8:10-8:20 Opening Remarks by Conference Chair John Cargile

Opening Keynote
8:20-9:10 Getting Paid for the Value You Create: How to Accelerate Sales Performance and Profitable Growth

• Are your margins shrinking?
• Has sales performance declined?
• Is your customer base eroding?

If so, you are not alone. Frustration and animosity are stifling the Software sector. Executives are frustrated because they can’t get their value-based prices for their software products and services, plus they are experiencing longer, unpredictable sales cycles, and their customer base is eroding.  Their customers are frustrated because they frequently don’t achieve the value they expected from the software solutions they purchased. Sellers and buyers stand on oppo site sides of the value gap and blame each other.

Organizations are confronting a substantially unaddressed value gap. This issue is bigger than the sales organization and requires executive involvement and leadership to get to the fundamental causes of the problem.

In this session, Jeff Thull, CEO and President of Prime Resource Group, will discuss how to turn this ominous situation into a substantial competitive advantage. He will show why customers have become immune to “value propositions” and how the “value life cycle” is the key to market dominance. He will cover how to identify, manage, and close the value gap, to reap the rewards of an under-served and value-hungry marketplace.

Jeff Thull, President and CEO, Prime Resource Group

Keynote
9:15-10:00 A Better Way Forward: Leveraging Business Intelligence and Performance Management Solutions as Catalysts for Improved Decision-Making in Sales and Marketing
Today, global competition and interconnected global supply chains have further intensified downward pressures on cost. Technology and the Internet have transformed the knowledge economy from the equivalent of a specialty store into a 24 / 7/ 365 big-box retailer. Vast amounts of content are accessible anytime, anywhere. Companies are expected to have a depth of insight into their customers' needs unheard of 10 years ago, and yet market uncertainty is greater than ever. The pace of rapid change does not allow for many second chances.

Driven by a global marketplace and technology advancements, stakes have increased dramatically at the front (customer) end of business. A furious pace of change and unforgiving competitive environment mean that reliable, sustainable revenue and margin growth is hard to ensure. To close a sale, reps must be able to react, adjust, and satisfy customer demands on the spot. Marketing needs to understand the most promising profit-pools to set company priorities and recommend investment strategies.

The need for fast, fact-driven decision making has never been greater.  That is the reason why business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) solutions are being leveraged now more than ever by countless Fortune 500 companies.  What's more, BI and PM are acting as catalysts to help these organizations better align goals, strategies and resources at a time when it's most needed.

In this session, Meg Dussault, Director of Analyst Relations and Corporate Positioning, Cognos, will discuss how to best meet these new customer demands and become more successful in a Web 2.0 world. She will address questions such as:

What implications have new customer demands placed on sales and marketing?
What techniques can boost company-wide awareness of these changes?
How are major companies using BI and PM to meet these challenges head-on?
How can a company understand what's driving demand?

Meg Dussault, Director of Analyst Relations and Corporate Positioning, Cognos

Breakout Session
10:15-11:00 Partnering With VARs the Right Way
Sorry, there is no magic switch. Engaging VARs is NOT going to magically make your sales grow geometrically. It’s all about partnering, defined by the speaker as “the act of making sure you alliances feel like they are getting more out of the relationship then they are putting in”.  

The speaker will discuss what it takes to develop a successful VAR channel and why it is essential to do so if you are selling software solutions to the SMB marketplace. Topics discussed will include: what it takes to be a great partner; strengths and weaknesses of VARs; comfort marketing; lead generation; setting realistic objectives; who owns the customer relationship; and how to recruit the right VARs.

Robert Cohen, President and Business Editor, mar.com

Breakout Session
10:15-11:00 Harnessing the Untapped Marketing Power of Blogs and Wikis
Many companies are dabbling with blogs and wikis to improve internal communication, but these web 2.0 devices can make an even bigger impact in external marketing. By giving your CEO, CTO and other key executives their own blogs, and coaching them to make timely comments on hot topics in your industry, a software company can cultivate a genuine, rewarding conversation with customers and prospects. Blogs and wikis give senior execs a powerful way to shape the message, show a human face to customers, stake out high thought leadership ground, react nimbly to industry news, and drive better results with media and analysts. As a pleasant side effect, CEOs buy into marketing objectives and get off the VP marketing’s back.

Jeff Schultz, SVP, Worldwide Marketing; Parlano Inc.

