The State of Selling in 2020

The profession of selling has gone through fundamental changes – and more dramatic changes are on the horizon. Companies are spending $5,000 per salesperson per year on technology and $2,000 on sales training and development, yet the percentage of forecasted deals continues to shrink below 50 percent. Learn what sales leaders can do to identify the growing performance gaps caused by the misalignment between people, process, and technology. Also learn the best action steps sales leaders can take today to accelerate sales and boost sales productivity.

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

Master Your Next Play – a Game Plan for Sales Success

In this session, John Guydon will walk you through the six things you must master to ensure success in an ever-demanding profession like sales. Be prepared for actionable takeaways you can implement immediately for consistently impressive progress. Sales leaders will leave the session with specific strategies to improve their leadership skills.

Speaker: John Guydon, Speaker, CEO, Master Your Next Play | @IamJohnGuydon

How Sales Leaders Can Accelerate Sales Despite Coronavirus Fears

In this panel discussion we will share the results of a brand-new Selling Power sales leadership poll about the impact of the coronavirus on sales organizations. Gerhard Gschwandtner will lead a fireside chat with Jeffrey Hayzlett and Andy Miller, who will share their perspective on the challenges sales leaders must address to accelerate sales in this volatile economy. The audience will be invited to share their tactics and strategies.

Moderator: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Selling Power | @gerhard20
Panelists: Jeffrey Hayzlett, Chairman, The C-Suite Network
Andy Miller, Partner Coach, Objective Management Group

Toxic Salespeople Suck! How to Avoid Adding Them to Your Sales Team

Have you ever had to manage a salesperson who was toxic to the rest of your team? Or have you ever had to work for a toxic boss? One in 13 people have the propensity to become toxic and suck the energy out of your sales team. Because of this, while the cost of making a bad sales hire is well over 100 percent of their annual compensation, the cost of making a toxic hire is even worse – and it's harder than ever to get rid of them.

Toxicity on your sales team puts you at risk of losing some of your better talent – as over 40 percent of salespeople have reported leaving a job due to issues with team culture, management, or co-workers. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to avoid hiring these types of candidates.

In this session, Lee will share the latest results from SalesFuel's exclusive "Voice of the Sales Manager" survey and his research work with Behavioral Resource Group. You'll learn

• What today's sales managers look for in new salespeople – and what you should be looking for
• How to measure a candidate's mindset before you interview them
• Examples of the 13 types of toxic salespeople
• Recommendations on how to avoid them and make your next hire your best hire

Speaker: C. Lee Smith, CEO and Founder, SalesFuel | @CLeeSmith

Optimizing Sales Strategy to Create Valuation

Sales strategy is all about driving revenue. Driving Revenue is all about creating company value. Company value stimulates wealth creation, creates jobs and other economic gains. This session will review:

• How to architect your unique sales model to drive results
• The secret to load balancing your ratio of appointment setters to closers so as to drive revenue
• Best practices for achieving new client acquisition and reducing customer acquisition costs
• Optimizing customer facing messaging to inspire customer adoption

Speaker: Kraig Kleeman, Author, Speaker, Sales Strategy Expert, and Founder of The Must-React System and The Sales Cadence | @Kraig_Kleeman

Breakout A
Showing up Strong at Every Call

Gregg Frederick, a certified Peak Performance Mindset trainer, former VP of Sales, multi-champion cyclist and mindset trainer for world-class athletes and executives will train you on how to show up strong and win the day every day!

Gregg will give you insights on how both world-class athletes and world-class executives show up strong in similar ways. From body language, to energy levels and self-awareness, you will walk away tall knowing how these athletes and executives create use these techniques to create a winning mindset.

You will learn how to:

• Show up strong through self-awareness, talent identification, and the use of positive language
• Use positive energy and visualization to show up strong every day
• Show up in purposeful ways in both low-stress and high-stress environments

Speaker: Gregg Frederick, Principal, G3 Development Group, Inc | @g3leadership

Breakout B
How to Turn your Incentive Program into a Profit Center

A strategically curated incentives program should not be designed to just pay for itself; it should be designed to turn a profit.

In this highly interactive session, you will learn game-changing incentive tools and strategies that ignite sales rep performance and engagement, encourage behaviors that support your company's unique goals, and effect positive change within your company's culture. And you will learn how to accomplish it all with measurable metrics and a quantifiable ROI.

Jacque Busby is a human capital expert who will offer insight and solutions to elevate your sales team's performance and measurably grow the ROI of your incentive program. You will get a preview of a new technology proven to fully engage your sales team, customers, channel partners, and employees so they are an aligned team of stakeholders, innovators, and collaborators.

Speaker: Jacque Busby, Founder & Owner, Luxe Incentives | @luxe_ROI

Breakout A
Buyer Preference Profiling – People Buy from People that they Trust

You don't sell products or services... you teach people how to buy them. And, when you build trust – you increase sales. In this session you will learn easy to use skills that identify buying styles, so you can build trust easily with your sales team, and your clients and prospects.

