01 · Insights · what the wash actually showed

What 2.5 years of drift looks like.

The list you sent us was from a 2023 SAP user-group event. Names, titles, and emails accurate as of then. We re-verified all 812 contacts against Apollo and rolled the changes up to the company level. What came back is more than a clean list — it's a Stuck-Program signal map across the Nordic SAP universe. Here's what moved.

94%
Apollo match rate on 812 contacts (763 enriched)
42%
contacts who moved companies since 2023
84%
of "risky" emails recovered as deliverable
13
companies in a Strong decision window right now
The headline numbers

What we found end to end.

Six numbers that explain why the list was worth washing. None of these would have surfaced from the spreadsheet alone — they all required matching every contact back to a current source of truth. Apollo was that source.

763
Successfully enriched · 94.0%
Apollo found and updated 763 of your 812 contacts — a 94% hit rate on a 2.5-year-old list. The 49 misses are mostly people who left work, retired, or had unique-spelling Swedish names that didn't disambiguate. Within those 763, every contact now carries a current title, current company, current email status, and a verified LinkedIn URL.
340
Moved companies since 2023 · 42%
Nearly half your matched contacts work somewhere different now. If you'd outreached the original list cold, almost half your sends would have hit a stale inbox. The washed file replaces those with current employer + current title so personalization stays accurate.
520
Title changed · 64% of matched
Even contacts who stayed at the same company mostly evolved roles. A "Affärssystemansvarig" from 2023 might now be "IT & Business System Manager" or "Group Process Owner ERP" — same person, but the playbook line that opens the email needs updating.
385/459
Risky emails recovered · 84%
The original wash flagged 459 emails as "risky" because most large Nordic employers run catch-all SMTP that breaks naive validation. Apollo confirmed 385 of those are actually fine to send to. The remaining 74 are genuine catch-alls or inactive — those are the ones to leave alone.
22·26
Companies that lost CFO · CIO since 2023
Across your 93 companies, 22 lost their CFO and 26 lost their CIO since the 2023 source date. Eight companies lost both. New financial leadership and new IT leadership inside an 18-month window is the textbook setup for a Stuck-Program reassessment.
3
Companies actively hiring SAP roles · top 13 scanned
When we scanned the highest-drift companies' open job postings, three came back hot: Fora AB hiring a SAP ABAP developer (the cleanest Stuck-Program signal there is), Telia with three SAP roles open (Authorization, Integrations, Finance), and Nobia with a SAP Masterdata Solution Engineer. Each one tells a different story and changes the outreach approach.
The leadership change story

Where the execs went.

Of the 340 contacts who moved, the ones that matter most are the C-suite and Director-level departures — they take SAP decisions with them. Below is a sample of the more notable moves we surfaced from the wash. Names and destinations are public via LinkedIn; we didn't dig into anything sensitive.

Recipharm
drift 10/10 · CFO + CIO both gone · 70% contact exodus
  • Tobias Hägglöv (CFO)Elekta
  • Mark Biddle (Head of Global IT / CIO)Calliditas Therapeutics
  • Christian Haldorsen (Group CIO)NTT DATA
Bergendahls
drift 10/10 · CFO + CIO both gone · 100% exodus on 11 contacts
  • Magnus Adler (CIO)Accigo
  • Christian Flo (Chief Digital Officer)Centigo
  • Ulf Zenk (CFO)Dafgårds
AAK
drift 8/10 · CFO + CIO both gone
  • Fredrik Nilsson (CFO)Trelleborg Group
  • Johan Torstenson (Group IT Director)Volito AB (Interim CIO)
H&M
drift 10/10 · CFO + CIO both gone · 55% exodus on 82 contacts
  • Anders Hagström (Head of IT Labs)AI Sweden
  • Mikael Söderlund (Global Head of IT Sourcing)Gartner
  • Oskar Jakobsson (Head of Solution & Innovation)ICA Gruppen
Sandvik
drift 8/10 · CIO gone
  • Petra Sundström (Head of Digital Business Dev)TRATON Charging Solutions
  • Magnus Snitt (Head of IT Sourcing)Unaro Nordic
  • Sebastian Kemi (Head of Cybersecurity)Zscaler
Nobia AB
drift 8/10 · CIO gone · plus active SAP hiring
  • Urban Larsson (IT Director Nobia Sverige)Mio AB
  • Zolo Östlund (Head of Operational Excellence)allnex
  • Dan Josefsberg (EVP Strategy & CX)MIMIR
The strongest single signal

Fora AB is hiring an ABAP developer.

When we scanned the open job postings of the top 13 highest-drift companies, one role jumped off the page. It's the cleanest demonstration of the Stuck-Program pattern we could have asked for.

