Bernard Quancard, CEO and President of SAMA, announced the addition of Denise Freier as the new Chief Operating Officer of SAMA during SAMA’s Annual Conference. Denise joins SAMA after more than 40 years of executive and sales leadership at IBM, serving as one of the executive leaders for one of the largest global transformation initiatives in the history of IBM – an undertaking that reimagined how IBM engages with its customers. Building on her career in sales, sales operations and strategic account management, she most recently led IBM’s CRM implementation, where she was accountable for the design, deployment and adoption by more than 40,000 global sales and sales managers. Bernard highlighted Denise’s experience, noting that Denise “has been on the front lines for the twin revolutions of customer-centricity and now digital transformation.”
SAMA is delighted that Denise will bring her experience as a SAM practitioner and her familiarity with the SAMA community as a thought-leading presenter and long-standing SAMA member. Denise will begin to take over the day-to-day direction of SAMA and, after a short transition period as COO, will become the next SAMA CEO. Her addition allows Bernard to focus more on his passions of developing leading-edge thought leadership and expanding SAMA in Europe as SAMA’s president emeritus.
“We evaluated more than 200 tremendous candidates for this SAMA position,” said Jim Ford, Chairman of SAMA’s Board of Directors. “After a long search, the Board’s Executive Committee unanimously agreed that Denise’s unique experience was the best choice. We believe that she can take SAMA to the next level. Denise joining SAMA is addition without subtraction — an ideal transition that frees Bernard to focus on what he wants to do most.”
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Denise, congratulations on your leadership appointment at SAMA. They could not have chosen a more qualified person to lead them in continued growth.
Milt Hearne