Presenter: Jeff Cochran, Partner and Master Facilitator, Shapiro Negotiations Institute

People are under increasing pressure to quickly establish credibility, build lasting business relationships, and produce results. To address these challenges, they need specific habits and tools to impact the bottom line. Finding these tools and actually implementing them in the face of fierce competition is not easy. In this presentation, participants will be introduced to a systematic process that will allow them to become more effective, efficient, and creative in their negotiation.

Presenters: Robert Willard, Director of Service, Global Key Accounts and Support Solutions, Coherent Inc.; Chris Miller, Sr. Manager, Global Service Markets & Accounts, Coherent Inc.

Becoming a trusted advisor within your customer’s decision-making process requires time and repeated touchpoints within the post-sale product lifecycle. Critical to demonstrating value and creating a true bond is consistent use of data to manage positive and negative deviations in real time while reporting on and managing lagging KPIs over multiple years. Post-sale capital equipment management means applying SAMA practices to a larger set of players, roles (manufacturing, service, logistics, and quality), locations, cultures, and personalities.

In addition, we’ll cover:

• Why the post-sale ecosystem is different.
• Managing a global distribution with varied, but equal stakeholders.
• Navigating a new set of success factors, expanding customer insights, and demonstrating value.
• Maintaining a solution-provider status over a decades-long product lifecycle.

Presenters: Alessio Arcando, Director of Key Account Management, Bologna Business School; Ceynur Nak, Founder of Leappo; John Shulman, Cofounder & President, Alignor

Join us for a deep dive into the world of procurement! Learn what makes buyers tick, how they are measured, the negotiation tactics they are trained to use, how they seek to show differentiated value to their internal “customers,” and most important, how you can use these insights to your advantage. In this interactive, hands-on workshop, you will apply a proven framework and tools that help you convert skeptical buyers into eager allies who “sell” you and your offering to their internal business partners. During the workshop, you will participate in realistic online simulations that allow you to “role play” typical interactions with procurement. This interactive and practical workshop is led by negotiation experts with decades of experience working closely with strategic procurement organizations. You will be able to apply the methodologies and tools from the workshop right away. Learn how to improve key relationships and unlock value at accounts where procurement has, until now, stood in your way!

Workshop overview

• How you can help procurement get credit for value delivered
• What relationships are important to procurement
• Overcoming objections and handling procurement’s negotiation tactics
• Converting procurement into your internal upselling partner

Presenters: Tom Kurt, Strategic Account Manager, Sonoco; Aaron Erbe, Director - Segment Sales, Sonoco

Sonoco, the global leader in paper tube sales and manufacturing relies on a proven tool set to protect their most important strategic accounts, grow their business, and manage profitability. In this session, SAMs will learn concepts they can utilize with challenging strategic accounts. During the session, Sonoco describes the strategic situation and how to apply battle-tested SAM tools. Attendees will gain insight and a dependable framework to deploy with strategic accounts. Sonoco, a long-time SAMA corporate member utilizes selected strategic tools to consistently win in their markets and develop their SAMs.

Key topics for this session are:

• Broader & Deeper Strategic Approach
• The Large Deal Team
• Create, Quantify, and Communicate Value
• SAM Focus and Mental Toughness
• Price Optimization

Presenter: Carrie Welles, Partner, Think! Inc.

We have all been here. You have flawlessly executed your value-based sales process, the deal is nearing close, and you learn the deal is now being turned over to procurement. We also know the conversation procurement wants to have is about price. In this session we will leverage our deep understanding of how procurement functions and more importantly, how to change the conversation from price back to value.

The session will focus on two areas:

• Learn what’s really important to procurement so we can speak their language.
• Leverage that knowledge to take back control of the negotiation.

We’ve spent years consulting to sales organizations globally. What is more important, however, is our work behind the scenes consulting with buyers. We will provide insight from that practice along with what we learned writing a negotiation book for buyers in concert with a supply chain management expert.

Presenter: Stephan Liozu, Founder, Value Innoruption Advisors LLC

Following COVID and the ongoing economic slowdown, customers are demanding tangible proof that their suppliers are delivering the economic value they were promised at the time of contract signature. Did suppliers keep their promises and are they able to show documented value overtime? These are critical questions in times of budget tightening and expense prioritization. As a result, SAM, GAM, and KAM have to add value realization to their toolbox. It is no longer enough to create, quantify, and capture customer value. It is equally important to deliver and realize value for customers. This new dimension of customer value management has become front and center in the Software-as-a-service (SaaS) world through the emergence of the customer success function. But the account management profession plays a critical role as well. In this session, we review key customer value concepts, introduce value realization, and discuss how technology can help automate value realization programs.

Attendees will learn:

• What value realization is.
• How to design value-realization programs for SAM/GAM/KAM.
• How value realization can boost sales velocity and customer retention.

