Software AG’s Capital Market Day 2019

I sell them; and I have had the enormous privilege of spending the past 20+ years doing so. My experience has taken me from consulting to pre-sales, where I helped customers to imagine solutions, to sales – where I translated customer needs into business value. I’ve work at big and small software companies; from global internationals to high growth startups.  I’ve built strong teams and raised funding to build and scale. This experience puts me in the right place at the right time at Software AG – which is on the cusp of growth.

In the 90 days that I have been CCO here, I’ve learned that we have a large, diverse, and passionate customer base – more than 10K strong.   We have the ability to invest and do the right thing for our customers and the business. We have credibility; the people who really know – like Gartner and Forrester – consistently rate us as leaders.

And, now, we have a new corporate strategy called Helix; a streamlined transformation program designed to ready our business for sustainable, profitable growth.  Helix puts us in a fantastic position to deliver change, and last week at the Capital Market Day in London I talked about how we are going to make that happen.

The two key tenets – focus and execution. We will focus on the markets and products where we can grow and gain market share. We must get our unfair share.  On the go-to-market side, it means adopting a new business model – rethinking the way we approach geographic coverage, customer segmentation, and sales specialization. We’ll modernize the customer experience – the key to becoming stickier within our customer base. And it means operational execution – defining how we’ll empower our sales teams and arm them with the tools they need to do their jobs.

We will make the all-important transition to subscription-based sales, as our CEO Sanjay Brahmawar outlined on our earnings call. We’ll also need to think about new routes to market – rethinking our channel strategy.

We will go big on OEM – a huge opportunity with massive scale potential. We are already having success here with the likes of Bosch, Siemens, and Dell.

A vital component of a truly evolved sales and GTM is a modern customer experience – one that’s focused on customer success.  We will focus on onboarding, adoption, and reference-ability.

Everything we’ve discussed here is aimed at one ambition: increasing our market impact. There are many more details to our new strategy, many of which I will be talking about in the weeks and months to come.

It’s time to GROW!