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 and why procurement measures success the way it does

• Understanding the procurement business model.
• Who gets credit for value delivered (or costs reduced).
• What models and metrics count (and to whom).

What relationships are important to procurement

• Who are procurement’s internal customers?
• Spotting procurements internal land mines.
• How to overcome (or leverage) supplier segmentation.

How to handle procurement’s negotiation tactics

• How procurement is trained to use leverage.
• Use of technology and RFPs.
• How you can neutralize common buyer tactics.

Convert buyers from foe to friend

• Fastest ways to build trust and loyalty
• Partnering to sell to procurements internal business partners
• Helping procurement quantify value delivered

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.

Presenter: Steve Andersen, President and Founder, 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.

Presenter: Todd Lenhart, Managing Partner, PMI; Dino Bertani, Vice President, Head of Alliance Management, Zealand Pharmaceuticals

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

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

With the growth of a global economy, conducting business across borders is inescapable. And thanks to the wide adoption of virtual selling, addressing a global audience is easier in some regards but harder in others, especially as content is becoming more complex. Therefore, more business professionals are seeking to add international intelligence to their negotiation skills and better understand how people from different cultures process information and, ultimately, make decisions.

In this session, Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions and B2B DecisionLabs, 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:

• How can you resolve deep-seated cultural differences when presenting complex content?
• Do some audiences prefer details while others don’t want to “get in the weeds”?
• Do people from different countries remember a simple or a complex sales pitch better?
• What important elements contribute to processing complex content and making decisions?

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. Unfortunately, most 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 give valuable insights to the probability of achieving, or not achieving the right organizational construct; the transformation to a highly productive customer-centric organization.

Key learnings of this session include:

• What is a metric-based performance dashboard?
• Choices of metrics: What will best provide the optimum value to your organization?
• How to develop, communicate, and measure any metric.
• Launching metrics: What, how, by whom, and when?
• Challenges associated with any metric-based program.

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 Yoshi, One Voice Lead and Health Care Affairs Manager, Boehringer Ingelheim Canada; Clement Chan, Director Health Care Affairs, Boehringer Ingelheim Canada

Starting a strategic account management journey to impact your end customers means working differently with your most important clients and adopting an outside-in mindset. It’s a business transformation that requires aligning around your most important customers, as well as executive engagement and commitment from senior leadership and to find success. In this session, you will have the opportunity to listen, exchange, and discuss with your peers, and gain insight and tips from Boehringer Ingelheim team members and Dominique (Cosawi) based on their experience in kicking off One Voice in 2019. You will also hear status update on their journey and what they’ve learned after three years — how they created the roadmap and what trials and errors they experienced along the way. The presenters will focus on areas of interest from the attendees and facilitate table discussions to foster sharing and overall conversation exchange.

Some of the topics covered will be: 

• The Why: Starting with identifying the pain points to create the story, gain momentum, and create a sense of urgency.
• Aligning Leadership: How to align leadership to ensure that a SAM journey becomes a strategic imperative and global priority.
• Creating the Roadmap: Having a vision to help establish, implement, and sustain.
  • What is the methodology? 
  • What are the steps?
• Creating the Methodology and Changing the Mindset: Starting small while providing the two-three-year nest to communicate the needs and gain acceleration.
• Developing capabilities.
• What are the next steps and aspirations?

We will provide a high-level journey, best practices, and learnings from the Boehringer Ingelheim Canada to define focus and do a deeper dive.

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: Joshua Gregg, Vice President, Global Strategic Accounts, The Qt Company

The challenges that organizations face as they segment their business and develop a SAM program are well documented. These include:

• Account selection
• Systems, processes, and tools
• Program leadership
• Account leadership
• Account planning
• KPI setting
• Business buy-in

Getting the above correct is widely accepted as core to designing and building a SAM program. The tricky part comes next: How do we take the next step and further scale our program while maintaining focus on becoming world-class? We will cover the following topics as we agree on what ‘great’ looks like. We will also cover how the right culture will allow us to do more than just build a great SAM program, as the impetus for building a scalable world class SAM program:

• Why is a SAM specific culture important?
• What does a great SAM culture look like?
• Built for today and tomorrow.
• What is world-class? (Account planning, processes, executive sponsorship, training and development, account plan pressure tests, program health checks, and thinking bigger.)
• Why is SAM culture so important to long-term success? 
• Finding the perfect tempo for scaling, and how do you know once you have found it.
• It starts with leadership.
• It ends with leadership.

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.

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.