Presenters: Steve Andersen, President and Founder, PMI; David Adams, Partner, PMI

In this 75-minute session, participants will select a strategic/key account and “try on” proven best practices for developing and sustaining momentum with their most important customers. Facilitator Steve Andersen of PMI will provide participants with a proven approach for defining and building an Account Value Portfolio, unpacking critical components, and explaining how top performing account managers gain competitive advantage and drive proactive growth by leveraging their value co-creation in the past, present, and future.

The session will begin with a self-assessment to help participants determine the current state of their Account Value Portfolio, providing a baseline with which to capture past proven value, strategize current sales opportunities, and identify areas of future potential account growth. The focus will then shift to building an effective Account Value Portfolio, as participants will explore how to leverage their past, present, and future value co-creation to gain momentum for proactive account growth.

The session will be supported by the application of best practices and tools to:

• Assess the current state of your account value portfolio.
• Capture your past proven value co-creation and align with customer success.
• Define the business outcomes the customer experienced as a result.
• Evolve key customer stakeholders into sponsors and supporters to gain momentum for growth.
• Explore sources of momentum for competitive advantage in current sales opportunities.
• Discover and explore future potential value targets for account expansion.
• Develop your account value portfolio and validate with your account team (and customer).

Specific areas of emphasis of this “How to?” session will include the primary dynamics for building and articulating your past proven value, connecting your past proven value with customer business outcomes to gain momentum in current opportunities, aligning your portfolio of account value with what’s most important to the customer’s key stakeholders, and the critical success factors for developing and executing an effective account growth strategy. The session will close with participants identifying follow-up focus areas to strengthen their Account Value Portfolio and gain momentum for growth and expansion.

Presenters: Todd Lenhart, Managing Partner, PMI; Dino Bertani, Vice President, Head of Alliance Management, Zealand Pharmaceuticals; Robert Eastwood, National Account Manager, Boehringer-Ingelheim; and Debbie Benyo, Field Business Director, Payor Sales, Boehringer-Ingelheim

In this 75-minute session, participants will select a strategic/key account and “try on” a proven approach for taking their account briefings and reviews to the next level of effectiveness. Facilitator Todd Lenhart of PMI will unpack the Executive Account Briefing process and provide participants with a format and structure for conducting powerful account briefings and reviews that have been designed and deployed within SAMA’s certification program and implemented within the SAMA community.

The session will begin with a self-assessment to help participants determine the impact of their most recent account briefing/review, providing a baseline with which to assess strengths and identify potential gaps. The focus will then shift to defining the structure of an effective account briefing as participants explore how to refine, enhance, and tell their “account stories” most effectively.

The session will be supported by the application of best practices and tools to:

• Assess the strength of your account review/briefing.
• Define the critical elements of an effective executive account briefing (past/present/puture).
• Leverage past proven value to focus your briefing on customer success (the past).
• Summarize your active sales opportunities and alignment with key stakeholders (the present).
• Develop strategies for account growth/expansion and action plans for execution (the future).
• Explore potential obstacles and risk factors that could impact your plans.
• Articulate and activate “main thing” focus areas to gain support for your plan after the briefing.

Specific areas of emphasis of this “How to?” session will include the primary dynamics of telling an effective “account story,” leveraging cross-functional account team resources in the Executive Account Briefing process and sharing common success factors identified and observed in effective and successful account briefings and reviews. The session will close with participants identifying follow-up focus areas that will help them strengthen the impact of upcoming Executive Account Briefings.

Presenter: Marcus Redemann, Management Partner, Mercuri International

Managing opportunities and driving them to an order is one of the key tasks for strategic account managers. Equally, opportunity management is creating multiple moments of truth and impacting the customer’s experience and therefore the probability to win.

In today’s world it is not a walk in a park because the decision-making process of customers is getting more complex and following just one approach to win an opportunity is not enough anymore.

A modern account manager needs to be agile and be prepared for a differentiated opportunity-management strategy to unleash the power of his solution while gaining the applause from the customer. During this session, you will learn to map your opportunity and understand the different buying situations, as well as gain the capability to cope with these to break away from competition.

Presenter: Dave Cusdin, Global Account Director, Mercuri International

Speaking with strategic account managers (SAMs), winning internal support is one of their biggest challenges in achieving their strategic account goals. During this session, we will explore two key aspects:

1. What are best practices for SAMs to make this process more successful?
2. What does the organization need to do to enable and support the SAMs?

By the end of the session, you will be able to assess your current situation against best practices we have observed working with some of the world's largest companies and their SAMs. Our aim is to give you new ideas as to how you can improve internal support for your SAMs and ultimately your strategic accounts.

Tools and templates will be provided, and participant exercises will be integrated into the flow of this 75-minute workshop.

