The Transformation to Sales 3.0 – Lessons from History for Winning in the Future

In this keynote, Gerhard Gschwandtner – the author of 16 books on selling, psychology, and sales management – shares what we've gained from technology and what we've lost in the transformation from Sales 1.0 to Sales 2.0 and Sales 3.0. Learn the five principles we need to be mindful of to be successful in the future.

Speaker: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Selling Power | @gerhard20

The Cognitive Era and What It Means for Sales

For the past several years, the converging forces of data, cloud, mobile and social technologies, and the Internet of Things have disrupted industries and led to unprecedented transformation across every type of business – ushering in the Cognitive Era. At IBM, we work with clients in every industry to help them reimagine their business, create new value, and lead in the Cognitive Era.

What does sales look like in the Cognitive Era? Learn how IBM is addressing the Cognitive Era while also applying its cognitive and digital capabilities to increase seller effectiveness, build skills, and engage clients in new ways.

Speaker: Judy Buchholz, General Manager, Sales Strategy and Solutions, Global Markets, IBM | @jabuchh

Training 3.0: Driving Profitable Growth in the Cognitive Era

In today's cognitive era, decisions are increasingly being informed and even being made by machines armed with sophisticated deep learning capabilities. In a world where Amazon sells more than $100 billion per year without a sales rep, we must ask ourselves: What does the future hold for sales professionals? The answer lies in focusing training efforts so they maximize the development of the unique human performance traits machines lack. That is a new paradigm, and it will require an innovative approach to sales training – a Training 3.0 approach. Training 3.0 deploys a radically different learning paradigm that is quick, experiential, engaging, and uses daily-drip learning with built-in retention characteristics. Training 3.0 incorporates performance metrics that ensure a true and enduring ROI. High in social and entertainment value, it is as ubiquitous on reps' phones as their favorite apps. Coupled with a focus on negotiation/value capture, Training 3.0 will transform your company's long-term growth rate, profitability and employee performance. Join us for this session and you will learn how to leverage Training 3.0 so you can maximize growth, profitability, and customer relationships.

Speaker: David Bauders, Founder and CEO, SPA

How Innovation Leads the Sacramento Kings Sales Team to Sustained Success

Recently named the Most Innovative Company in Sports by Fast Company, the Sacramento Kings christened their new technology-packed Golden 1 Center in September 2016 by selling out all 41 home games in its inaugural season and setting new benchmarks across their business and the industry.

In the years leading up to the opening of the building, the Kings sales team embarked on a modern selling philosophy that centered around their unwavering commitment to continually innovate to enhance the fan experience while leveraging innovative sales-acceleration technologies. The Kings analyzed the merits of dozens of unique sales technology platforms and, in doing so, carved a new path for sales success in the sports industry. Using progressive tools, including virtual reality, video, and predictive analytics, their sales team migrated away from the singular cold-call focus and developed a balanced attack customized for today's digitally savvy and social buyers. In this session, you'll get an inside look at the Kings success story and the internal process the organization uses to test, track, celebrate, and implement sales technologies for sustained success.

Speaker: Phil Horn, Senior Vice President, Sales and Service, Sacramento Kings

Sales, Marketing, and Artificial Intelligence – SciFi or Reality?

Machine learning is more than a buzzword. What could it actually mean for business and sales down the line? Will salespeople be replaced by Rosie from The Jetsons or the more frightening HAL?

When we go down this line of thinking – automation, AI, and machine learning – it's easy to jump back anxiously at the thought of robots taking over business. But we all know sales success is based on human relationships. In fact, if machines start crunching numbers on scale, it will be more important than ever to engage personally with customers and prospects. Sales reps will always be in charge of the relationship. Marketers will become industry experts, forecasting customer needs before they come up. Automating processes is a means to an end: freeing more time to focus on what's important – your customer. Join Johann Wrede as he separates the reality and fiction of artificial intelligence in today's enterprise and the benefit of building automation and intelligence into your sales and marketing organizations.

