Through our journey of innovation


with the SAMA community, these five areas have risen to the top as being critical to success and requiring bet- ter technology enablement to support customer value creation and growth:


1. Customer-facing Experience: So


much of SAM is customer facing. Co-discovery, co-creation, co-execu- tion – the “co” means the customer is involved. This means if we are going to use a tool to enable SAM, then it better work well in front of custom- ers.


relationship management (CRM), and apps in a CRM that do not allow seamless, real-time collaboration with key customer stakeholders will have SAM programs painted into a corner.


2. Enable SAM playbook: SAMA’s research (and what we teach in SAMA’s training workshops) sug- gests that the work involved must focus on developing and executing a plan with a customer around how you can create more value for them. This is fundamentally different than developing a plan focused solely on selling the customer more “stuff.” This results in a different


kind of tool that is more focused on understanding and solving customer challenges, rather than an upgrade of CRM opportunity management.


3. Quantify customer value: A criti- cal component in achieving trusted partner status


is proving the value Internal documents, customer


created for a key or strategic account. This requires data on how much you have improved their KPIs as well as making sure you are rewarded for those efforts. Without some techno- logical help, it can become extremely labor intensive to structure, track, roll-up and report on all of these numbers.


4. Integrate with Marketing: Understanding customer challenges and potential solutions and quanti- fying potential customer outcomes can be hard! A critical linkage needs to be made here with marketing – practical account-based marketing – to help the SAM by supplying value propositions and value calculators that can be easily downloaded to an account plan for personalization.


5. Create organizational alignment: The SAM does not operate as an individual user working in isolation


but as the orchestrator of a cross- functional team whose purpose is to help the company work with and grow their most important cus- tomers. Visibility to the strategy, accountability to get work done and constant,


purposeful communi-


cation are critical to success at an enterprise level. Tech platforms can create alignment across disparate teams very quickly by sharing data (instead of documents) with every SAM support role, including mar- keting, product management, sales operations, executives and custom- ers.


And like any customer-related tech


these days, there needs to be a comple- mentary connection to CRM. It needs to be mobile-enabled and pass world- class security standards. And, on top of all that, it needs to be easy and – dare we say – fun to use.


So we’ve been building it. Testing it.


Improving it with the SAMA commu- nity. And in the spirit of community, we thought to incorporate the perspec- tive of five SAMA community compa- nies currently solving these challenges with Valkre tools.


CHALLENGE 1: CUSTOMER-FACING EXPERIENCE


Blake Jarrell Vice President National Accounts


Jon Murray Sr. Director Commercial Learning and Development


AMERISOURCEBERGEN Like most companies, we have a


long history of business reviews with customers. Despite all the best inten- tions, we have struggled to get every- one on the same page, both internally and with the customer. What is the right structure for a business review? The right cadence? The right content? As we started to explore tools to help,


VOL. 21 ISSUE 3 2019


we quickly became interested in the customer-facing nature of Valkre. just seemed right. We love it because it:


It


• Gives the work with customers a more agile, real-time feel


• Saves everyone time by eliminating the endless cycles of status reporting


• Eliminates confusion on what’s being worked on, status, owners and latest news


• Increases the level of commitment and importance of the customer plan to internal teams and customers


VE L O C I T Y ® 2 9


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