Agenda

The #1 Reason Sellers Don't Perform Under Pressure (In Spite of $85B Spent on Tools & Training)

Organizations are investing more than ever in sales tools and training…yet performance under pressure continues to fall short in the moments that matter most. Why? Because when stakes are high, sellers don't rise to the level of their knowledge… they fall to the level of their habits.

This keynote challenges the traditional approach to sales enablement by shifting the focus from information to behavior. Grounded in neuroscience, it unpacks how pressure impacts the brain, why even top performers default to ineffective patterns, and what it really takes to build habits that hold up in real-world selling environments.

Attendees will walk away with a new understanding of how to align training with how the brain actually learns, retains, and performs–along with practical strategies to build repeatable, high-impact behaviors that show up when it counts most. Because in today's high-pressure sales landscape, performance isn't about what your team knows. It's about what they've trained to do automatically.

Speaker: Jeff Bloomfield, Founder and Chairman, Braintrust

Fireside Chat: Navigating Change – AI and the Future of Business

Join Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, for a dynamic fireside chat at the AI Sales Summit. During the this session we will explore:

• The Evolving Business Landscape: AI isn't just a technology; it's the foundation for future innovation. Bill will help you understand the key challenges sales leaders face today amidst rapid technological change.
• Strategic AI Investments: AI's promise lies in its ability to make the complex simple and the mundane extraordinary. Learn how to prioritize AI investments to maximize business impact.
• AI Development Journey: We need to embrace AI as a partner that empowers human capability, not as a replacement for it. Gain insights into the milestones reached and future advancements over the next three years.
• Transformation with ServiceNow's AI Platform: In a world where everything is connected, AI is the key to unlocking the potential of that connectivity. Discover how ServiceNow is reshaping business operations through AI.
• Preparing for the Future: The future belongs to those who can harness the power of AI to drive meaningful change in their organizations. Discover practical steps you can take now for sustainable success.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn from one of the industry's most influential voices!

Moderator: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Selling Power
Speaker: Bill McDermott, Chairman and CEO, ServiceNow

The New Frontier of Sales: Rewiring the Sales Engine with AI

Most organizations are layering AI onto broken processes and seeing limited impact. The real opportunity lies in "rewiring" the sales engine clean-sheeting workflows from lead generation to deal execution and redesigning how humans and AI agents work together.

This session introduces a practical framework to move from incremental AI adoption to full sales transformation, showing how companies can unlock meaningful growth, productivity, and speed by rebuilding not just digitizing their commercial processes.

Speaker: Jay Kaza, Senior Expert-Associate Partner, McKinsey & Company

Create Moments, Not Just Milestones: The Missing Link in Your Sales Methodology

Most sales teams have a process. Stages. Exit criteria. Required actions.

But evidence from 150,000 B2B buyer decisions makes one thing clear: Success doesn't come from running a process-compliant engagement. You must create a differentiated buyer experience.

Too many sales methodologies are built to measure seller progress, not shape buyer decisions. They help teams hit milestones, but they do far less to create the experiences that win deals.

Milestones measure progress. Moments create it.

In this session with Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer at Corporate Visions, you'll see why today's sales methodology needs to do both: give sellers a clear process to follow and equip them to create the high-impact moments that influence how buyers evaluate, prioritize, and justify change.

You'll learn how to:

• Diagnose where your current sales process tracks activity but fails to create meaningful buyer progress
• Redesign milestones around the moments that differentiate your buying experience and win more deals
• Build a sales methodology that's both process-compliant and experience-driven, so your team can execute it consistently at scale

Speaker: Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions

The Trust Dividend: How Great Sales Leaders Win in the Age of AI

Sales leadership has never been more complex. AI-empowered buyers arrive informed and skeptical. Sellers must create trust and deliver value in every conversation and interaction. The old management playbook is obsolete. In this session, Helen Fanucci, bestselling author of Love Your Team and veteran sales leader from Microsoft, Apple, and IBM, unpacks the three core principles of modern sales leadership required for sustainable results: building trust-based teams, coaching sellers to win in high-stakes buying environments, and harnessing AI intentionally to grow revenue and competitive advantage.

Speaker: Helen Fanucci, Sales Performance Expert and Best-Selling Author of Love Your Team

The Human Edge: From Managing People to Shaping Destinies

In the age of AI, your most powerful competitive advantage isn't your tech stack – it's you. Tricia Benn, CEO of C-Suite Network, delivers a keynote that cuts to the heart of modern sales leadership: the courage to lead with empathy, vulnerability, and authentic presence at scale. From building psychological safety across distributed teams to having the courageous conversations that transform culture, Tricia reveals why the leaders who inspire lasting loyalty are those who show up fully human – not just fully prepared. Leave ready to stop managing people and start shaping destinies.

Speaker: Tricia Benn, CEO, The C-Suite Network

The 10x Sales Leader: AI, Data & Automation as Force Multipliers

The best sales leaders are no longer just motivators – they're systems builders. In this high-impact session, Chris reveals how AI, data, and automation are transforming every pillar of sales leadership: hiring for evidence over charisma, coaching at scale without losing meaning, eliminating junk work so leaders can focus on strategy, and building a culture where technology develops people rather than polices them. With real-world examples and tools you can use immediately, you'll leave with a clear blueprint for becoming the kind of leader who doesn't just manage the future – but builds it.