11:15-12:15 Lunch

General Session
12:20-1:20 Innovation Methods to Expand Markets
Winning software companies most understand their customers and drive business level innovation that delivers superior benefits to their customers. This session will describe innovation methods to help organizations expand markets by getting closer to dissatisfied non-buyers and the converting them into profitable customers. Learn concepts for marketing organizations to develop sufficient foresight to understand both the future needs of existing customers, tomorrow’s customers and customers’ customers. Hear how organizations can become market leaders that learn how lead customers can dramatically influence or foresee the future for all customers and gain a crucial advantage in time-to-market through experimentation that reduces product development time while minimizing risk and maximizing learning based on superior custom insights.

George Chen, Principal, Strategos

1:30-2:20 How to Escape the Price-Driven Sale
Several powerful but generally unrecognized market forces have redefined the concept of customer value. The kind of value for which customers will pay a premium is no longer embodied in product, services or brand name. Great and innovative products, excellent customer service and recognizable brands are now merely prerequisites--those attributes sellers must have just to earn the right to compete. But, unless sellers want to compete principally on price (i.e. rely heavily on discounting strategies as the main source of differentiation) then they must approach the customer from a new frame of reference. In short, sellers whose main expertise is in their ability to communicate product differences are on a short path to commodity selling. Sellers must now be the primary engine of value creation.


Tom Snyder, Senior VP of Strategy and Business Development, Huthwaite

1:30-2:30 Competitive Mapping - Differentiation Made Easy
A competitive map is the best way for you to determine that you are making a unique marketing claim. The breakout session shows you how to analyze print advertisements, marketing collateral and Web sites with an eye to deducing the positioning behind them. Once you have determined how your competitors are positioned, a competitive map gives you an intuitive way to see if there's any unclaimed space you can claim.

Lawson Abinanti, Principal, Messages That Matter

2:30-4:00 Everything You Know about Software Sales is Changing, Obsolete or Wrong
Too many software companies are good at a game no longer being played. Technological superiority no longer carries the day as it used to. Conventional selling as we know it is dead in the software industry. Most software companies have very good sales strategies that their salesforce can't effectively and consistently execute because the lack effective tactics and a systematic sales process.

Attendees will learn:

• Why selling often provides the exact opposite effect that is intended
• Why your value proposition is valueless
• Why the customers you do business with will always pay for the customers you don't do business with
• How to understand which customers truly have a compelling reason to change
• How to build a business case instead of a tecnical case with your customer

Richard Farrell , President, Tangent Knowledge Systems

2:30-4:00 Using Market Intelligence to Achieve Competitive Advantage
Too often marketers must make important product and marketing decisions without input from an essential source, their target customers. This presentation covers the practical aspects of designing, implementing, and using market intelligence to improve the fit between a company’s products and services and the markets it is trying to reach. Actions and analysis developed over 20 years of working with technology companies will provide valuable insights for improving the marketing of software for startups and established companies alike. Specific examples of successful and unsuccessful uses of market intelligence will be presented.

Peter Simon, Founder and President, Simon Management Group

General Session
4:10-5:00 Best Practices for Increasing Software Sales through Partnering
Developing partnering relationships in the software space brings with it some innate challenges not found in other segments of the technology industry.  In this presentation the speaker will discuss best practices for developing and executing SLA’s, the differences between resale and influence relationships and pay special attention to the challenges posed by creating a value proposition for partners around SaaS. 

Dean Madsen, Manager Business Development, Amazon Consulting, LLC

5:00 Evening Reception

7:00 Colorado Rockies Baseball Game at Coors Field

June 7 -- Day Two

8:00 Day Two Welcome

Keynote
8:15-9:00 The Bottom Line on SaaS
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is quickly migrating beyond its roots in delivering low-cost, quick-to-install horizontal applications in the cloud – toward a much more integrated and functionally-rich infrastructure and business services delivery environment.  In 2007 we are seeing accelerating customer adoption and a fundamental shift beyond SaaS islands-of-automation toward integrated SaaS ecosystems and Business Services Marketplaces. Leveraging recently-published Saugatuck research, this presentation will discuss key findings, issues, trends and practices, including a focus on SaaS pricing and licensing.