Speaker: Johann Wrede, Global Vice President of Strategic Marketing, SAP Hybris | @wredefine

Building a Sales Team: What It Takes to Go Beyond

After turning a start-up into a Fortune 1000 company – that sold in 2016 for $4.3 billion – some might be surprised at Robert Carr's definition of "success." When looking back at his 19 years leading Heartland, his strongest source of pride is that 87 percent of employees rated it a great place to work. Carr believes, "Enthusiastic employees create an incredibly powerful work environment that sparks a spirit and dedication that can never be purchased." Carr is founding his newest venture on this same principle. On May 1, 2017, he launched Beyond, a cause-based business tools and services company that combines a focus on employee ownership and a mission to help low-income students graduate college. In less than 75 days, Beyond already has more than 200 employees – with another 700 applicants in queue. Join Robert Carr to learn more about his revolutionary business model and how to build a company culture that lifts employee satisfaction and the bottom line.

Speaker: Robert Carr, Founder and CEO, Beyond | @therobertcarr @Get_Beyond

How to Define, Refine, and Enhance Sales Enablement to Achieve Sales Success

"Sales" and "Enablement." You put those two words together and you get a ton of different answers. In this lively conversation with battle-tested sales enablement experts, you'll learn how to move the needle on sales enablement. Takeaways include: What exactly are they doing? What works, what doesn't? Why are they called "silo-busters" and "paradigm-shifters"? How are they doing things differently? The concrete takeaways will impact the growth of your sales organization.

Moderator: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Selling Power | @gerhard20
Panelists: Dan Cilley, CEO, Telemaximum | @TelemaximumTech
Todd Handy, VP and Managing Director, Digital Media & AdTech, MarketStar | @ToddHandy
Brandon Lee, Founder, Speaker and Author, Yip Yip Inc. | @GoYipYip
Scott Santucci, Director, The Alexander Group | @scottsantucci

Coaching: No Longer a Soft Skill

The role of the manager as a coach is misunderstood in most every sales department. While "coaching" is being taught, it is limited in scope and lacks metrics that prove coaching effectiveness and outcomes. In this session, Bill Eckstrom will share how the manager role has become archaic and why sales departments need to eliminate the role or adopt a high-growth coaching model.

In this upbeat, research-based session, attendees will

• See data that shows how much managers impact sales results
• Understand the role of the growth-minded coach (it may not be what you think it is)
• Learn coaching metrics: what are they and why aren't sales execs using them?
• What and how to measure coaching performance

EcSell Institute research indicates that 31 percent of managers hinder performance – which is to say that, without a manager in place, almost one-third of salespeople would produce an average of $2.2 million more revenue. It is no longer acceptable for sales departments to "hope" managers are behaving like coaches – it is time to measure.

Speaker: Bill Eckstrom, President, EcSell Institute

TBA

TBA

Speaker: TBA

Not Another Class: Make Your Sales Force Amazing

Don't send your sales force to another class without fully understanding what makes sales training stick. LaVon Koerner, who co-founded Revenue Storm in 2001, will share how technology and neuroscience combine with content to create personalized and therefore transformational training that gets lasting results. Whether you're developing an existing team or creating the next generation of sales powerhouses, LaVon will forever change your idea of effective sales development.

LaVon Koerner has more than two decades of international consulting experience in sales and marketing effectiveness. Offering companies worldwide a suite of comprehensive, proven tools and techniques for profitable revenue growth, LaVon powers organizations to achieve revenue acceleration through demand creation and reap instantaneous, sustainable gains.

Speaker: LaVon Koerner, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder, Revenue Storm

Not Another Class: Make Your Sales Force Amazing

Don't send your sales force to another class without fully understanding what makes sales training stick. LaVon Koerner, who co-founded Revenue Storm in 2001, will share how technology and neuroscience combine with content to create personalized and therefore transformational training that gets lasting results. Whether you're developing an existing team or creating the next generation of sales powerhouses, LaVon will forever change your idea of effective sales development.

LaVon Koerner has more than two decades of international consulting experience in sales and marketing effectiveness. Offering companies worldwide a suite of comprehensive, proven tools and techniques for profitable revenue growth, LaVon powers organizations to achieve revenue acceleration through demand creation and reap instantaneous, sustainable gains.