Presenters: Adrian Davis, Principal Partner, The Summit Group; Janti Masani, Founder and CEO of CXO IMPACT, Principal, The Summit Group; Neil Wright, Commercial Director, Guys & St Thomas Hospital NHS Trust UK; and Greg Craft, Global Sales Director, Food & NAB, Owens Illinois

Today’s business executives face enormous challenges. Many are overwhelmed as they try to navigate macroeconomic challenges such as inflation, supply chain disruptions, a shrinking labor pool, and geopolitical hostilities. This chaos and uncertainty create unprecedented opportunities for SAMs to show up differently and tell different value stories. The key to creating greater relevance begins with story listening, continues with storytelling, and concludes with story making. SAMs and SAM teams will leave this session with a robust understanding of the power of story and how to apply it to create compelling value in any client situation.

In this session we will uncover two examples from different industries — medical devices and manufacturing — of how to structure conversations with storytelling around global meta themes and make them relevant to the client. Learn how to engage the C-suite on topics that matter most, and how to tell a story using simple techniques to bring the client back to a common area of interest and mutual collaboration.

Conversations that win mindshare ultimately win wallet share. Wining mindshare is about the story and will be the distinguisher.

Presenters: Myla Maloney, Chief Commercial Officer, Premier Inc., PINC AI Applied Science; Britney Horrocks, Director Strategic Accounts, Premier Inc., PINC AI Applied Science

In this interactive and lively discussion, you will learn how to ensure your overall relationship is aligned to strategic and business goals for both your client and your organizations. There will be a focus on discovery of skills needed to balance the singles, doubles, and home runs to ensure realization of long-term strategy and short-term business needs. This session will focus on how to leverage value co-creation to achieve strong business outcomes. Myla and Britney will showcase specific case studies in becoming a valued, trusted partner while wearing both the SAM and sales hats.

Presenters: Ed Wallace, Managing Director of Human Capital, AchieveNEXT; Mark Allen Roberts, CEO & Founder, OTB Sales Solutions, Executive Sales Coach

Did you know that even during times of economic uncertainty, 14% of companies actually grow an average of 9%?

Join bestselling author Ed Wallace and sales effectiveness expert Mark Roberts on how to become a 14%er and grow your accounts regardless of economic conditions.

We’ll share ways that the 14%ers:

Continue to outperform their competitors regardless of economic uncertainty. Transform relationships from vendors to valuable industry resources. Understand the real impact of your offerings on the customers business outcomes. Conduct discussions in the language of the decision maker. Realize your true sales superpower.

Want to become a 14%er?

Join Ed and Mark as they share how strategic account managers grow an unfair share of the key account's wallet while other account managers are struggling just to get conversations.

Presenter: Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer, Corporate Visions

It’s been suggested that different cultures appreciate different levels of detail during business presentations. For example, some cultures strongly believe that details are necessary to understand content deeply and avoid misunderstandings. Other cultures prefer to communicate by “suggestion,” meaning they generalize the information and draw personal conclusions, rather than being given all the details.

However, many of these observations on cultural preferences for detail have been based only on surveys or anecdotes — not rigorous empirical study. Do these opinions hold scientific weight? In this session, Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions, shares her latest neuroscience research on handling complex content during a sales pitch, while dealing with culturally diverse brains. Join us to learn practical guidelines for addressing intricate content for international audiences, and find out clear answers to these questions:

• Should you simplify complex information for a culturally diverse audience?
• Do buyers from different cultures process information differently?
• How can you manage complexity to make your sales presentations more memorable?

Presenter: Dan Kosch, Co-CEO of IMPAX Corporation

As SAMs, our roles are important, and to do our jobs, we need to interact effectively with people at all levels in our customer’s organization. However, getting to the senior executive level, where the business impact of our solutions can truly be appreciated, remains challenging. We know that to sell the value of our solutions, we have to get to people who can understand that value, but that doesn’t make it easy. When we do get to these executives, we have to be so good that we get invited back.

In this session, you will learn how to:

• Efficiently understand your customer’s business environment and leverage that understanding to gain access to senior-level executives.
• Speak their language and position your solutions in terms of the critical business outcomes they care about.
• Deliver your message in such a customer-focused way that you are perceived as a credible business resource and not a vendor.

Presenter: Dennis Chapman, Founder/CEO, The Chapman Group

In a business world characterized by fierce global competition and account demands, an organization needs strong and well-founded signals (metrics) that indicate when key objectives are being met or when trouble is on the horizon. Traditionally, strategic account management programs are evaluated by the sales numbers they post. While sales numbers, usually defined as revenue and profitability, are critical measurements, there are additional key metrics to consider that provide additional valuable insights to the status of the relationship. These metrics provide insights into the probability of achieving, or not achieving mutually beneficial goals, and ensuring the right account management construct; ultimately guiding the transformation to a highly productive / collaborative customer-centric organization.

Key learnings of this session include:

• What is an Account feedback dashboard?
• Choices of metrics: Which metric will best provide the optimum value?
• How to develop, communicate, gather, and measure any metric?
• Launching metrics: What, how, by whom and when?
• Challenges associated with any account feedback program.

