Tag: Event

DemandFarm’s Spring Release 2025 – Omphalos

The Need for Relationship Mapping Goals in Enterprise Sales If you’re part of a B2B sales team, chances are that ABS as a strategy is on your radar. Account Based Selling (ABS) burst into the spotlight in the mid 2010s and has been steadily gaining traction as the go-to approach among B2B sales organizations. Who wouldn’t want to unlock the full potential of their key accounts?   Identify your target accounts, put together a team of sales plus marketing, work out a hyper-personalized messaging and content strategy for those accounts, and measure your efforts. Sounds simple enough!   The best account managers, however, have a secret sauce that differentiates them from the others. At the core of their ABS is an often-overlooked perspective–selling to the humans behind the steely structures that make up their accounts lists.  While sales processes have moved forward by leaps and bounds, thanks to these sales champs, the technology that supports these power moves unfortunately has not. An account manager needs to keep a tab on several parameters while reaching out to different personas today to simply break through the everyday clutter. This is possible at scale provided the account manager has neatly laid out relationship goals for all the stakeholders in the account, especially the buying committee. As a company that works closely with key account management teams from across the globe, we have a vantage view to unfolding trends. What can be a blink and miss moment is slow motion for us. That there is a huge gap in how key account management teams are doing relationship mapping today would be an understatement. Only a handful of companies and sales leaders are laying down relationship targets, and an even smaller slice plots a course to hit them.  The consequence?  Relationship mapping is still ad-hoc. Account Managers are struggling to identify the right people, initiate meaningful conversations, keep track of who they’ve spoken to and stitch back their efforts to the larger business goals. While their work happens on CRMs partially, they tend to use ad hoc tools (or no tools sometimes!) to build org charts.    Relationship Mapping and ABS Maturity Organizations at various stages of ABS maturity focus differently on relationship mapping. The more mature shops are eager to streamline their relationship mapping with technology. They understand that without technology they can’t systematize a process-driven approach to relationship mapping at scale. For them, nailing relationships is non-negotiable.    “ They have realized that key account management in its simplest form is all about pure human-to-human connections in a B2B world.    However, organizations that are just climbing up the ABS maturity ladder recognise the need for methodical relationship mapping  but often default to manual approaches to tackle the challenge. While the manual fix might hold up in the short term, it often breaks when the business scales and more stakeholders become part of the engagement mix.  Our latest release is aimed at helping both seasoned and emerging ABS-driven enterprises realize the benefits of tech-powered relationship mapping. We’re certain it’s time for a shift. KAM should no longer be seen solely through the ABS lens; it’s crucial to also see it through the people lens. As leaders, we’re committed to paving the path, highlighting that tech-enabled ABS isn’t just beneficial—it’s essential.   The Unveil: Relationship Mapping that puts People at the Center.   DemandFarm’s new and enhanced features released as part of Omphalos are designed to ensure your Account Managers (AM) are spending 100% of their time talking to the right people, building relationships that move deals forward and effortlessly track how effectively they are engaging the C-suite and other key stakeholders. Let’s dive in.    Org Chart 2.0: More Intelligent. More Effortless. More Intuitive.  Here’s an interesting discovery we made when we looked into our strategic account engagements: on an average, it takes at least 8 to 15 meetings and connecting with approximately 10 different stakeholders across more than four roles to lock in these strategic partnerships.  While the specifics might differ based on your organization’s size, industry and multiple other factors, here’s a constant: strategic deals demand a higher-than-average number of touchpoints and stakeholder involvement.  Pinpointing powerful contacts among thousands, distinguishing supporters from detractors, understanding their relationship dynamics all can be daunting if the vehicle you’re using to visualize and take action isn’t snappy.  And this is exactly why we have made some massive upgrades to our Org Chart, especially from the lens of cutting down the time it takes for account managers to build context-rich ones. Here are the highlights:    A Fresh Look That’s Designed To Help You Find Information Faster  DemandFarm’s Org Chart looks all-new, but works exactly the way it used to. Only faster, easier to navigate, and every piece of context—from a stakeholder’s buying power, to their current status to associated opportunities—everything is now more intuitively visible.   A single click on the contact card reveals every ounce of context there is to the contact. Brand-new filters, zippy pinch and zoom, the upgrades are aplenty. Creating and maintaining org charts is now faster and more delightful thanks to the latest UI update and some sleek under-the-hood technical improvements.    Make it Dead Easy for your AMs to Prioritize who to include in their Org Charts, with Suggested Contacts Picture this: you’re an account manager who’s got 30 to 50 new contacts that are yet to be added to the org chart. Role changes, departures, new meetings and more, all these variables only end up making this task herculean.  And now you’ve to figure out who among this sea of contacts to prioritize adding to the org chart.    Most account managers are likely to find themselves stuck in analysis paralysis. They end up losing time choosing who to include instead of talking more with customers and partners.  That’s the pickle we’ve set out to fix with Suggested Contacts.  Suggested contacts is powered by an rule-based engine that takes into account a contact’s static, think role, title, etc. and evolving attributes—like their latest engagements