FORA AB · open posting · April 2026

Systemutvecklare SAP ABAP till Avtalat

SAP · ABAP · Avtalat division

ABAP is the proprietary programming language for SAP ECC's customizations — the bespoke extensions that grew up around the core ERP over the years. Hiring an ABAP developer in 2026 is, definitionally, an investment in maintaining custom ECC code. Not a migration. Not a transition. A maintenance hire.

"If you're hiring people to maintain your custom ECC code in 2026, you've effectively chosen ECC over RISE/Joule for now. That's the diagnostic in one job posting."

Combine that single posting with what the wash already shows about Fora AB — CFO departed, CIO departed, 71% of the original contacts have moved on — and you have an account where the leadership conversation about SAP modernization hasn't happened yet, but the operational signal says it's overdue. That's a Stuck-Program Diagnostic conversation waiting to happen.

The active-investment signal

Telia has three SAP roles open.

Different shape from Fora AB. Telia is actively building out SAP capability — three open roles, all senior, spanning the parts of the platform that matter for a transformation: identity/auth, integration, finance.

TELIA · open postings · April–May 2026

Active SAP investment, not maintenance

SAP Roles & Authorization Specialist SAP Integrations Specialist SAP Finance Specialist

These three roles read together as the core operating team for an in-progress SAP program — someone owning identity and access, someone owning the integration layer between SAP and the rest of the stack, someone owning the finance modules. You don't post these roles unless SAP is a strategic platform you're investing in.

Telia's drift score is also 7/10 — CIO has departed since 2023. The combination — new IT leadership stepping into an active SAP investment — is the textbook moment for an outside POV like Forefront's Joule-Native Selective Transition to land in the inbox of whoever just inherited the program.

The decision-window read

Five accounts to outreach this week.

Combined priority = drift score + SAP signal weighting. These five sit at the top of the account map. Each one has a specific, evidence-backed reason to lead with the Stuck-Program Diagnostic right now — not next quarter.

1
Combined
10/13
Recipharm
CFO + CIO + Group CIO all departed. 70% of the original contacts gone, including three of the most senior IT/finance voices. The CDMO sector has been consolidating; Recipharm itself was taken private by EQT. Decision window is now.
drift 10 · exec 4
2
Combined
10/13
H&M
10 senior departures. CFO, CIO, multiple Heads-of. 1,208 open jobs — too many to scan top-50 for SAP roles, but the leadership churn alone is decision-window grade. US presence makes this a candidate for the bridge play (BTP across Azure + GCP).
drift 10 · exec 10
3
Combined
10/13
Bergendahls
100% exodus on the 11 contacts we had. Every single name we had has moved on — CFO, CIO, CDO, IT lead. New leadership team is in place. Family-owned, regional retail, exactly the kind of mid-market account where coalition rebuild + Stuck-Program Diagnostic lands cleanly.
drift 10 · exec 5
4
Combined
10/13
Fora AB
Active SAP ABAP hire = textbook Stuck Program. Plus CFO + CIO departures since 2023. The ABAP role gives the cold-open email an obvious, specific hook: "Saw you posted for an ABAP developer — happy to share the diagnostic we wrote on programs like this."
drift 7 · ABAP
5
Combined
10/13
Siemens
CFO + CIO both departed at the country level. Country-level CFO and Head-of-IT Sweden both moved (one to Siemens Energy, one to LFV). Multinational scale means SAP roles likely exist but are buried in 2,608 open postings. Worth a manual scan.
drift 10 · exec 3
6
Combined
9/13
Telia
Three open SAP roles. CIO change since 2023. Active SAP investment in finance, integrations, and authorization — the team is being built right now. Lead with the Joule-Native Selective Transition POV; this is the audience for it.
drift 7 · 3 SAP
Where this goes next

Now you have a list and a moment.

The full account list (Nordic-SAP-Account-List.xlsx) sits in this package — link's on the index page. It's got everything you need to start working the top 13: enriched contact rows, the Drift_Per_Company sheet, the SAP_Signals sheet, the Priority_Targets list. Tier-rebalanced, sorted, ready to ship into whatever cadence tool the team uses.

The two playbook docs in here — the Stuck-Program Diagnostic and the 4-Buyer Coalition — were written before any of this evidence existed. Now it does. The diagnostic in particular reads differently when you can name three live signals at the account it's being sent into.

If you only do one thing with this: open the Priority_Targets sheet and send Fora AB the Stuck-Program Diagnostic email this week. The ABAP role is the hook. The diagnostic offer is the close. We'd love to hear how it lands.

Open the Account Map
Chris & Jesper @ Ignite Studio