Strategic Account Management Association US Conference 2010

April 25, 2010 – April 28, 2010
Chicago, IL

Andris Zoltners, ZS founder and Co-Chairman, will deliver a keynote presentation, "The Sales Force as an Engine of Organic Growth," at the 2010 annual meeting of the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA). ZS Principal Mike Moorman will lead a roundtable on "Organizational Options to Optimally Structure your Strategic/Global Customer Programs," and ZS Principals Arun Shastri and Chad Albrecht will lead a session on "Capitalizing on Incentives and Goals to Enable Team Based Selling Effectiveness."


Keynote: The Sales Force as an Engine of Organic Growth
Andris Zoltners
Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Founder and Co-Chairman, ZS Associates

Customer success and company results are the direct consequence of an efficient and effective sales force and its strategic account management team. A thinking framework for organic growth is presented in this keynote. The presentation will:

  • Demonstrate the impact an effective sales organization can have on a company's revenue and profit
  • Present the five key dimensions of sales force success
  • Describe the core decisions that drive sales effectiveness
  • Assess the existing state of your sales force and identify improvement opportunities using a structured effectiveness framework
  • Suggest actions, tools and processes that are immediate effectiveness enhancers
  • The general framework is illustrated with examples of how the concepts apply in a strategic account management context.

Roundtable Panel: Organizational Options to Optimally Structure Your Strategic/Global Customer Programs
Moderator: Michael Moorman, Managing Principal, ZS Associates
Panelists: Cam Hyde, Sr Vice President, Global Account Operations, Xerox and Geoffrey Williams, VP, Global Customers - Global Sales, Schneider Electric-SGBD

Organizational structure can be a key enabler or a challenging barrier to the success of your strategic/global program. This interactive session will explore models that have proven to work, those that have not and why. This session will help shape SAMA's current research on organizational structures for SAM/GAM success.

You will learn:

  • Key organization design issues and challenges related to SAM/GAM
  • Models that have proven to work versus not and under what circumstances
  • Approaches for determining the optimal organization design for your company 

Presentation: Capitalizing on Incentives and Goals to Enable Team-Based Selling Effectiveness
Arun Shastri, Managing Principal, and Chad Albrecht, Principal, ZS Associates

This session will examine the roles that compensation can and cannot play in motivating and rewarding effective team-based selling. It also reviews the various methods used to incentivize SAMs and the issues faced by designers of these plans.

You will learn:

  • A workable approach for using compensation and incentives to drive team effectiveness
  • The role of compensation in the context of other variables (structure, deployment, culture, tools, etc.)
  • How companies have successfully and unsuccessfully leveraged compensation to drive team selling
  • Challenges to successfully designing team-based compensation plans and critical success factors for overcoming those challenges


Please visit the SAMA website for more information and online registration.