Presenter: Mark Shonka, Co-CEO, IMPAX Corporation

Strategic account managers are in a tough position right now. With a recession looming, the pressure to renew and expand customer relationships has never been higher — and yet customer loyalty is at an all-time low. The power of procurement is growing, and many SAMs are facing stiff, margin-erosion pressure when negotiating renewals. At the same time, SAMs and their organizations are helping to create rich value for their customers. The unfortunate truth is that this value only matters if you get credit for it. This fast-paced, interactive session, “Getting Credit for Value with Customers,” is designed to help you understand the value you create and then communicate that value in the right way to the right people.

Presenters: David Chapnick, Partner, Vantage Partners; Ben Siddall, Partner, Vantage Partners; and Ava Colasin, Partner, Vantage Partners

With the risk of recession looming, customer centricity is an essential way to stand out from the competition and weather market turbulence in true partnership with key customers. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of confusion about what customer centricity is and how to put its principles into practice. At too many companies, customer centricity is mostly hype that involves no substantial change and delivers little measurable benefit.

During this session, we will review recent benchmarking research and case studies to explore how leading companies have transformed every aspect of their operations — from research and product development, to after-sales customer service and support — in order to put customers at the front and center of everything they do, and thereby gain a durable source of competitive advantage.

Topics will include:

• Research on benefits of customer centricity, including greater revenue growth and enhanced pricing power and profitability
• Why and how SAMs should lead customer-centricity efforts
• Customer centricity best practices
• Customer-centric innovation
• How to use customer centricity to build and sustain competitive advantage

Presenters: Travis Hill, Managing Director Strategic Consultant, Upland Altify; Nicole Denil, VP of Customer Alliances JCI, John Polidori, Head of Global Account Management, Conduent; Anju Birdy, VP Strategic Account Management Excellence Industrial Automation Business, Schneider Electric

Account planning is the key to building trust with customers, generating pipeline, and growing revenue. During this session, you will get a deeper understanding of “what good account management looks like” through inspirational stories of real organizations that have been highly successful with account planning. The leaders behind this success will join us on stage to discuss how they’ve implemented a holistic approach to account planning, integrating it into their sales process as a continuous practice that drives huge success. Through these success stories, you will see that it's not just about short-term goals and winning the deal right in front of you. It’s about winning the relationship and the greater opportunities the relationship affords.

Our philosophy is simple; if you want to win, you can’t be perceived as just another vendor. Join Upland Altify and get inspired to drive new pipeline and grow and retain revenue in your key accounts by mastering how to: 

• Forge a deeper understanding of key decision makers to spend time with the right people, visualize influence, track political and support status, decision criteria, and coverage. 
• Identify key business problems and challenges, enable greater team visibility, and create strategic opportunity plans to guide sellers toward closing. 
• Move from pitching products to aligning with customer strategy and identify account whitespace and business initiatives to grow revenue potential.

A successful sales organization is one that makes customers’ success the #1 priority, and that’s exactly what we want to deliver with this insightful session that will make you "not just another vendor.”

Presenters: Dr. Stephen Timme, President and Founder of FinListics Solutions, Ben Cagle, Chief Customer Solutions Officer, FinListics, Joel Schaafsma, Research General Manager, SAMA

In today’s business environment of economic uncertainty, rapidly changing business models, dynamic customer demands, and intense competition, it is even more imperative to understand your customer’s financial and strategic priorities...and align your solutions and products with your customer’s financial outcomes.

Yet, research shows that executive buyers believe that almost 80 percent of enterprise sellers don’t understand their business.

This session begins with an overview of proprietary research conducted by SAMA and FinListics regarding current strategic account management trends and best practices...correlated with account management results, such as increased revenue. FinListics will then overview key elements and new insights for creating strategic, ‘customer first’ account management plans that are more relevant to customer executives. You will also receive a step-by-step template for applying these to your customers.

Topics:

• SAMA-FinListics Survey Overview
  • Sources of key elements for ‘customer first’ strategic account management
  • Best practices when engaging with customers
• FinListics: Key elements of customer focused strategic account management
  • Company structure
  • Company-wide goals and strategies
  • Executive compensation
  • Financial performance
  • Individual stakeholders supporting companywide goals and strategies:
    • Initiatives
    • Operational KPIs
  • Aligning solutions with goals, strategies, and initiatives
  • Identifying new opportunities
  • Estimating financial benefits
  • Tailoring messaging for individual stakeholders

Presenter: Peter Morelli, Vice President and Sales Consulting Practice Lead, Holden Advisors

Finding new ways to create value is critical in strategic account management. Monetizing that value effectively year over year? Even better.

However, we’re all facing headwinds as investment budgets are becoming more scrutinized and expectations around price justification are returning to pre-pandemic levels. SAMs need a simple approach for how to price innovative solutions in a logical, simple, and repeatable way to prioritize initiatives that drive sustainable growth.

