells you tomorrow’s.
Write that into how you review accounts, or the loudest report wins every time. And the loudest report is usually the one with a chart.
Nobody admits this: they're paid to fight
Here’s the awkward bit.
If your CSM is measured on keeping customers and your KAM is measured on growing them, they’ve now got different scoreboards on the same customer. Who gets the renewal credit? Who runs the QBR? Who owns the upsell that started life as a support ticket?
Leave it alone and it turns into a turf war. And the customer feels every second of it.
The fix isn’t a workshop. It’s a pay plan. Give them at least one number they both win or lose on together. Measure them apart, and they’ll act apart.
What Messy Ownership Really Costs You
When nobody knows who owns what, the story we tell ourselves is that a renewal slips through a crack. Annoying. You’ll live.
The evidence says it’s worse than that.
Researchers looked at customer success managers stuck in role conflict — pulled three ways by different bits of the business, handed jobs that contradict each other [3].
Here’s what they found. Role conflict makes CSMs miserable. And miserable CSMs start doing something called service sabotage: deliberately doing a bad job for the customers they were hired to protect.
Not quitting. Not slacking. Working against you, quietly, while still on the payroll.
These are your retention people.
Why them? Because a CSM sits in the middle of everything — sales, product, support, the customer — which makes them the easiest person in the building to dump work on. The researchers even named it: undue task transfer.
Which is a very posh way of describing this sentence, which I hear all the time:
“Our CSMs handle onboarding, adoption, renewals, upsells and the senior relationships.”
Two things protect against it. Experience — old hands are far less likely to go this way. And emotional intelligence — it softens the whole slide. Which is a decent reason not to build your CS team entirely out of cheap graduates and hope the playbooks carry them.
What to do about it, if you’re running the place:
- Write down what a CSM does. And what they don’t.
- Tell your customers what the CSM is and isn’t for. Almost nobody does this. It’s free.
- Stop other teams quietly offloading their jobs onto CS.
- Sort out who takes the hard escalations before one lands.
- Make keeping customers happy everyone’s number, not just theirs.
- Give people a way to say “not my job” without it hurting their career.
Getting ownership right matters more than picking CS or KAM. The best model on earth is worth nothing if everyone’s got a different idea of who does what.
How Do You Choose Between Customer Success and Key Account Management?
Forget frameworks for a moment. These four questions will tell you what you actually need.
- What’s your average deal worth? Under £40k a year? CS leads. You can’t put a dedicated relationship manager on every account at that price. A slice at £200k, £500k, £1m+? Those earn different treatment. That’s KAM.
- How many people are in the room? A ten-person startup has one decision-maker. A global manufacturer has a buying committee, three department heads, procurement, legal and finance. Complexity’s the signal. Not revenue.
- Is your churn spread out or bunched up? Lose 5% of customers, lose 5% of revenue? Spread out. CS is your tool. Lose two customers, lose 30% of revenue? Bunched up. You need KAM.
- Are they buying a product or a partner? Some customers want it to work and want you gone. Others want to build things with you. Know which one you’re selling.
The question that makes the choice easy
Here’s the bit that changes the whole conversation.
Even for a customer who’s nowhere near being a key account, someone still has to do the key account work. Someone still plans the account, builds the trust, keeps the two businesses lined up, checks how it’s going, pulls in the right people.
They just do it faster, and without the title.
Same the other way. Loads of firms with no CS team still have to onboard customers, watch whether it’s landing, and tell the customer what they’re getting.
The work’s compulsory. The titles are optional.
So stop asking “should I hire a CSM or a KAM?”
Start asking: which of these jobs is currently nobody’s job?
Write them down. Put a real name next to each. Not a team. A person.
- Choosing which accounts matter, and planning them
- Building trust with the customer
- Keeping your business and theirs lined up
- Checking whether the account’s healthy
- Pulling in the right people internally
- Getting new customers up and running
- Watching whether the product’s actually working for them
- Telling the customer what value they’re getting
- Finding ways to give them more
- Updating the promise as their goals change
Every blank is leaking money right now, whatever your org chart says.
Where are you starting from?
Most advice assumes you’re building from scratch. You’re probably not. So find yourself below.
You've got neither
You’re not behind. You’re in the cleanest spot of anyone reading this.
Don’t hire a title. Run the list above and find the two or three jobs hurting most. Usually it’s “watching whether the product’s actually working” and “telling the customer what value they’re getting” — because in most young firms, the answer to both is nobody, and we find out at renewal.
Hand those jobs to people who already work here. Let them do it badly for two quarters. You’ll learn more about which function you actually need than any framework will tell you — and you’ll hire on evidence, not a hunch.