After attending this session, you will learn how to:

• Build trust with colleagues, clients, and prospects by identifying their learning and buying styles
• Adjust your style to build rapport on one-third the time it normally takes
• Identify how words and eye movements determine your sales reps' learning styles and your clients' buying styles
• Ensure long-lasting results that will impact your professional and personal life

Speaker: Jeff Brandeis, Sales Coach, Speaker, Consultant, Brandeis Training Solutions

Breakout B
Poorly Positioned: These Questions Will Close Deals Faster

Does it seem like your deals are moving at a glacial pace? Are your salespeople poorly positioned to successfully close them? By getting involved earlier and asking strategically crafted questions, you can coach your team to be positioned to close complex deals faster. With more than 20 years of experience helping companies increase sales, Alice Heiman believes that by asking the right questions, you can achieve a shorter sales cycle, more effective selling, and more accurate forecasting. Join Alice Heiman as she shares the questions you need to ask to keep your salespeople closing deals and hitting quota.

Speaker: Alice Heiman, Founder and Chief Sales Officer, Alice Heiman, LLC | @aliceheiman

Corporate Strategy and Cold Call Scripts: Strange Bedfellows or Essential Partners?

With the rising power of private equity, executing corporate strategy has become more challenging. For many B2B companies, the obvious best path forward is tightly focused organic growth – growth designed to enter and dominate markets, not merely grow market share. It turns out that the trust-centric nature of buying B2B solutions brings a new strategic player onto the scene. This session lays out the surprising consequences of this strange coupling, along with a step-by-step approach to using it to your advantage.

Speaker: Chris Beall, CEO, ConnectAndSell | @chris8649

Selling with NOBLE PURPOSE

The words "selling" and "noble" are rarely seen together. The common business narrative is that money is the primary motivator for salespeople, and doing good by the world runs a distant second. That belief is wrong. Lisa shows audiences:

• Why purpose-driven sellers outsell quota-driven sellers
• How to name and claim your own Noble Purpose
• Techniques to increase competitive differentiation and emotional engagement with your team and customers
• Language to bring a greater sense of Noble Purpose into meetings, pitching, and planning
• How to reset yourself (and your team) when you've lost your sense of purpose

Speaker: Lisa Earle McLeod, Author of Selling with Noble Purpose

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Conference Day 2 Opening Remarks

Speaker: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Selling Power

Clearing the Blurred Lines

With more market turbulence in the business environment, growth in the use of artificial intelligence, digital selling, team selling, and generational differences in the work force, selling and managing a sales force have become increasingly complex in recent years. These changes in the business environment create strain-test relationships between buyers and sellers – particularly in B2B sales.

Consequently, the lines are blurring in the minds of buyers when distinguishing differences between competitive offerings, and sales organizations are struggling to convey the unique value they offer. In this session, Dr. Jones will share the current research on building a competitive advantage by cutting through the clutter to clear the blurred lines.

Speaker: Dr. Eli Jones, Professor of Marketing, Peggy Mays Eminent Scholar, and Dean of Mays Business School at Texas A&M University | @maysbusiness

Driving Customer Engagement at the Speed of Lightning

A sea change is taking place in today's sales and customer success environment. These teams have been converging and thrust into the spotlight as companies pursue innovative ways to boost win rates, adapt to new buyer behaviors, create value with customers, and generate top-line growth.

This interactive session explores some of the most intriguing strategies that challenge sales and customer success teams – strategies backed by exclusive research from more than 500 Salesforce sales professionals who reveal what's going on inside their companies regarding buyer intent, account-based selling, customer engagement, and quarterly business reviews.

• How are companies improving customer satisfaction, cross-sell, and retention results?
• How valuable is account-based selling in creating, advancing, and closing pipeline?
• Are sales leaders confident in their sales enablement and programs?
• What are the latest buyer intent trends for improving sales and customer success performance?
• How successful are quarterly business reviews, and what are the latest trends for improving results for sales and customer success teams?

We'll show you where organizations stand on issues your peers face and deliver exclusive insights to help you boost performance.

Speakers: Vrahram Kadkhodaian, CEO, PROLIFIQ | @vrahram
Mandy Febus, Vice President, Customer Engagement & CRM Operations, Valpak

Management Mess to Leadership Success

Leadership is hard, and every leader – no matter the age or the industry – has experienced failures. Scott Miller knows what it's like to fail. He was demoted from his first leadership position after only three weeks – and that's just one of several messy management experiences on his two-decade journey to leadership success. Scott's not alone. Everyone fails. Learn the principles and practices that can be learned and applied to build one's leadership skills and abilities.

Buckle up for a session to identify your leadership messes and turn them into successes. Join Scott Jeffrey Miller, FranklinCovey's Executive Vice President of Thought Leadership, to broaden your talents, set aside fears, and accelerate your career by tackling the most common challenges every leader faces.