In this session, you will learn how to:

• Use our Innovation Pricing Tools.
• Price new solutions in a simple and systematic way.
• Prioritize your innovations so you can co-create efficiently.

Presenter: Richard Wiltshire, Head of Key Accounts, LinkedIn

Strategic account managers are navigating a period of tremendous transition. Economic uncertainty, technology shifts, and hybrid work have created further demands on the profession. Today, buyers are better informed and more difficult to reach, with only 5% of the buyer’s journey spent with a salesperson. In this session, we’ll share research and best practices on how top-performer sellers and their organizations overcome these challenges by leveraging LinkedIn’s Deep Sales platform.

Presenters: Thierry Depeyrot, Executive Vice President and GM, Coro Digital Solutions, Coro, Bain and Company and Kevin Callaghan, Expert Associate Partner, Commercial Excellence, Bain and Company

In this presentation, participants will learn about Bain’s B2B Commercial Excellence strategies and how account planning is a crucial aspect of any winning commercial go-to-market strategy. Account, territory, and channel management are key for a business to win consistently. Reinventing full potential account planning to maximize growth at key accounts is a sure-fire way to boost your bottom line, but how does one go about doing it in the most efficient way? Learn Bain’s three-step method, which sets a business up for repeatable success:

• Redesign your go-to-market strategy using market opportunity & segmentation strategies.
• Set up a scalable and repeatable account planning infrastructure and process.
• Deploy repeatable sales plays that continue to evolve with your organization.

Join us to dive deep into each of these three key pillars and learn how to differentiate your account management strategies to excel beyond the competition.

Presenters: Matt Ruple, Principal, ZS Associates, Joe Stevens, Principal, ZS Associates

This session is relevant to attendees from life sciences companies, and will share results from a survey of US health systems around a range of topics, including:

• Strategic initiatives for their organization, and how these impact programs and investments.
• How health systems are investing in new capabilities such as telehealth and advanced data analytics.
• Where opportunities exist for partnership between a life sciences manufacturer and a health system.

The survey, which was conducted in mid-2022, collects responses from 92 health system administrators from 72 unique systems and is the largest and most comprehensive survey of its type.

Presenters: Craig Jones, Managing Director, PMI, Kim Balaski, Head of Marketing & Operations US Petcare, Zoetis U.S. Petcare, Jason McKinney, Vice President, Corporate & Specialty, U.S. Petcare; Lexi de Laveaga, Senior National Account Manager, LP Building Solutions

Account managers' actions in anticipating the market factors that impact their customers and help them adapt to market shifts are critical to sustaining success in today's evolving business environment. The most effective organizational partnerships are those in which providers and their strategic customers seek to navigate these uncharted waters and leverage shared experiences to achieve mutual success.

In this interactive session, facilitator Craig Jones of PMI and a select group of panelists will explore some of the most significant challenges impacting SAMA member companies and their key and strategic customers. Specific insights and proven best practices will be shared from three different perspectives of the panelists (a C-level executive sponsor, a cross-functional team lead, and a strategic national account manager) regarding how they are partnering with their customers to address these challenges. Areas of emphasis will include:

• Supply chain disruptions and constraints
• Labor shortages and qualified talent
• Inflation and financial uncertainty
• Retaining and developing employees in a virtual environment
• Pricing pressures from customers
• Environmental health and sustainability
• Driving proactive growth in a saturated marketplace

Presenter: Jim Dickie, Partner, Sales Mastery

During this session we will review the findings of a joint analysis that Sales Mastery and Korn Ferry conducted based on surveying 500 B2B buyers on how vendor/customer dynamics are changing. We will then explore, using case study examples, how AI innovations are already being leveraged to reimagine the relationship of buyers and sellers. And finally, we will take a glimpse into the near-term future to see how Extraprise Relationship Management will foster a new range of collaboration and co-creation with strategic accounts.

Presenter: Chris Wells, Director, Strategic Accounts,  bioMerieux

We all know that co-creating value with customers is one of the key elements of successful strategic account management. It sounds easy in principle, but it can take time and effort to realize. In this session, Chris will share a concrete example of product development and value co-creation occurring simultaneously with strategic customers.

Presenter:

Presenter: Dennis Chapman, Founder/CEO, The Chapman Group

More than ever, it is imperative to gain the support and active involvement of influential senior leaders of both the account and strategic supplier. This workshop will explore the “why and how” to keep their continuous involvement and support, as it is becoming increasingly more difficult for a SAM program to deliver the expected value without senior leadership participation. The content focuses on going beyond traditional executive sponsors to gain the support of the most senior leaders, to buy into and become actively involved in strategic account management (SAM).

