Executive Summary
As industries shift from linear value chains to interconnected ecosystems, the way companies manage their most important customer relationships must also evolve. At the B2B Growth Summit 2025, Siemens’ Marco Lippuner argued that strategic accounts can no longer be treated as isolated relationships—they must be developed and nurtured within the wider ecosystems in which they operate. The organizations that succeed will not be those who sell the hardest, but those who ask sharper questions, measure more rigorously, and orchestrate more intelligently.
Siemens’ Journey: Lessons in Maturity
Siemens offers a striking case study. They began experimenting with account management approaches in the 1990s. By 2009, they had institutionalized customer-centricity by adopting the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a company-wide KPI. In the 2010s, they expanded vertical market strategies, integrating account management into their broader digital transformation agenda.
Today, Siemens manages more than 600 key accounts with over 430 dedicated Key Account Managers, supported by 30,000 sales professionals worldwide (Siemens, 2025). Their journey illustrates that building SAM maturity is not an overnight project but a multi-decade transformation. And yet, Siemens’ progress also reveals a limitation. While the NPS provided a useful signal, it cannot capture the full richness of ecosystem dynamics. As ecosystems become central, SAM leaders will need new indicators: trust, co-innovation capacity, partner resilience, and ESG alignment. The challenge is to design these metrics in ways that are both rigorous and actionable.
Why Strategic Accounts Matter More Than Ever
In times of volatility, strategic accounts offer stability. They are not just sources of revenue, but platforms for co-creation, innovation, and long-term growth. Yet managing them has become far more challenging. Customers operate in uncertain environments, balancing digital transformation, sustainability imperatives, and competitive threats from new entrants.
While almost every sales leader recognizes the importance of strategic accounts, the majority still struggle with the basics: updating account plans regularly, mapping stakeholders effectively, or aligning value propositions with customer outcomes. In other words, the intent is there, but the execution often lags.
This gap raises the question: if strategic accounts are universally acknowledged as critical, why are so few companies able to manage them systematically? The answer lies in how organizations approach SAM. Too often it is treated as an art—relying on intuition, individual talent, or legacy relationships—rather than a science based on data, frameworks, and evidence.
From Linear Chains to Complex Ecosystems
For decades, B2B selling followed a relatively predictable pattern. Companies identified customer needs, designed solutions, and delivered value in exchange for revenue. But the rise of digital platforms has replaced linear value chains with ecosystem economies.
In ecosystems, value is created not in dyadic exchanges but in networks of interconnected players: customers, suppliers, competitors, technology providers, and regulators. For Key Account Managers, this means that the old role of being a “relationship interface” is no longer enough. Instead, they must become ecosystem orchestrators.
This shift raises profound questions:
- Should a company seek to orchestrate the ecosystem, or simply participate?
- How does one balance openness (to encourage innovation) with control (to secure value capture)?
- What metrics can capture ecosystem health beyond traditional KPIs like revenue or NPS?
At ARPEDIO, we see that the most successful SAM leaders are those who recognize this new reality and respond with both structure and foresight. They move beyond traditional CRM practices by leveraging advanced tools to map influence networks in detail, uncovering not just the obvious decision-makers but also the hidden influencers who shape outcomes. They apply white space analysis to identify untapped opportunities across multiple business units and geographies, ensuring growth is systematic rather than opportunistic. And crucially, they coordinate internal teams—sales, marketing, product, and delivery—around a shared account vision to deliver integrated, ecosystem-based solutions. With over a decade of experience enabling global enterprises in account-based selling, ARPEDIO has consistently observed that organizations adopting these practices outperform their peers in retention, expansion, and customer trust.
Why Ecosystem Thinking Changes SAM
Most digital transformation initiatives fail—not because the technology is unavailable, but because organizations struggle with complexity, alignment, and integration. Ecosystems multiply this challenge. Instead of managing one-to-one relationships, KAMs must coordinate multiple actors, align diverse agendas, and deliver outcomes across entire networks.
