On stage at SAMA's Pan-European Conference, Carlos Martin Boix and Morten Junge took the room through Saint-Gobain's Glocal model — global intent, local execution, one source of truth across 161,000 employees.
The evening before SAMA's 2025 Pan-European Conference, ARPEDIO hosted a "pre-burner" dinner in Paris — a follow-up to the Leadership Forum we ran in March, where senior practitioners had gathered around a shared ambition to make Strategic Account Management a real driver of growth, not a slide in the operating plan.
Those conversations carried into the conference the next day. On stage at SAMA Pan-European, Carlos Martin Boix, Commercial Excellence and KAM Lead at Saint-Gobain, joined Morten Junge, ARPEDIO's VP of Customer Success, to walk the room through what running KAM at Saint-Gobain's scale actually looks like — and how Key Account Management is becoming a cornerstone of the company's "Lead and Grow" Strategy 2030.
Saint-Gobain operates in 80 countries with 161,000 employees, across multiple business units, languages, and market cycles. Until recently, account planning was scattered across spreadsheets, decks, shared files, and Salesforce notes — every national director with their own way of working, no shared view, and no common ground for strategy conversations. The session was a candid look at what changed.
Morten Junge (VP Customer Success, ARPEDIO) and Carlos Martin Boix (Commercial Excellence and KAM Lead, Saint-Gobain) on stage at SAMA's 2025 Pan-European Conference in Paris.
The Saint-Gobain session was substantive, not promotional. Here's what shifted the conversation.
Different business units, languages, and market cycles need a different kind of leadership. Saint-Gobain's answer is "Glocal" — global intent and value framing, local accountability for execution and relationship depth. Strategy and intelligence flow both ways.
Saint-Gobain has shifted the KAM job description: less about the individual relationship-builder, more about convening sales, service, logistics, legal, R&D, and executive sponsors around a shared customer outcome. The KAM is the orchestrator, not the closer.
Saint-Gobain's tech philosophy on stage. A unified Salesforce + ARPEDIO stack creates one source of truth across business units. When everyone sees the same account plan, relationship map, and opportunity progression, internal negotiation drops and external value creation goes up.
Software installs don't change behavior; weekly cadence does. Saint-Gobain builds relationship intelligence into how teams actually work — assess, map, engage, review — running the loop continuously where the work lives, not in a quarterly deck.
ARPEDIO's ABS Maturity Model assesses six enablers — Leadership, Process, Value, Orchestration, Data, Tech Stack. Saint-Gobain's diagnostic showed strong leadership and orchestration, with room to grow in process and tech integration. The variation across countries told them where conversations, not tools, would unlock progress.
"Align on purpose. Enable empowerment. Measure performance. Then keep the loop turning."
Closing principle · Saint-Gobain × ARPEDIO at SAMA Pan-European 2025
The next executive summit lands in Munich on 22 June 2026. The diagnostic Saint-Gobain ran is open to enterprise teams.