Fireside Chat: Driving Strategic Account Growth With Digital Account Planning

DemandFarm is challenging global market leaders with its unique Digital Account Planning solution. Watch Milind Katti and Abhijit Gangoli live as they share with Express Computer, The Indian Express Group, their perspectives on Driving Strategic Account growth with Digital Account Planning.

How Key Account Management solutions help make sales teams more efficient | DemandFarm at DeepTech Innovation Week

Effective key account management requires you to increase profits, develop relationships, increase satisfaction, grow revenue, improve retention and reduce conflict. It’s a big, complex job and organizations need to invest more in the right technology to help account managers be more effective. Existing customers are a critical revenue source for almost every organization. Meeting organizational growth targets requires sales leaders to establish well-defined account management processes and tools that retain customers and enable account teams to identify, develop, and execute growth opportunities within their account bas

Top 3 Highlights of Dreamforce 2019

Dreamforce 2019 Dreamforce – undoubtedly one of the largest tech events in the world. Salesforce’s massive event gathers more than 170,000 attendees at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco. Dreamforce 2019 was an electrifying week filled with innovation, excitement, and inspiration. 4 Days; 2,700+ sessions; 50+ speakers Did you get a chance to catch up on any of the keynotes or ‘fireside chat’ between Marc Benioff and Apple’s Tim Cook? But other than these wonderful conversations, there are few important highlights of Dreamforce 2019 which you need to know! Welcoming the Newbie – Tableau Since Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau for a whopping 15.7 billion in an all-stock deal in May, lots of efforts are put in to employ the massive capabilities of the leading analytics platform inside Salesforce. Salesforce has also made huge investments in AI which can boost Tableau’s efforts shortly. In the keynote, Adam Selipsky, President and CEO spoke about the need for building a data culture within every organization. Starting the keynote, Selipskya specified the merger as a  “natural combination” to join Salesforce. In terms of fit & overlap, Selipsky and Benioff gave a high-level overview of what to expect. Anyways, users and partners can definitely expect some high-level analytical advancements in the Salesforce platform very sooner. ‘Hey Einstein’ – Voice to Customer experience ‘Hey Einstein’ is similar to Alexa or Google’s assistant but a more focused solution for the workplace. It’s all about bringing Salesforce closer to the community by introducing voice access to Salesforce data which will enable salespeople to quickly access data on the go and to ask the system questions about their data. Salesforce is soon launching a tool that will allow companies to quickly build basic Einstein skills to pull up data from Salesforce. Salesforce Chief Product Officer Bret Taylor gave a small demo and added that “We’re really excited about the idea of voice in businesses — the idea that every business can have an AI guide to their business decisions”. The list of announcements included. ‍1. Einstein Voice Skills Ready-made dialogue snippets and tools tailored toward specific roles or industries, designed to help “admins and developers to build custom, voice-powered Salesforce apps”, which could be rendered as Alexa Skills, Google Assistant Actions, or other tasks that can be carried out by voice assistants. ‍2. Service Cloud Voice ‍Resources that closely integrate contact center functions with Service Cloud-based applications and services, enabling agents to avail themselves of Einstein in all its capabilities through a “unified agent console”. ‍3. Einstein Call Coaching ‍Console for managers that use conversational data to spot trends and provide sales reps with best practices and insights to support designed to improve customer experience (CX). Trailhead GO One of the key announcements at Dreamforce was a deepening of the partnership between Apple and Salesforce. The Giants – Apple and Salesforce have jointly come up with a new companion app Trailhead Go – a sales coach and learning solution which is compatible with iOS and iPad OS. This also implies that no Android for now. Announced in Dreamforce and now integrated with the Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce has entered into the Edutech market providing its users and partners with the best technology resources. Though priced at $25, it’s worth it because of new enhancements of AI and Voice power. Also note that Salesforce has redesigned and launched its Salesforce Mobile app with advanced features like deeper analytics and insights to users, using Siri shortcuts and FaceID with Apple’s design features. It’s completely free and is available in the app store. Conclusion With all these exciting announcements about partnerships and developments, Dreamforce 2019 has ended up leaving us excited for the future of technology. What was your highlight of Dreamforce 2019? Write to us and also stay tuned for our next blog on ‘Account Planning sessions in Dreamforce 19 – Everything you need to know!’