This requires a different mindset. Instead of static account plans, SAM must adopt ecosystem analytics: mapping interdependencies, testing hypotheses about partner value, and modeling systemic risks. It is no longer enough to ask, “What does this customer need from us?” The better question is: “What role should we play in the broader ecosystem that defines this customer’s success?”
Pitfalls to Avoid
Even organizations with established SAM programs often fall into predictable traps. Some label too many customers as “strategic,” diluting focus. Others operate in silos, where sales owns the account but marketing, product, and service are disengaged. Many create account plans that are forgotten until the next annual cycle.
Perhaps the most dangerous pitfall is over-reliance on intuition. While most leaders recognize the importance of data, many still make strategic account decisions based on gut feel rather than analytics. In today’s ecosystem economy, this is unsustainable.
How ARPEDIO Translates Ecosystem Complexity into Account-Based Growth
In any business and sales context, there exists a landscape of relevance that must be carefully understood. This landscape is not just made up of individual accounts, but of the wider ecosystem of companies, stakeholders, and influencers that shape outcomes. Recognizing and mapping this environment—formally or informally—provides the foundation for positioning effectively within strategic accounts. Collecting the right data points strengthens understanding and significantly improves the ability to build compelling account plans and meaningful partnerships.
Organizations can choose different levels of ecosystem engagement: joining existing ecosystems, building new ones together with partners, or even owning and orchestrating ecosystems. Each option comes with both opportunities and risks. Joining an ecosystem allows access to a “living organization” with new potential for growth, but it also exposes the company to risks if alignment is weak. Opting out entirely can be just as problematic, leaving an organization isolated from critical networks of influence.
Driving or orchestrating an ecosystem, on the other hand, brings immense potential but also significant responsibility. It requires a deliberate strategic choice and a clear definition of objectives—not only for individual strategic accounts but also for the broader set of partnerships that underpin the ecosystem. These decisions redefine how both Strategic Account Management and Partner Management must be approached in practice.
At every level, the mapping of players and stakeholders is vital. Understanding the relationships and influence structures between customers, partners, and competitors can be decisive in shaping the right strategy—whether the goal is to win a large-scale project collaboratively, or to drive co-creation with a strategic account through carefully selected partners.
From an Account-Based Selling perspective, this means consolidating and visualizing all relevant information about stakeholders and their connections. Best practice is to embed this capability directly within the organization’s CRM system, supported by dedicated Account-Based Selling technology such as ARPEDIO’s platform. This ensures that ecosystem insights are not fragmented or forgotten, but live dynamically inside the tools that account teams use every day—turning complexity into clarity, and relationships into measurable growth opportunities.
The Future: SAM as a Science of Complexity
Looking forward, SAM is set to become even more scientific. AI tools are emerging that can predict churn, simulate stakeholder interactions, and recommend next-best actions. Companies will begin to track ecosystem health indices—analogous to biodiversity measures in ecology—capturing diversity, resilience, and interdependence. Longitudinal studies will help organizations identify the deep patterns of trust and growth that unfold over decades, not quarters.
Sustainability will also become central. Accounts will increasingly be evaluated not only on revenue potential but on alignment with ESG goals. Strategic accounts of the future will be those that contribute to long-term resilience—not just short-term profit.
Conclusion
Marco Lippuner’s presentation underscored a critical truth: Strategic accounts are no longer managed in isolation—they are orchestrated in ecosystems.
The challenge now is to treat SAM as a science. That means asking sharper questions, validating strategies with evidence, and adopting tools that make complexity manageable.
At ARPEDIO encourage leaders to reflect:
- What if your SAM program were structured like a research lab?
- What if your account managers were scientists of growth
- What if your competitive advantage came not from budget size, but from the rigor of your questions?
In an ecosystem economy, those who manage complexity with discipline will not just adapt to the future—they will define it.