Key learnings of this session include:

• What motivates and convinces anyone to participate
• Important role and responsibilities for those senior leaders involved
• Practices that will encourage senior leadership participation
• Metrics that matter to senior leaders
• Challenges and possible solutions to gaining involvement

Presenter: Dr. Hajo Rapp, SVP & Sales Excellence, TÜV SÜD

Hajo Rapp is one of those rare individuals who has experienced key/strategic and global account management from a wide variety of perspectives, academically, as well as practical. He has been successfully running the global CAM programs of Siemens for more than 10 years and has run the TÜV SÜD SAM program for five years now. During this session, he will provide insights and lessons learned from introducing and operating these programs.

Topic covered will be:

• The challenge of being a SAM
• The journey of the SAM programs at Siemens and TÜV SÜD
• The big five for gaining impact when managing a SAM program
• Current practices on multichannel, especially on account-based marketing

Presenters: Dominique Côté, Owner & Founder Cosawi and Principal at the Summit Group; Stephanie Joshi, One Voice Lead and Health Care Affairs Manager, Boehringer Ingelheim Canada

Starting a strategic account management journey to impact your end customers and the patient and shifting to work differently with your most important client, while adopting an outside-in mindset is a journey and a business transformation. It requires alignment around your most important customers, executive engagement, and takes leadership and many passionate people to make this a success. In this session, you will have the opportunity to hear, exchange, and discuss with your peers, and gain insight and tips from Boehringer Ingelheim and Dominique (Cosawi), based on their experience in kicking off One Voice in 2019. You will also hear about the journey and the status after three years — how the roadmap was created, and what were the trial and errors along the way. The presenters will focus on areas of interest from the attendees and facilitate table discussions to foster sharing and overall attendees' exchange.

Some of the BI topics covered are:

1. The why: Starting with identifying the pain points to create the story and gain momentum of why it is important to do this as well as create a sense of urgency.

2. Aligning leadership: How to align leadership to ensure that SAM journey becomes a strategic imperative and global priority.

3. Creating the roadmap: Having a vision to help establish, implement, and sustain.
     • What is the methodology?
     • What are the steps?

4. Creating the methodology and changing the mindset: Starting small while providing the nest two-to-three year journey, to communicate the needs and gain acceleration.

5. Developing capabilities

6. What next: What are the next steps and aspirations?

The presenters will provide a high-level journey, best practices, and learnings from the Boehringer Ingleheim Canada journey and will use it to define focus and deeperdive sharing based on the audience preferences. The audience will be able to take these learnings home and apply them to their reality. You will have the opportunity to think about how to apply them in your own journey in a relevant manner.

Think big but start small.

Presenters: Sara Theis, Program Leader, Key Account Management, Owens Corning; Jay Persinger, Director of Sales, Owens Corning

After building and industrial materials leader Owens Corning (OC) was recognized as SAMA’s “Outstanding Young Program of the Year” in 2022, company leaders were clamoring to replicate this winning recipe across regions and business segments to drive more organic growth from its existing customer base. OC KAM Program Leader Sara Theis walks you through their journey as they expanded the program from North America to South America, Europe, and India, as well as a less-mature business segment — each with their own unique differences and challenges. This session will include key learnings and practical advice, especially helpful for those companies looking to scale their KAM programs for greater business impact.

Presenters: Richard Santucci, Sales Consultant, S&H Strategic Sales Consulting LLC; David Hughes, Sales Consultant, S&H Strategic Sales Consulting LLC

It is well known that a successful strategic account management program needs to be an enterprise-wide effort. To that end a successful strategic account team requires participation and commitment from many different parts of the organization, including top management. This session begins by describing the characteristics of a healthy and effective strategic account team. We will discuss the key pieces of the account plan that all team members must understand. Next, we will review the functions that should be part of the team and the contributions they are expected to make, as well as the structure of the team itself. Key organizational elements will be discussed, as well as team activities that are critical to team success. Finally, we will review compensation incentives for team members and some common team challenges.

Those attending this session should leave with an understanding of how to build and maintain an effective strategic account team.

Presenter: Shakeel Bharmal, SVP, The Summit Group

The best leaders in any industry have a set of common characteristics, including the ability to reframe the game for their company and sometimes their industry. Think about how Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen shifted the vision from providing creative desktop tools for websites to powering digital customer experiences. Or how Eaton moved from being a vehicle component manufacturer to a leading energy management company. As your customers reset and reinvent, they need partners that will bring their best to co-create and align strategy across the value chain from their own company, through to their customer’s company, all the way to the end customer.

This session will enable you to leverage the power of individual ideation, group creativity, and customer centricity to co-create a future value narrative for your customer with strategic alignment to the shifting needs of their end customer. We will share some simple, yet transformative approaches to change the way you look at your customer, their customer, and unleash your personal genius to create value as a strategic advisor. You will leave this session feeling more confident in your skill set, mindset, and experience set — and you will be eager to apply what you learn the following day. We will explore the topics of creating an end-user persona, defining your customer’s business compass, structuring simple individual and group ideation for creative breakthroughs, and translating this creativity into how you can impact your customer’s business.

