Today’s landscape for strategic account leaders continues to evolve significantly both due to continued macroeconomic uncertainty and the rapid integration of digital technologies that have radically altered how sellers and customers engage one another. Sellers are continuously innovating to better co-create solutions with customers, while their strategic customers have adopted consumer-like purchasing expectations — demanding sophisticated omnichannel buying interactions and showing a much-increased willingness to switch suppliers if their high expectations are not met.

Hear London-based McKinsey Partner Jennifer Stanley share what today’s enterprise buyer is really looking for and what savvy strategic account managers should do to respond and continue to grow in this challenging, yet exciting ecosystem.

Conference participants will have the opportunity to hear 'hot-off-the-presses' 2024 McKinsey research on the ‘5 truths’ for B2B growth, including:

• How enterprise customers split their time with suppliers across channels.
• What strategic suppliers should do with eCommerce and hybrid working arrangements.
• Where generative AI is having the highest impact.
• Other elements of successfully going to market with strategic customers in complex value chains.

Jennifer will also share the differences we are seeing in European markets relative to other parts of the world. Leaders will leave with practical tips and provocative ideas for how their strategic account organizations can innovate going to market with their company’s most critical customers.

Explore the core elements that make Zurich Insurance's strategic account management (SAM) program a benchmark in the community. This session delves into the intricacies of their award-winning program, highlighting key components such as team engagement, a customer-centered culture, and executive involvement. Discover how Zurich implements SAM principles with their strategic customers to create a scalable and sustainable approach, optimizing customer engagement and co-creating solutions that deliver measurable success. Uncover the strategies, KPIs, and lessons learned from Zurich's SAM program, and how these insights can be applied to elevate your own organization's SAM practices.

In today's competitive business landscape, effective account planning and execution are more critical than ever for managing and growing strategic accounts. Jacques Orbach, Head of the Strategic Business Program at Endress+Hauser Group, will provide advanced insights and practical strategies to develop robust account plans that drive results, while sharing his organization’s account planning journey. Through the lens of real-world examples, participants will gain insights on how to improve strategic account planning and best practices for executing those plans with their most important customers.

Understand how CFOs prioritize investments and how to position your proposal higher on the priority list. Understand the three components of ROI: NPV, payback, and IRR. Learn how to calculate and articulate the ROI of your solutions, as well as what ROI is needed for your project to be considered. Demonstrate the financial value of your solutions with solid financial arguments and be able to answer and ask relevant questions. Develop a value proposition showing operational and financial impact that will convince the executives to invest, and to invest with you.

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. 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 collaborate with 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 customers and their customers and unleash your personal genius to create value as a strategic advisor. We will provide some simple examples of using generative AI to understand your customers more deeply. You will leave this session feeling more confident in your skillset, mindset, and experience set — and eager to apply what you learn the following day. We will explore 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.

Executive sponsorship has been shown to be an integral component of successful strategic customer relationships, and more specifically where the senior executive’s role is clear, structured, and measured. Oftentimes, companies do not formalize it and or do not choose the “right” executives for the role, resulting in frustration for the strategic account manager and the customer. Learn how to make effective use of executives to facilitate long-term, value-added, relationships to your most strategic customers. All attendees will receive tools/templates to immediately put to use.

Key Learnings:

• Business case and strategy for creating and implementing a formal executive sponsorship program
• Board level / Middle Management: Addressing the customer level based on customer buying behavior (relevance, personal match)
• Roles and responsibilities for both the executive sponsor and the strategic account manager: two examples
• Executive sponsor metrics and accountability

In the rapidly evolving landscape of strategic account management, leveraging Generative AI is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for staying competitive. However, the success of Gen AI integration hinges on more than just the technology itself — it requires a solid foundation built on the right processes, tools, and data. Join us for a session where we dive into the SAMA 7-Step Process, showcasing practical Gen AI use cases and what it takes to make it a reality.

Specifically, we’ll cover:

• Real-world SAM Gen AI use cases from the SAMA community.
• What proprietary data is required and how to generate it.
• How to turn a proprietary SAM dataset into a competitive advantage.
• How to get started on a SAM Gen AI in collaboration with IT.

In today’s competitive landscape, recruiting the right account managers is crucial for sustained business growth. This panel delves into key learnings and takeaways for mastering these processes, such as finding the right people and developing competencies to ensure alignment with organizational goals and customer needs.



Key Topics

• Understanding the blend of skills required for effective SAMs/KAMs
• Screening processes to evaluate candidates fit for the role
• Strategies to attract and retain top-tier account managers
• Key competencies and behaviors necessary for high-performing account managers