Speaker: Chris Courneen, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Human Resources, MS International

The AI-Augmented Sales Team: Tactics to Personalize, Prioritize, and Execute at Scale

Only about 5% of your addressable market is in-market at any given time.

When buyers are in-market, they don't move quietly. They leave signals everywhere. They hire. They research. They read reviews. They visit your website. They evaluate your competitors.

Most go-to-market teams don't have a unified way to capture those signals, score them, and turn them into motion in real time. This is a problem of activation failure.

Join ZoomInfo's Jonathan Gardner, Senior Director of Sales (R&G), for a fast, tactical 15-minute session on how AI-augmented sales teams are closing the activation gap, and what you can put into practice immediately.

You'll discover:

• How to capture and act on buyer signals in real time
• What AI-powered personalization and prioritization actually looks like in practice
• How to dismantle complexity and give your sellers one place to execute

Speaker: Jonathan Gardner, Senior Director of Sales (R&G), ZoomInfo

AI Doesn't Fix Broken Sales Behavior

Artificial intelligence is transforming the sales landscape, but too many organizations are discovering a costly truth: AI doesn't fix broken sales behavior.

When discovery is weak, qualification is inconsistent, coaching is irregular, and accountability is missing, investing in AI tools just amplifies the problem. In this session, Jeff Seeley, CEO of Carew International, challenges sales leaders to confront the real reason results aren't changing despite significant technology investments.

Speaker: Jeff Seeley, CEO, Carew International

Why CROs Fail

The CRO role has the shortest tenure in the C-suite – 18 months on average, with roughly 70% failing within two years. The conventional explanation is that companies hire the wrong person. The real answer is harder: companies aren't built for CROs to succeed, and most CROs aren't built for the job they actually accepted. In this session, Warren Zenna – Founder of The CRO Collective and advisor to hundreds of CROs over the past six years – breaks down the four risk categories that predict CRO failure: Role Risk, Organizational Risk, Execution Risk, and Future Risk. Through real-world case studies, he'll show how misaligned role definitions, organizational politics, inherited pipeline fiction, and outdated playbooks systematically destroy CRO tenures – regardless of talent.

But Warren doesn't stop at the environment. He'll address the uncomfortable truth head-on: most CROs came up through sales leadership and were never given the competency map for what the role actually demands – systems thinking, cross-functional architecture, operating model design, and board-level strategic communication. They default to running a function instead of building a system. And then everyone calls it a "bad hire" when it was actually a development problem.

You'll leave with the Risk Reduction Framework – four diagnostic questions to evaluate any CRO role – and a clear picture of the Dual Solution: the environment the company must build, and the competencies the CRO must develop. Plus live Q&A where Warren will workshop real situations from the audience.

This isn't a motivational talk. It's a mirror – and a blueprint.

Speaker: Warren Zenna, Founder and CEO, The CRO Collective

Sales Transformation by Self Transformation

Sales doesn't transform when tactics change–it transforms when people do. In this powerful session, Todd Duncan reveals how your identity, habits, and beliefs drive your income more than any script ever will. Shift who you are, and you'll multiply what you earn, how you lead, and the legacy you leave.

Speaker: Todd Duncan, Bestselling Author & Co-Founder, FUEL !nc.

Fireside Chat: AI Trains Knowledge. We Hone Instinct: The Human Edge in Sales Performance

Virtual Instinct, a Virtual Sales Practice agency, joins Selling Power for a fireside chat on the evolving role of AI in sales performance. AI avatar platforms are rapidly reshaping the market—delivering scale, repetition, and data-driven feedback to reinforce knowledge and consistency. That narrative is clear: practice more, forget less, improve faster.

Virtual Instinct defines a different lane. We are a creative firm with consultative expertise that designs realistic sales role-play environments—combining professional actors and avatars—to develop the human side of performance. We provide the stage where salespeople practice and perform, refining the human intuition that determines outcomes in real conversations.

AI trains the literal—what to say. We train the instinct—when to say it, how it lands, and whether it moves the moment forward. This conversation is designed for leaders navigating AI adoption. The question is not whether to use AI—it's whether your team is developing the human instincts that technology cannot replace.

Moderator: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Selling Power
Speaker: Michael Eaton, Founder and CEO, Virtual Instinct, Inc.

Lead in Ways That Make Others Want to Follow

For 50 years Jim Cathcart has led and trained others to lead organizations from 10 members to 356,000 members. His specialty is Ground-Level Leadership, doing what needs to be done even when you don't feel like it. Jim's belief is that if you cannot lead yourself, you should not be leading others. All leadership begins with self-leadership. Jim is author of 28 books, and in the Sales & Marketing Hall of Fame.

You will learn:

• How to focus people on your Purpose and your Process.
• How to truly Motivate people who might not want to be motivated.
• How to gain adoption of new technology, like A.I. when many resist the change.
• How to approach Leadership from a higher level with greater results even at ground level.

Speaker: Jim Cathcart, CSP, CPAE

How to Do More with Less: Future-Proofing in the Age of AI

AI SDRs and go-to-market engineers are already replacing parts of the sales function. The question isn't whether your team will be affected; it's whether they'll be ready. In this session, Sharon Gai (Keynote Speaker and author of How to Do More with Less Using AI) introduces her Hive Structure framework to help sales leaders separate the "bee tasks" that AI should own from the "beekeeper tasks" where humans 100x their impact. Walk away with a practical playbook for restructuring your sales team to thrive alongside AI, not get eliminated by it.

Speaker: Sharon Gai, CEO, Culture Fluid