Introduction

James from Evergrowth speaks with Sven Roeleven, SVP Solution Management at ARIS (Software AG), about how his team is modernizing global sales enablement with agentic AI, turning real-time buying signals into actionable strategy.

Below is the full, timestamped conversation, lightly edited for clarity while preserving Sven’s original tone and meaning.

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Can you briefly describe ARIS’s go-to-market approach and your role in that?

Sven: Sure. Like many companies, our main goal is growth—expanding both with our existing customers and reaching new ones who haven’t adopted professional business process management yet. We’re the market leader in process modeling, mining, and governance. As SVP of Solution Management, my job is to help our go-to-market teams be more productive, supporting them with methodologies, tools, training, and partner enablement. Evergrowth fits right into this, as it can really help increase productivity.

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Looking back before Evergrowth, was there a particular initiative or challenge that led you to look for a solution like this?

Sven: It started after a sales enablement event in Amsterdam where Evergrowth presented. Out of all the vendors, the way Evergrowth described common challenges really matched what I was facing. GDPR and new data regulations changed how we could collect and use data. At the same time, buyers now educate themselves—they don’t want to be sold to. So traditional outbound became less effective. That’s why we needed a more modern approach, and Evergrowth really addressed that.

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I heard you on a sales enablement podcast talking about Evergrowth being embedded into sales training and agent role play. Was that the case for you?

Sven: Yes, that’s right. Many companies like ours are searching for more modern ways to go to market. For us, there were three main things: First, shifting to value-driven content, because buyers want to educate themselves now. Second, a focus on account-based selling and marketing with highly personalized information—generic messages just get ignored. Third, using AI and data-driven insights to identify real buying intent signals. There are plenty of vendors selling intent subscriptions, but those are often surface-level. We wanted to define our own signals based on what really predicts buying intent, and that’s where agentic AI helped.

Was account-based research and signal gathering already something you did before Evergrowth?

Sven: Yes, the activities aren’t new, but the tools and methods have changed. Account planning and searching for buying signals has always existed, but it used to be manual—conversations, reading up on customers. Now, agentic AI platforms can do that work for you, nonstop. That’s the game changer.

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How did you decide which signals to focus on when building your Evergrowth environment?

Sven: When we onboarded, Evergrowth provided a starting set of signals based on their experience, which was really helpful. We also spoke with our sales teams to understand which buying signals mattered most, beyond the usual things like event attendance. Then we added more specific signals, like tracking mergers and acquisitions in the US, since those often led to transformation projects needing our solution. Recently, we adjusted buying signals for a campaign focused on our on-prem product, which is important for sectors like government and defense. The partnership with Evergrowth lets us keep tuning the system as we learn.

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What did onboarding look like for your team? What were your first priorities, and how did you approach rollout?

Sven: The top priority was finding more high-quality contacts in accounts—especially as buying groups are getting bigger. During onboarding, we identified our accounts and set them up in the platform, then started running workflows to find the right contacts. We uploaded our value propositions, ideal customer profiles, and buyer personas into Evergrowth, and it began finding contacts and enriching our account planning information. It even surfaced insights like competitor activity, which saves a lot of time. The process was step-by-step: upload our proposition, find contacts, enrich account plans, refine buying signals, and improve with every cycle.

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Which use cases or plays have you prioritized first?

Sven: With sales cycles of six to twelve months, it’s hard to say yet where the biggest impact will be. Right now, all the scenarios you mentioned—prospecting new businesses, expanding in existing ones, finding champions—are relevant. SDRs use Evergrowth for prospecting, sales reps use it for expansion, and both get value from AI-personalized messaging.

Have you mapped out all your different sales plays in Evergrowth, or are you focusing on a few to start?

Sven: Not all of them. We’re starting with the ones that bring in recurring revenue. We’re taking a step-by-step approach—get something working, scale it, then move on to the next area. Right now, sales reps and SDRs are the main users; we’ll expand to other roles later.

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Are other roles asking to use the system?

Sven: Yes. Customer Success Managers want to use it to expand existing accounts, and Solution Architects are interested too because it helps them prepare for conversations and connect with the right people earlier in the process.

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What concrete feedback have you heard from SDRs and sales reps?

Sven: Time savings is the biggest. Account research and planning that used to take hours now takes seconds. The quality of contacts and messaging has also improved. The co-pilot helps with writing scripts and accuracy. And because Evergrowth syncs with our CRM, everyone benefits from richer, more up-to-date contact data.

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Is the main goal data hygiene, or something else?

Sven: The main goal is adding new, high-quality contacts who have intent or influence into our CRM. Keeping our system of record updated with real, actionable data is critical.