157,000 employees. 180 locations. Strategic accounts spanning Air Power, Space Systems, and Connected Intelligence. Airbus Defence & Space embedded ARPEDIO into its CRM — centralizing account plans, stakeholder intelligence, and strategic account governance inside Salesforce.
Airbus Defence & Space operates at the scale where strategic account relationships span years and touch decision-making units the size of divisions. Stakeholder intelligence lived in individual heads and scattered artifacts. Account plans varied across programmes. Centralized visibility — the kind that lets governance scale with the business — wasn't there.
ARPEDIO embedded into Salesforce. A significant increase in stakeholder contacts captured in the CRM. Consolidated account plans. Stakeholder mapping adopted as the practice, not the exception. A centre-of-excellence function scaled the discipline across programmes.
Airbus Defence & Space is the defence and space division of Airbus — aerospace and defence engineering at the scale where a single strategic account touches programmes in Air Power, Space Systems, and Connected Intelligence, and the decision-making unit on a single engagement can run to dozens of stakeholders across multiple nations and agencies.
At that scale, the strategic account practice is a governance problem before it's a selling problem. Relationships with customer organizations span years — decades, for some accounts. Stakeholder knowledge accumulates with the individuals who hold it. When a strategic account manager rotates roles or an agency contact retires, the knowledge doesn't move with the record; it moves with the person, if it moves at all.
The Airbus team already had Salesforce. What they didn't have was a way to hold the depth of a strategic account — the stakeholder map, the multi-year plan, the SWOT that actually reflected the programme — inside the system of record. Account plans varied by programme. Stakeholder intelligence varied by seller. Governance wanted to scale the practice; the tools weren't yet there to scale it from.
ARPEDIO embedded into the Airbus Defence & Space CRM as the strategic account layer. DMU visualization native to Salesforce. Account plans consolidated into one system, with goals, SWOT, and stakeholders living on the same record as the opportunities that depend on them. Stakeholder intelligence stopped being distributed across individual memories and started being a shared asset of the organization.
Eric Pannekeet, who led the CRM Tools and Applications function during the period covered, carried the operational integration — the work of making ARPEDIO into something Airbus sellers could adopt inside a landscape of existing tooling. Manel Becharef runs the Strategic Account Management Center of Excellence, the function that scales the practice across programmes. That shape — a centre of excellence pulling the standard from a central function rather than pushing it from top-down mandate — is how the methodology gets absorbed into the way strategic accounts are actually managed.
The outcomes the team reports are qualitative and honest: a significant increase in the number of stakeholder contacts actually captured in Salesforce, centralized account plans instead of programme-scattered slide decks, stakeholder mapping adopted as a practice by the accounts team. An in-depth analysis of win rates, Net Promoter Score, and customer feedback is still ahead — the quantitative layer will develop as the practice compounds.
"It's an entire world. You can't just improvise yourself as a software builder."
The decision for Airbus Defence & Space wasn't about choosing a CRM module — it was about choosing whether to absorb stakeholder intelligence and strategic account governance into the system of record, or keep improvising at institutional scale. Improvisation doesn't scale with 157,000 employees and three programmes.
ARPEDIO was the layer that let the practice scale without flattening. Methodology-configured, Salesforce-native, strong enough to hold the depth that accounts of this size demand. The centre of excellence took it from there.
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