Speaker: LaVon Koerner, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder, Revenue Storm

Transformational Selling with Smarter CX

Customers today are driven by choice – of how they engage, when, where, and how often. They design their own journey and expect sellers to engage with them on their own terms; but, too often, sales processes are excluded from customer experience (CX) initiatives. Sales leaders must be prepared for immediate decisions being made across an array of channels and make each experience feel seamless and personalized. Hear the latest innovations that push the boundaries of traditional CX and the sales strategies and components of an extended sales ecosystem that are transforming sales organizations around the globe.

Speaker: Krishna Mulukutla, Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle | @ORCLSalesCloud @OracleCPQ

How to Create and Sustain Relationships of Value

The ability to create value is a key element to winning new business and keeping customers happy. Join Anthony Iannarino, an international speaker, author, and sales leader, for this session.

You will learn how to teach your sales team to:

• Create more value throughout the entire sales process
• Create and win more opportunities – at a higher margin
• Increase revenues from within your existing client base

Speaker: Anthony Iannarino, International speaker, Author, and Sales Leader | @iannarino

Building the Perfect Sales Beast

Today's business market demands sales professionals who can function as true business assets. That requires a transformation from the one-dimensional "tech-focused" or "product-focused" approach to a multi-dimensional set of capabilities that includes equal parts IQ (Intelligence Quotient), EQ (Emotional Quotient), and TQ (Technical Quotient). In this program, Carew International CEO Jeff Seeley will expand on these three critical areas of competence and the role of each in cultivating productive, long-term relationships, increasing reps' value and influence, and closing more sales.

Speaker: Jeff Seeley, CEO, Carew International | @jeffreybseeley

Why Your Training Program Doesn't Stick
The Four Pillars of an Effective Training and Coaching Program

Tony attends a five-day training course. He's pumped. He returns to the office with new ideas, increased energy, and 10 pages of notes. The problem? He forgets 90 percent of what he's learned and can't apply classroom knowledge to live customers.

Does your training fall on deaf ears? Research confirms 87 percent of traditional sales training doesn't stick. In this session you'll learn the four pillars required for a results-producing training and mentoring program as well as how to

• Reduce the time and effort it takes to develop your training program, while increasing its effectiveness through the use of facilitated learning.
• Leverage scientifically proven methods to increase your sales and decrease turnover.
• Incorporate virtual learning, games, and interactivity to put the fun back in your sales meetings.
• Give your trainers tools to incorporate the four pillars and increase retention.
• Offer breakthrough tips for one-on-one coaching and mentoring to get the most out of each employee.

Speaker: Shari Levitin, Professional Speaker, Author of Heart and Sell, and CEO, Shari Levitin Group | @sharilevitin

Hit Home-run Sales Numbers

How a simple baseball truth will help your team overcome their fear of the phone, win more deals faster, and make you manager of the year. No matter how much you invest in the latest sales tools, if your team is playing "Captain Wing-it" when they pick up the phone, they'll never reach their full revenue potential. In this Q and A session, Michael Pedone will walk you through a few simple steps that will have a huge impact on raising your sales numbers quickly.

Speakers: Michael Pedone, CEO and Founder, SalesBuzz | @MichaelPedone
Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Selling Power | @gerhard20

Sales Planning: Strategies that Leave Your Competition in the Dust

By the time September arrives, you will probably be thinking about how your team is going to crush its quota in the fourth quarter. As highly driven people, sales executives tend to want to close anything that's living and breathing without realizing – at the end of the quarter – they've just "drained the swamp" of opportunities. Don't worry; you're not alone. Many sales organizations lack the planning system necessary to ensure consistent, repeatable success, and they end up starting the new year handicapped due to the hockey stick run-up of opportunities leading to the inevitable precipitous drop in revenue in the next quarter. We call this "hockey stick syndrome." Setting yourself up for an amazing year in 2018 involves a lot more than knowing how to manage your pipeline, however. This session will explore the five key strategies you must address in your strategic planning to totally crush your competition in 2018. Topics include:

• Accelerating the buyer's process
• Developing a team of rock stars
• Breaking down the sales/marketing divide using ABS (account-based selling)
• Increasing sales performance with AI technology and sales process
• Reducing stress with predictive metrics

Speaker: Sherri Sklar, CEO, GrowthTera | @SherriSklar

The Customer in Context
Establishing a State of Readiness to Advance Customer Experience

If Sales is from Mars and Marketing is from Venus, where does that leave the customer? All too often the competing agendas and sometimes-contentious dynamic between sales and marketing functions leave the customer out in the cold. But, today's connected customer – a customer who is making active and very intentional decisions over where they spend their money – is no longer interested in being a prize in the sales vs. marketing power struggle.

However, according to new research from the CMO Council, SAP Hybris, and Selling Power, despite having a mutually approved definition of what customer experience should be, the majority of organizations continue to lack alignment and collaboration between sales and marketing – putting customer experience success in real jeopardy. Across both marketing and sales audiences, gaps and deficiencies in everything from strategy to technology continue to allow customer relationships to languish and experiences to fall far short of expectations.

So how can both sales and marketing rally around customer experience strategy? What are the new trends and market realities shaping CX strategies? Is the gap between sales and marketing too great to narrow…or are we closer than we think? What are the cultural and political pitfalls these two critical functions must avoid in order to truly rally around a unified customer experience strategy?

The CMO Council will ask these very questions as sales and marketing leaders take the stage to answer tough questions around customer experience expectations and realities – and how to turn experience into revenue. The session will reveal recently released research, including insights from sales and marketing leaders, about the state of readiness their organizations are in specific to customer experience, as well as new CMO Council research that sheds light on the consumer mindset on experiences and engagements with brands they love.

Moderator: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Selling Power | @gerhard20
Panelists: Shalini Mitha, Global Head, Solution Marketing, SAP Hybris | @shalinimitha
Liz Miller, Senior Vice President, Marketing, CMO Council | @lizkmiller

High-Profit Prospecting – Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Mark Hunter, "The Sales Hunter," will share insight from his best-selling book, High-Profit Prospecting – insight you can use immediately to build an effective prospecting plan in a Sales 3.0 world.

If you want great customers, you have to start with great prospects. Many sales teams are operating without a plan that links both sales and marketing in a world driven by social media. If they have prospects, they often are not quality ones. Mark will provide proven strategies and a roadmap you can use with your sales team regardless of your organization's size – or the industry you're in.

Mark Hunter, "The Sales Hunter," travels more than 200 days per year and has spoken on five continents in more than 20 countries. He works with salespeople and sales leaders across numerous industries. His fast-paced, engaging style will certainly challenge your thinking.

Speaker: Mark Hunter, "The Sales Hunter," Keynote Sales Speaker and Best-selling Author | @TheSalesHunter

Sales Enablement Is Emerging as a Critical Function in the Digital Economy…but What Exactly Is It?

Earlier this year, the movie theater chain AMC announced it would be spending $750 million revamping its theaters to offer high-end fast food to capture more of the night-out experience. The digital economy – revenue driven by selling intangible experiences or outcomes enabled by the convergence of various computing, mobile, and media technologies – is rapidly transforming old go-to-market models.

These dynamics are fundamentally changing the entire buyer-seller relationship and companies need to change their revenue generation systems from focusing on promoting products to helping customers envision their results. This digital disruption is creating huge rifts within most companies' current organizational structures – rifts that manifest as "friction" between departments and the sales organization. It's within these fissures (gaps between sales and HR, finance, marketing, and administration) that new "sales enablement" roles are popping up like wildfire within companies.

Sales enablement, as a function, is in its infancy and, as such, it can be very confusing.

• What is it and what is its scope?
• To where do these functions report today – and where should they?
• Is the hype real this time?
• How will the role evolve over time – and why?
• What should your company be doing right now?

Scott Santucci will answer these questions by sharing insights from the members of the Sales Enablement Society and perspectives from the organization's incredible growth (Launched in November of 2016, it has 27 chapters all across the world).

Speaker: Scott Santucci, Director, Alexander Group | @scottsantucci

TBA

TBA

Speaker: TBA