Bill McNee, Founder and CEO, Saugatuck Technology

Keynote
9:00-9:30 Revolutionizing Software Marketing with Dynamic Online Demos
Industry leaders in software are transforming their marketing strategies and seeing new levels of success and results with dynamic online demos. With clients such as Microsoft, Intuit, Sage Software and FrontRange Solutions, Runaware is fast defining a new paradigm in delivering online demonstrations and related lead capture, profiling and marketing services. Demonstration services are the right strategy for ISVs of all sizes for many reasons, including an improved customer experience. Learn more about the origins of Runaware, how TestDrive services work for software and SaaS companies, and view live examples of TestDrive online demos.

Jayson A. Gehri, Marketing Account Manager, Runaware

9:30-10 Neworking Break

Keynote
10-10:45 Accelerating Sales by Focusing on Value
The reality is we (software sales people) have experienced something we may never see again for a very long time; an era of irrational exuberance, where everyone seemed to be buying. The converse was also true; anyone could sell. There was a lack of formal sales training and a lot of bad habits formed. These bad habits have now caused a whole new generation of software sales people to be on the street looking for employment. Selling software is different now; it’s more complex, more competitive, and typically a longer sales cycle. The bottom line is, buyers expect sales professionals to be more consultative, and sellers expect buyers to evaluate and select a vendor based on value delivered. Selling now requires a whole new skill set. As a professional software sales person, you must learn to sell differently. You must shift the paradigm from salesman – prospect to one of a partner.

Michael Nick, President, ROI4Sales

10:45-11:30 Effective User Adoption: A Basis of Competition That Maximizes the Lifetime Value of Customers
Software without effective user adoption has no value. Enterprise buyers understand this basic premise after numerous software innovations have failed to deliver intended business results. As the software industry matures and shifts to new business models, software providers will live and die by their ability to enable their customer’s effective user adoption.

In this presentation we will discuss how sales and marketing executives can compete using effective user adoption strategies and practices. Specifically we will review case studies of how market leading software firms are using Effective User Adoption to:

• Win profitable sales against larger providers offering free licenses
• Favorably reposition their product against competitors with more innovative functionality
• Expand license sales with existing customers
• Create new services revenue streams

Chris Dowse, CEO, Neochange

10:45-11:30 Video Communication in the Google/YouTube Era
With the explosive popularity of YouTube and its blockbuster acquisition by Google, Web-based video is now forging its way into mainstream corporate communications. During this session, Catapult PR-IR will share insights into the latest trends around automated rich media communications that incorporate audio, video and graphics into a high-impact Webcast. Specifically Catapult will discuss how software companies can incorporate Web video to improve thought leadership, drive leads, build online communities and elevate online training into a strategic asset.

Terri Douglas and Guy Murrel, principals of Catapult PR-IR

11:30-12:30 Lunch

General Session
12:30-1:20 Lessons Learned in the SaaS Market
QuickArrow has been providing SaaS solutions for Billable Services Organizations since 1998, and has developed a deep understanding and expertise around the SaaS model that newer vendors in the marketplace simply can’t compete with. This presentation will present a case study of Best Practices and Lessons Learned throughout our history that ultimately lead to the current success we enjoy, serving more than 230 clients and 22,000+ users, and consistently maintaining 35%+ Year over Year Growth.

Elizabeth Davis, Founder and CEO, QuickArrow

1:30-2:15 Sales 2.0: Online Tools for Finding Accurate Contact Data
As the web generation meets lead generation the rules for developing successful sales strategies are changing. Besides traditional sales experience and skills, successful sales people have to learn to use the collective masses of knowledge available in digital form.

Why? Because salespeople know that quality contacts are hard to come by. The speaker will provide an overview of online tools for finding accurate contact data, discuss how to increase your efficiency in targeting prospects and provide tips on how to turn old business contacts into useful leads.

Attendee Take Aways:
1) Attendees will receive an overview of online peer networks and how to create a sales environment that encourages collaboration
2) Participants will learn practical innovative methods to generate strategic leads
3) The audience will walk away with knowledge about the various online tools and technology available for prospect targeting

Jim Fowler, CEO and cofounder, Jigsaw Data

General Session
2:20-3:10 Licensing Solutions for Customer Satisfaction and Profit
In this session attendees will learn the new technological, business, and governance compliance developments that are impacting the various uses of licensing models in industry.  Attendees will also learn   how to choose the right license model by understanding how their software is used by customers, and how to reduce complexity to focus on benefits to the end user. Finally, there will be a discussion on the future trends in technology, such as SaaS and virtualization, and their impact on software licensing practices . 

Jam Khan, Director of Product Management Software Protection, SafeNet

Click here to view the conference program from SLAM 2006!

Click here to view the conference program from SLAM 2005!