Presenters: Jennifer Stanley, Partner, McKinsey & Company; Mark Williams, Associate Partner, McKinsey & Company

In order to thrive in an omnichannel world — where two-thirds of enterprise buyers opt for remote interactions or digital self-serve, and where the companies that gained the most market share in the past year offered 10 channels (vs just five in 2016) — strategic account teams must evolve their operating model, structure, and capabilities to meet their customers where they are, with the right message, at the right time, and on the right channel.

In this presentation, McKinsey leaders, Mark Williams and Jennifer Stanley, will provide an overview of the seismic shifts in go-to-market approaches, including specific examples of how Strategic Account teams are reorganizing and overhauling their operating models. They will share the challenges and opportunities that strategic account teams face as they rethink their operating and engagement models to deliver best-in-class customer experiences and activate sustainable growth. Lastly, Mark and Jennifer will provide each participant a worksheet on KAM capabilities with a scoring system against best practice that participants can use to self-assess and identify priority areas of focus when returning with their teams after the SAMA conference.

Presenter: Martyn Lewis, Founder & CEO, Market-Partners

Buyers are buying very differently today. Technology, socioeconomic trends, and the pandemic have all caused major disruptions in the overall buying journey. Expectations of account managers have changed. In this session we will share our latest research from talking to over 4,000 buyers about how they buy and what they expect from account managers. Participants will be guided through an interactive discussion about these trends and how we should be responding. We will offer a success formula for matching SAM programs and approaches, to not only meet these challenges, but to clearly differentiate in this new world. Among the topics we will explore:

• Changed buying behaviors.
• The expectations that buyers have of sellers, both good and bad.
• The disconnect between buyers and sellers.
• What buyers are really doing behind the scenes when we are selling.
• How SAMs can become more relevant to buyers.
• Why opportunities slow down or stop in the later stages of the buying journey.
• Why the focus must shift from a sales process to the buying process.
• The new role of the SAM.

Presenter: Guilherme Rossi, Customer Engagement Program Manager, Hypertherm Associates; Costin Lonescu, Strategic Account Manager, Hypertherm Associates

A strategic account management program is under implementation, as part of a strategic change in Hypertherm. Within a challenging context, the program was deployed in 2018 and grew to 15 SAMs worldwide, affecting different fronts of the Hypertherm business. The program was internally challenged year after year, creating more complexity in its original targets. Making strategy work is more complex than making strategy, which is no different for a strategic account management program. In this session, we will navigate through the early stages of the program, the challenges the organization faced in implementing it, and the current research to assess, improve, and see to its maturity.

Presenters: Liz Pettinger, Director of Key Account Management and Operations, Bellevue University, James Degner, Key Account Manager, Bellevue University, Todd Lardenoit, Director, Community College Transfer, Bellevue University

Implementing a SAM program within your organization can feel overwhelming — especially if you are the sole leader responsible for exploring the opportunity, aligning the teams, and executing on it. In this session, you will learn how to navigate a phased approach for the beginning stages of the initiative. This systematic process helps you prepare an initial roadmap and the metrics needed to prove to external departments that the practices are worth supporting.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how to analyze and discuss the specific key performance iIndicators needed to align important SAMA theories with your company’s strategic plan.
• Identify gaps across departments and utilize specific SAM methods to monitor success.
• Design a phase-by-phase approach to implement SAMA techniques in an organization new to using strategic account management.

Presenters: Denise Juliano, Group Vice President, PINC AI Applied Sciences, Betsy Westhafer, CEO, The Congruity Group

The greatest insurance policy you can take out on yourself as a SAM centers around the kinds of relationships you build and with whom to build them. To reach the highest pinnacle of success, your customers must view you as a strategic business advisor rather than a transactional vendor.

In this session, SAM veteran and SAMA board member Denise Juliano, Group Vice President PINC AI Applied Sciences., will share examples of how she has been able to successfully position herself and her organization as an ally that helps her customers make good business decisions, locking her in as a valued and deeply trusted partner in the customers’ growth.

Denise is joined by Betsy Westhafer, CEO of The Congruity Group, a consultancy focused exclusively on executive-level customer engagement programs and strategic customer advisory boards. Through an intentional and methodical approach, Betsy helps SAMs and their senior leadership teams engage with customers in a deeply meaningful and impactful way, securing their position as a vital strategic business advisor.

Together Denise and Betsy will help SAMs and senior leaders understand the proven path of learning, planning, executing, and elevating customer relationships.

Attendees will learn:

• How to build essential skills including emotional intelligence, relationship building, and positioning.
• How to discover hard-to-find and highly impactful information to take back to your customers.
• What it means to be intentional and methodical in relationship building and why it’s your #1 competitive advantage.