You've got Customer Success, and you're going upmarket
The most common place to be stuck, and the crash is predictable: you tell your best CSM to “look after” the big accounts too.
They’ll fail. Not because they’re not good — because the job needs a plan, senior cover and time you haven’t given them.
Adding KAM properly means three things: fewer accounts each, a real plan, and a named senior sponsor. Can’t fund all three? Don’t call it Key Account Management. Call it high-touch CS, and be honest you’ve bought twelve months, not a strategy.
You've got Key Account Management, and the long tail's leaking
Senior people on the big accounts, everyone else gets the scraps. Mid-market churn is quietly getting on your nerves.
Your KAMs aren’t the answer. Give them more accounts and you kill the thing that made them work.
What you need is the machine:
- onboarding
- health signals
- a reliable way of spotting someone’s gone quiet.
That’s a CS motion, and it can start as one person and a spreadsheet. It doesn’t need a platform. Anyone selling you one at this stage is selling you a haircut.
You've got both, and they're treading on each other
Then your problem isn’t CS or KAM. It’s ownership.
Go back to the split — product versus customer, or now versus next — write it down, tell the customer who does what, and give the two of them a shared number. Then read the sabotage bit again, slowly.
CSM or KAM or Both? Making the Decision
Here is a practical starting point based on where your business is right now.
Start with Customer Success if:
- You are a SaaS company in growth mode with a broad customer base
- Your average contract value is below $100K
- Churn across many accounts is your primary risk
- You are earlier stage and need repeatable processes before adding specialized headcount
Start with Key Account Management if:
- A small number of accounts bring in a big share of revenue
- You are in enterprise B2B where relationships take years to build
- Losing one or two customers would seriously hurt the business
- Your product requires deep partnership to deliver value
Build both if:
- You have clear customer tiers with different needs
- Your enterprise accounts are being under-served by a CS-first approach
- You are seeing enterprise churn that better relationship management could have prevented
For those still figuring out what to hire first:
| Your situation | Best starting point |
|---|---|
| Many customers, lower ACV, churn across the base | Customer Success |
| Few large customers, high revenue concentration | Key Account Management |
| Mixed customer base, unclear ownership model | Tiered CS + KAM design |
| Enterprise accounts under-served by existing CSMs | Add KAM |
| CSMs overloaded with adoption, renewal, and expansion | Redesign ownership first |
| Moving upmarket | Build a KAM readiness plan |
The finding that ends the argument
One more, and it’s the one I’d stick on the wall.
Researchers ran an experiment [2]. They tested three things: selling value brilliantly, delivering value brilliantly, and doing both.
Delivering value well made customers feel sharper, stronger, harder to beat. Clear win.
Selling value well, on its own, did nothing. Nothing you could measure.
But both together made something bigger than either alone.
It was a controlled study, not ten years of live accounts, so hold it loosely. But it lands on something most of us have watched happen. A promise is worth nothing until somebody keeps it.
Their conclusion is the line to remember:
It’s whether your bits join up that makes customers see you as valuable. Not how you’ve drawn the org chart.
Specialist teams, hybrid roles, one person doing the lot… it matters far less than you’d think. What matters is that someone makes the promise, someone keeps it, and someone holds the whole thing together. And that all three actually talk.
Which means the argument you’ve been having in that strategy meeting? Probably the wrong argument.
What About AI?
The assumption is AI eats the boring bits of CS, then starts nibbling at KAM. Half right.
Those 43 key account managers showed a running order most firms get backwards [4].
The ones who did it well made life easy for the customer in a strict order. First they made the company credible. Then they built the personal relationship. Only then did they automate.
Automation worked because the customer already trusted the person. They handed over their data because of the relationship, not instead of it.
Get the order wrong and it falls over. Push automation into an account where trust’s still thin and you’ve just cut the very contact that was going to build it. As one of them said, you’re never as good at this job as when you’re actually in the room.
There’s a twist, too. Sometimes the customer automates you. One KAM described customers using procurement systems that fire automatic requests at suppliers, leaving him no way in at all. Their software turned him back into a vendor.
So this isn’t anti-AI. Better data genuinely lifts the ceiling on what a CS team can carry.
It’s about order. Earn the relationship. Then automate it. Not the other way round.
When to Get Outside Help
Sometimes the right answer is not CS or KAM. It is getting the way your team works designed properly before you hire into it.
I have seen companies hire great people into unclear systems and then wonder why the results do not improve. Usually, the people were not the problem. The model was.