6 Key SAM Sessions at SAMA Prague

If you happen to be in Prague now, it may not be just for the spring. Strategic Account Management Association’s (SAMA) Pan-European conference is the other reason. After an insightful SAMA 2016, they’re back again this year. Over a two-day action-packed pre-weekend, SAM professionals across the World and Europe will debate, discuss and devour, insights on strategic account management. Will you be around? There are 18 sessions in addition to 2 Keynotes, over these two days. Some of you might attend all of them, including the cocktails. However, if you are someone with only a limited time and energy, I bring to you DemandFarm’s recommendation on the six sessions that you should not miss. These 6 sessions cover digitalization, account-based marketing, analytics, automation and not to forget customer metrics. Firstly, do not miss out on keynotes. Johnson Controls’ Renae Leary talks about using Design to Supercharge Customer Value Co-Creation. The design is one of the least talked about subjects in the realm of Key Account Management. One needs to look at the tech space to understand the profound sales transformation design can bring. Undoubtedly, it would be interesting to listen to the story of how Johnson Controls leveraged design in transforming SAM. It remains to be seen though if Renae would talk form or function, in the context of design. Function, of course, would be forthcoming. Phillip Lund from Schneider Electric has the perfect closing keynote, owing to the touchy subject of talent in SAM. While the Schneider Electric story is about talent management, it would be welcome if Philip could also talk about talent development, skills, and millennials. 1. Quantify and track customer outcomes: Technology tools are changing the game! Fair to say, DemandFarm strongly believes in the power of technology, to help Key Account Managers become successful. Thus, a recommendation for this session. The team has regularly made a case for productivity tools for KAMs. In this session, Valkre consultants Jerry Alderman and Brian Kiep team up with Velinda Cox from Konica Minolta Business Solutions to talk about an insight – technology tools to measure your customer’s business metrics. How cool is that? Come on, how many of us are measuring customer metrics that we are impacting? If we did that and followed through, wouldn’t our customers love us? 2. Digitalization Disrupts the Relationship Map Facing the SAM Today’s customer wields enormous power. We all know why – the internet, social media, and the wave of digital transformation. Hajo Rapp from Siemens (Read Hajo’s interview with DemandFarm) and Volkhard Bregulla from HP, rightly address how digitization is dissolving the web of customer relationships: a Key Account Management strategy would build over the years. We understand the importance of relationship mapping. It is one of the key offerings of DemandFarm’s Key Account Management Software. Will these two gentlemen discuss how SAM can address the intricacies of relationship dynamics in a changing power scenario? Will they also touch upon the importance of visualizing relationships, especially in complex accounts? Nevertheless, perspectives on addressing internal business stakeholders by a technical buyer would be insightful for Key Account Managers from the technology sector. 3. Robot as an Account Manager: Are your clients ready for it? The Mckinsey consultants stole our thunder, almost. My team introduced a Key Account Management BOT called KAM-BOT in November 2016 to introduce the importance of automation in SAM. I am keen to understand what emerged from the Mckinsey survey of 1,000+ business purchasers and decision-makers across all major B2B industries, especially how they like to buy; where digital matters, and where it doesn’t. I am expecting the Mckinsey consultants – Varun and Hamza – to share specifics and some tangible action points for KAMs. Read KAM-BOT ebook 4. The New Era of B2B Growth: Moving to Analytics-Based Sales Is it possible to read anything worthwhile in business today without hitting ‘Analytics’? ‘Data-driven is another. I wish they were ‘just’ buzzwords. To Key Account Management teams, these keywords mean ‘effort’ and ‘study’. Armed with information, customers can ask the right questions that salespeople and account managers may not have anticipated. The Gallup team represented by Jeff and David will rightfully sensitize the B2B audience about the need for SAM to transition from experience, solution, and relationship-based customer management strategies to insight and data-based strategies that demonstrate unique business understanding and help proactively solve customer questions. This session should raise some eyebrows. 5. Accelerate Growth in your Strategic Accounts with Account-Based Marketing Didn’t ABM dominate as the most important sales topic in SAMA 2016? If you belong to the SaaS space, you will not disagree. Now ABM is making inroads into SAM. It is still sometime away before we can see some successful models, the debate is essential to assess proper fit. In his session, Bill Simpson from ITSMA has laid out an elaborate menu for advocating ABM into SAM teams. Will you bite it off? The questions he is addressing cover the entire spectrum from who is using ABM to why the ABM SAM alignment is critical? This one should be overwhelming. Who is headed to the bar? 6. How Aptean Accelerated Growth through a Transformational Account Management Strategy Aptean is a software product company offering a bouquet of enterprise software products. It made a change, from account acquisition to account management. Perhaps, the toughest change management in sales organizations. Charlie and Don from SOAR Performance Group team up with Aptean’s Kyle Bowker to tell the story of Aptean’s transformation. It is these stories that keep the SAM excitement going. Are you excited?