During this session, you'll learn to

• Develop the most important communication skill in leadership: listening
• Inspire trust with your team, leader, and peers by declaring your intent in every conversation
• Deliver tough feedback using a framework that spurs improvement

This full-throttle session is perfect for leaders at all levels who recognize the power of owning their messes and moving to a new level of authentic leadership.

Speaker: Scott Miller, Executive Vice President, Thought Leadership, FranklinCovey

A Mind For Sales

In his engaging style, "The Sales Hunter" Mark Hunter will share from his new book, A Mind for Sales, what it takes to fully harness the most powerful sales tool you have: your mind. When you unlock your mind, you will unlock your customer's mind.

Speaker: Mark Hunter, "The Sales Hunter", Author, A Mind for Sales

Becoming the B.O.S.S. – What the Top 1% Know and Do

In this session, the author of the best-selling book The Sales Boss will provide insights into the four levers that sales executives of any company can use to quickly diagnose, plan, strategize, and implement sales growth within an organization. A sales boss is a sales leader operating at the top 1 percent of the field and delivering massive value to the company they lead. With experience that comes from being in the trenches – from building and leading numerous sales teams to advising top companies on sales strategy – Jonathan will share some real-life case studies that will ring true and help clarify the power and responsibility of the sales boss.

Speaker: Jonathan Whistman, International Best-Selling Author of The Sales Boss: The Real Secret to Hiring Training and Managing a Sales Team

Breakout A
Achieving the Greatest ROI from Your Sales Technology Investment

New sales technologies are emerging and being adopted at an unprecedented rate. All these sales tools offer numerous opportunities to transform your sales organization, but not all companies are able to achieve the expected ROI.

Understanding the value of the sales technology within specific solution areas starts with an awareness of the costs and value created. Join us as we navigate the specific areas for improvement (EG, onboarding reps faster, lead engagement, improving sales performance, upskilling your sales team, etc.), and the steps required to determine the true value of these technologies and drive profitable growth.

You will learn how to:

• Determine if the sales technology you want to adopt is really worth the investment
• Identify if it is worthwhile to keep going with your existing sales tools
• Predict how long it will take to see the return on your investment

Speaker: Dan Cilley, Co-founder, Vendor Neutral, LLC | @Vendor_Neutral

Breakout B
Storytelling Demystified: Breaking Down the Barriers to Leveraging the Power of Stories in Sales

A good story can change buyers' minds, differentiate your solution, and inspire action. So why aren't you – or your team – using this powerful selling tool? In this session, Julie Hansen demystifies the "magic" behind storytelling and breaks down the barriers to use, addressing questions like: What's the most effective type of story? How do I make it relevant for a specific customer or situation? When's the best time to tell it? You'll develop a purposeful story that will engage prospects and move deals faster through your pipeline.

Key takeaways:

• Five types of sales stories – and when to use them
• A simple model for building a purposeful sales story
• How to connect your story to a real customer
• Techniques for making your story compelling

Speaker: Julie Hansen, Founder, Keynote Speaker, Author, Performance Sales and Training | @acting4sales

Closing the Gap between Sales Enablement and Engagement

Sales enablement is building systems, storage sites, and third-party systems to produce the documentation a salesperson needs to execute the right message to the right target buyer. Sales engagement tools such as SalesLoft and Outreach require salespeople to develop their own messaging, but nobody is leveraging the sales enablement tools (HighSpot, etc.). The gap is killing productivity, burning the buyer, and creating animosity across the sales team. Chad will explore ways to close this gap and get your sales teams on the same page.

Speaker: Chad Nuss, Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, InsideOut| @chadnuss

Create Your Peak Performance Mindset

In this session, moderated by Gerhard Gschwandtner, you will learn from three mindset masters who will share science-based tools for developing a mindset that leads to peak performance.

Umar Hameed, a certified master neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) trainer, will share how NLP techniques can lead to personal breakthroughs. And Johns Hopkins University sales and marketing professor Joel LeBon will discuss his own personal experience with mindset transformation.

Moderator: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Selling Power | @gerhard20
Panelists: Umar Hameed, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Coach and Trainer | @nolimitsselling
Joël Le Bon, Marketing & Sales Professor, Executive Director, The Science of Digital Business Development Initiative, Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School | @Joel_LeBon

It Starts with You: The Only Way to Drive Sales Growth

As a sales leader, how do you talk about your salespeople when they're not around? Do you hold negative beliefs about salespeople in general? (For example: Do you believe salespeople are lazy, or largely coin-operated?)

As a leader, your beliefs about salespeople have a profound impact on how much sales growth you can achieve. But most sales leaders need to do some serious soul-searching in this area. Many sales leaders are burned out and have developed a cynical mindset about their sales team. In this session, we'll uncover your real attitude about sales, tune up your beliefs, and give you valuable tips to steer your team to greater growth and success in 2020.

Speaker: Alice Heiman, Founder and Chief Sales Officer, Alice Heiman, LLC | @aliceheiman

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