Consider outside help if:
- Your enterprise accounts are growing but ownership between CS, sales, and account management is unclear
- Your CSMs are expected to handle adoption, renewals, expansion conversations, and senior relationships at the same time
- Your largest customers receive basically the same experience as mid-market accounts
- You are moving upmarket and do not have a clear point at which KAM kicks in
- You have high-value accounts but no account plans, stakeholder maps, or executive sponsor structure
Building these functions without a clear way of working is expensive. You hire the wrong people, confuse the team, frustrate customers, and end up redesigning it 18 months later anyway.
Much better to slow down, define the model, and then hire against the work that actually needs doing.
Working out who owns what is the bit most firms skip — then pay for eighteen months later. If you’re going upmarket, bolting KAM onto a CS team, or building the whole thing from scratch, that’s the work I do with clients. Have a chat and we’ll map it out.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between Customer Success and Key Account Management?
Customer Success is a scalable, proactive way to help many customers get value from your product. It uses onboarding, health scores, playbooks, and automation to improve adoption and retention.
Key Account Management is a high-touch approach for your most important accounts — the ones that bring in a large share of revenue, need senior relationships, and have room to grow. CS is built for repeatability and scale. KAM is built for depth and long-term growth.
Can a company run both Customer Success and Key Account Management?
Yes. Most growing B2B companies eventually use both. A common setup is tech-touch CS for long-tail customers, high-touch CS for mid-market accounts, and full KAM for strategic enterprise accounts.
The key is making sure each tier gets a truly different experience, and that ownership between CS and KAM is clear.
When should a company invest in KAM over Customer Success?
Invest in KAM when a small number of accounts bring in a big share of revenue, when losing one customer would seriously hurt the business, or when growth depends on senior relationships and long-term partnership.
KAM is especially useful when accounts need account plans, executive sponsors, stakeholder maps, and multi-year growth goals.
What metrics do Customer Success and KAM teams use?
CS teams usually track Net Revenue Retention, churn rate, product health scores, adoption, and usage.
KAM teams usually track account growth, account plan progress, stakeholder depth, senior-level engagement, and share of wallet.
What is a CSM vs a KAM?
A Customer Success Manager helps customers adopt your product, get value, and renew. They often manage a larger group of accounts using data, playbooks, and automation.
A Key Account Manager owns a small number of strategic accounts. They build senior relationships, create account plans, find growth opportunities, manage risk, and act as a long-term partner to the customer’s leadership team.
Is Key Account Management the same as Account Management?
Not quite. Account Management usually focuses on managing and growing existing customer relationships across a broader group of accounts. Key Account Management is more selective. It focuses only on the accounts important enough to justify dedicated planning, executive sponsors, stakeholder maps, and long-term growth work.
Every key account is an account. But not every account deserves KAM treatment.
What to do Next
Customer Success and Key Account Management were never rivals. They feed each other. One proves the product works; the other makes the relationship worth having. The trouble starts when you point the right tool at the wrong customer.
Three things you can do this week, whichever camp you’re in:
- Tier your customers. Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron. Can’t sort them? Then you can’t serve them differently — and serving them all the same is the whole problem.
- Run the list. Take those ten jobs and put a real name beside each. Every blank’s a leak, and you’ll find at least two.
- Find the person doing three jobs. Every company’s got one — quietly soaking up the work nobody else owns. Identify the opportunity cost (what they are vs what they should be doing). Take something off them. They’re closer to the edge than you think.
And next time someone suggests bumping your biggest customers into a “strategic” tier, ask what’s actually going to change about how you serve them.
If the answer’s nothing, come back and read this article again.
References
[1] Wengler, S., Kleinaltenkamp, M., Heirati, N., & Prohl-Schwenke, K. (2026). Untangling value-based customer management approaches in business markets: Value-based selling, customer success management, key account management. Industrial Marketing Management, 133, 162–174.
[2] Chugh, R., Leach, M. P., & Oneto, S. (2026). Elevating customer competitiveness: The synergistic role of value-based selling and customer success management. Industrial Marketing Management, 135, 29–48.
[3] Mahimkar, A., Hadjimarcou, J., & Ramirez, E. (2026). Navigating role conflict: Implications for service sabotage in customer success management. Industrial Marketing Management, 134, 159–171.
[4] Schmitt, L., Klein, M., & Lussier, B. (2025). Key account managers and customer experience: A service ecosystem approach. Industrial Marketing Management, 126, 118–130.
[5] Zeithaml, V. A., Rust, R. T., & Lemon, K. N. (2001). The Customer Pyramid: Creating and serving profitable customers. California Management Review, 43(4), 118–142.