SAMA’s Annual Conference 2019 – Key Speakers To Look Out For

We are excited to be a sponsoring partner at the Strategic Account Management Association’s (SAMA) Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida on May 20-22, 2019. We are just a few days away and we can’t wait to be there.  For those of you who don’t know about the Strategic Account Management Association, it is a global knowledge sharing and networking organization devoted to developing, promoting, and advancing strategic customer-supplier value, collaboration, and learning. Hundreds of key account managers and sales leaders of all levels attend the conference to build their network and expand their businesses. It enables the attendees to connect on the future and the challenges of their industry.   The #1 challenge conference attendees encounter remains the same. Aligning the internal organization around co-developing and delivering value to a small number of critical customers continues to vex even the most progressive, customer-centric organizations. That is why SAMA’s 2019 conference revolves around this perpetual challenge and is called “The state of precision: aligning with your strategic customers for extraordinary results. This time around SAMA, we have several influential industry leaders as keynote speakers at the event. Let’s look into who these speakers are and what they will be speaking on. KAI KLATT Head of Sales Tools & Technology – Sales Center of Excellence at Diebold Nixdorf ‍Kai is a specialist in digitizing sales processes and bringing radical innovation to sales performance. He ensures a consistent, value-added, and best practices-driven approach from improvement potential identification to implementation management and continuous improvement to drive adoption and to support sales performance improvements. Diebold Nixdorf has triggered a new approach to SAM as well as highlighted the business impact that this technology-led change has brought to SAM’s results within the company. An esteemed customer of DemandFarm, Diebold’s story will inspire your enterprise to take a similar route to make your account planning & execution ridiculously easy. Kai Klatt will be speaking on “How to leverage technology for strategic account management.” JOHN PINEDA Director at Boston Consulting Group John is an expert in pricing model transformation, monetization of digital platforms, and pricing value to improve core business profitability. He has worked with clients across a wide range of industries including technology, data/business services, life sciences, industrial goods, and financial institutions. He has supported clients in implementing large-scale pricing programs, applying pricing quick hits tactics, and developing new subscription-as-a-service revenue models. He will speak on “Digital Readiness: Changing the way we price and sell innovative digital value.” JONATHAN HUGHES Partner at Vantage Partners Jonathan Hughes is a partner at Vantage Partners, and an expert in strategic sourcing, supply chain management, negotiation, strategic alliances, and organizational transformation. He has worked with leading companies and state-owned enterprises across a range of industries in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. He has a particular focus on developing and implementing new strategies that leverage enhanced collaboration – across