Presenter: Steve Andersen, President and Founder, PMI

What better way to launch your SAMA Annual Conference experience than by sharing your SAM/KAM success at the world’s largest gathering of account-planning and management thought leaders and practitioners! SAMA’s 2023 Annual Conference provides a unique opportunity to share proven best practices and learn with peers, and you’re invited to kick off the conference this year by stepping back and reflecting on the critical factors that determine successful journeys to SAM/KAM excellence.

This 60-minute conference pre-session will feature SAMA member Boehringer Ingelheim (BI), with emphasis on their implementation of key account management, as we unpack the high-impact areas of focus that have contributed to the success of their award-winning KAM program. You will hear firsthand how BI has addressed the challenges of large-scale KAM deployment, plus you will have opportunities to benchmark your own progress against a proven model of KAM effectiveness. Topics and focus areas to include:

• Executive Sponsorship and KAM Program Support
• Cross-Functional Account Team Engagement
• Proactive Leadership Coaching and Review
• Institutionalizing Executive Account Briefings (Telling Your Account Story)
• KAM Adoption and Sustainability
• Certification and KAM Talent Development
• Third Party Validation and Voice of the Customer

PMI will facilitate discussion with Boehringer Ingelheim’s expert panelists, who will share relevant insights and specific examples of how they have evolved their people, process, and program in the pursuit of world-class account planning and management. The session will close with identification of lessons learned and “main thing” takeaways that you can apply to your own personal journey to SAM/KAM excellence!

Presenters: Jerry Alderman, CEO, Valkre; Chris Jensen, Director Customer Solutions, SAMA; and Alberto Uggetti, Senior Vice President, Global & Strategic Accounts, UL

Strategic Account Management is evolving as a business model, not a program. What is the ROI? As companies make decisions about investing in Strategic Sales Models vs Transactional, they continue to be challenged by the ROI question. In this session will share what we know so far on the topic and set the stage for many discussions to come.

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Presenters: Karlheinz Neuer, Principal, The Summit Group; Joshua Dey, Senior Vice-President Global Accounts, The Summit Group

This session will provide you with pragmatic, tangible, and action-oriented insights about the critical drivers of SAM motivation and high performance. And, because knowing means nothing without doing, we will also consider how to immediately activate these insights to elevate and accelerate SAM performance.

Presenter: Frank Helfenstein, Global Account Leader, MBA, CSAM

In a world of information overload, increasing demands, and uncertainty, are you prioritizing the 'right things' to meet personal and client objectives?

Sometimes we are not present — or ‘in the moment’ — and therefore we might be missing opportunities that are right in front of us.

Key questions for anyone to thrive in this practical session are:

• What are you focusing on right now and why?
• How can you be present while organizing yourself to get it all done?

If you want to challenge yourself, learn proven tools and strategies that are easy to implement, and help your clients while being authentic and true to yourself, this session is for you.

Doesn't sound like a typical session for a SAMA conference? Maybe not. Challenge yourself to think in a new way.

Presenter: Kunal Shah, Principal, ZS; Joel Schaafsma, Research General Manager, SAMA

This session will highlight some of the findings from the recently concluded 2023 study on SAM compensation, and will offer additional perspective on the results from ZS’ Kunal Shah and SAMA’s Joel Schaafsma. Additionally, it will address common questions about compensation that were captured during the study, and give participants an opportunity to ask questions.

This study is the most comprehensive survey of Strategic Account Management compensation practices available today and was designed to establish benchmarks and track market trends related to:

• Profile, responsibilities and job scope
• SAM program practices
• Market compensation levels and incentive mix
• Pay plan type, structure, metrics, and timing
• Performance measurement and sales crediting practices

Presenters: Phil Styrlund CEO, The Summit Group; James Robertson, President, The Summit Group; Bryan Thomas, Managing Director, Google; Andrae Rainey, MCAPS Academy Coach, Microsoft Sales Academy; and Sharon Wrenn, Director, Account Management Learning and Development, Janssen/J&J

Join us for a provocative and timely dialogue that will explore the future of our industry and the emerging forces of AI, machine selling, the metaverse, and shifts in B2B buyer/seller relationships. The panelists will offer prescient insights from key leaders from Google, Microsoft, and J&J regarding the future of customer engagement and the distinguishing fluencies and mindsets that will be required.

Presenters: Gerilyn Horan, Vice President, Group Sales & Strategic Accounts, Hilton; Danielle Boyles, Director of Commercial Services, Hotel del Coronado, Curio Collection by Hilton

Join representatives from Hilton Corporation as they guide you through their approach to establishing a coaching culture within their 300-person global sales team. A multipart process of development to implementation spanning several years with guidance from both Human Resources and Learning & Development, Hilton firmly believed that a strong, strategic, engaged, and intentional coaching culture was better for their team members and, ultimately, their clients. Learn their framework to stand up a strong coaching culture in your organization.

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