Among the first people to get in touch about Aldous was the MD of a manufacturing firm. Not the audience I’d pictured when I started writing about consultants and their networks, but the conversation was familiar within minutes. His words, roughly: “Five customers are most of my revenue. I know everything about them. None of it is written down, and I’m also running the factory.”
That’s key account management as it exists in most SMEs: vital, personal, and carried entirely in the owner’s head. The enterprise playbook (account plans, QBRs, a named account director per client) assumes headcount you don’t have. But the underlying maths applies to a 30-person firm more brutally than to a corporate: lose one key account and you’re making redundancies; win one and you’ve changed the shape of the year.
Here’s the playbook at SME scale, drawn from what the people doing it well have in common.
1. Know more people than your buyer
The most dangerous number in an SME’s sales ledger is one: one relationship into an account that’s worth a third of your revenue. Buyers retire. Procurement gets a new manager who owes you nothing. Your champion gets restructured out, and the first you hear of it is a tender document.
For each key account, you want living relationships with at least three people: the person who signs, the person who specs (the engineer or ops manager who insists on you), and someone who tells you the truth about what’s changing. Then keep track of what each of them cares about, professionally and personally. The buyer’s retirement date is strategic information. So is his cricket club.
2. Show up between orders
Repeat business feels automatic until it isn’t. The order book rolls on, contact narrows to order confirmations and delivery queries, and one day you discover a competitor has been visiting for a year. In long-cycle businesses, the relationship decays silently precisely because the revenue hasn’t yet.
The fix is contact that isn’t transactional: the site visit with no agenda beyond “how’s the new line running”, the note when their industry gets hit by regulation, the invitation to see your new kit. Once a quarter minimum for the accounts that pay the wages. It’s diary discipline, not charm.
3. Work the change signals
Accounts are lost and won at moments of change: your buyer moves on (risk at their end, opportunity at their new employer), the account gets acquired, a new site opens, a competitor stumbles on quality. Each one has a window measured in weeks. The MDs who win these moments aren’t better salespeople; they heard earlier and followed up while it mattered.
Which means the intelligence you pick up at trade shows, on plant visits, and in passing (“did you hear Dana’s moving to head of procurement at their Warrington site?”) needs somewhere to land, and something to turn it into an action with a date.
4. Give growth a number
Defence isn’t a strategy on its own. The engineer-MDs I know are superb at delivery and quietly allergic to selling, so new-business work loses to operations every single week unless it has a number attached. “Two new accounts qualified this quarter.” “Every key account visited this month.” “Three lapsed quotes revived.” Small, concrete, reviewed weekly. If it isn’t reviewed, it isn’t real.
Where Aldous fits
Everything above is memory, timing, and follow-through, done alongside a day job that already fills the day. That’s the exact gap I built Aldous for: an AI assistant that works like a competent colleague whose whole brief is your business relationships and your growth.
- Capture happens in the car park. A voice note after the plant visit: “New line’s down twice a month, they’re furious with the German supplier, buyer retires next spring, his replacement is Dana Torres.” Aldous saves the lot against the right account and people. No forms, no Friday admin.
- You’re briefed before every meeting. Walking into the annual review, you get the full picture that morning: open threads, last conversations, the personal details worth asking after. You show up as the supplier who remembers, and that’s the supplier who keeps the account when procurement pushes for a retender.
- Silence gets noticed. An account that’s gone quiet, a promised follow-up from the trade show, the buyer whose retirement is now six months out: raised in your morning plan before they become surprises.
- Growth gets a rhythm. Set 7, 30, and 90-day goals with Aldous, and they plan your day around the conversations that move them, then walk you through a weekly review: what moved, what stalled, where to focus. The sales-director cadence, without the salary.
Aldous connects to your email, calendar, and meeting notes, fusing intelligence with the data your business already produces. Twenty years of who-knows-whom stops living only in your head: it becomes a system with a memory, superhuman recall on every account, and a sensitivity to how you like to work.
We’re in invite-only alpha, and owner-MDs are exactly who we want to hear from. Tell us about your firm and we’ll be in touch.