internal organizational boundaries, and with external business partners. Jonathan’s experience includes deep transformational work at both an enterprise and functional level, with a focus on sourcing, supply chain management, and alliance management organizations. He will be speaking on “Alignment with procurement.” During this session, Jonathan will share insights from a multi-year benchmarking study of hundreds of procurement organizations, along with case-studies from more than 20 years working with procurement. Key topics will include: What makes procurement tick: understanding their goals, metrics, and incentives Why and how to profile procurement within each of your accounts How to speak the language of procurement Procurement hot buttons and how to avoid pushing them Aligning SAM with supplier relationship management programs at customers See You There Do not miss these star speakers as they will transform how you think about SAM and its processes. They will share energetic stories while offering practical takeaways for achieving your strategic goals. These individuals have expertise in implementing the necessary changes to bring better coordination, collaboration, and revenue to their respective organizations. Looking forward to seeing you all at the SAMA Annual Conference 2019.

Strategic Account Management Association, Heuristics and Beautiful Summers

This was the first time I visited Chicago in the summer, and it was stunning. I think it’s the most beautiful city in the US when it is not cold. Unfortunately, that’s only 3 months a year; I was told.DemandFarm was honored to be a sponsor of SAMA 2016, and I was delighted to be representing DemandFarm at the event. The gathering of a few hundred SAM (Strategic Account Management) practitioners was exciting because of the opportunity it gave me to learn more about a subject I care deeply about. And I was not disappointed.I feel like I along with our small team at Strategic Account Management Association was able to connect some critical dots in our journey of building DemandFarm as the best possible enabling software for Strategic and Key Account Managers. Here are top three lessons I learnt Strategic Account Management is all about co-creating value for your customers. It sounds great and is true. But how do you quantify that ‘value’? We concluded that while some of it can be quantified, there is also undeniably ‘soft/intangible’ impact. We are now thinking ‘how we can make DemandFarm capture both aspects of value creation’? I have often come across this smirk accompanied by ‘Oh! You can’t have software for SAM/KAM’. This is partly true. At SAMA this year, I kept my eyes, ears, and mind open for more on this ‘art-science’ debate. If a phenomenon can be explained with math equations (algorithms), then sure, we can build key account management software. If it is only art (esoteric and mysterious), there may not be any point in bothering with software – the only the human mind can interpret it, and that too in myriad ways. But what if it is in the middle (heuristics)? Many of the world’s phenomena fall in the middle category. I think it depends on which side it tilts to. Our thinking at DemandFarm where we want to ‘enable’ SAMs was fortified with this insight. We will definitely be exploring more of this in future builds. The last lesson is that Chicago is beautiful in summer.