About
Gerhard Gschwandtner is the founder and CEO of Selling Power, a media company that produces the award-winning Selling Power magazine and Selling Power TV, a daily video interview series on sales success. He developed and hosts the Sales 3.0 Conference, which helps sales leaders integrate sales technologies into their sales organizations to create improved sales effectiveness and greater customer value. Over the course of three decades, he has interviewed some of the most successful leaders and experts in sales, business, sports, entertainment, and politics, including Mary Kay Ash, Marc Benioff, Michael Dell, George Foreman, Larry Ellison, Richard Branson, Jay Leno, Meg Whitman, and many more. Gerhard has studied the lives of hundreds of peak performers and worked with world-leading coaches and psychologists to create the unique, new Peak Performance Mindset training program. He is the author of 17 books on the subject of sales, management, and motivation and received the Sales & Marketing Executives International, Inc. 2010 Ambassador of Free Enterprise Award.
Sessions
FIRESIDE CHAT
MODERATOR
Day 1 · Wednesday, September 2, 2026
12:30 pm - 1:00 pm ET
Humanizing Selling in an AI World
As AI reshapes every stage of the buying journey, one skill is emerging as the ultimate differentiator: your humanity. Linda Richardson, the pioneer of consultative selling and founder of Richardson, joins Gerhard Gschwandtner for a fireside chat on her provocative new book, Humanizing Selling in an AI World. Linda introduces the Empathy-Assertiveness Framework and the concept of your "Silent Voice" – the emotional intelligence AI can't replicate. Backed by hard data showing empathy-trained sales teams outsell peers by double digits, this conversation reveals why the salespeople who thrive alongside AI will be the ones who lead with heart, not just algorithms.
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FIRESIDE CHAT
MODERATOR
Day 1 · Wednesday, September 2, 2026
1:10 pm - 1:40 pm ET
Building the Agentic Sales Organization
Kris Billmaier, EVP & GM of Agentforce Sales at Salesforce, once corrected an interviewer's guess that reps waste 30-40% of their time on non-selling work – the real number, he said, is 60%. In this fireside chat, Kris joins Gerhard Gschwandtner to unpack what happens when that time comes back: agentified pipelines, headless CRM, and reps freed to do what only humans can. From his path as a Notre Dame team captain to leading Salesforce's largest cloud, Kris shares candid, personal insight into where AI ends and human judgment begins — and what the sales director role looks like five years from now.
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FIRESIDE CHAT
MODERATOR
Day 1 · Wednesday, September 2, 2026
3:40 pm - 4:10 pm ET
When Beliefs Bend Reality: A Fireside Chat with Shawn Achor
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FIRESIDE CHAT
MODERATOR
Day 2 · Thursday, September 3, 2026
1:00 pm - 1:30 pm ET
Everyone Bought the Same AI. Why Only Some Are Growing.
Before writing Growth IQ, Tiffani Bova spent years as a Gartner analyst and then as Salesforce's growth and innovation evangelist, watching companies copy one another's playbooks – and watching most of them fail. Her conclusion: growth tactics don't fail because they're wrong. They fail because they're deployed in the wrong sequence and the wrong context. The same move that transforms one company destroys another.
In this fireside chat, Tiffani explains why most AI sales deployments underperform: teams buy the tool everyone else bought, drop it into a broken process, and skip the sequencing question entirely. She unpacks what sequencing means when the thing you're deploying is an agent rather than a campaign, and how to tell whether a process is ready to be automated before you automate it. The uncomfortable premise: your AI isn't underperforming. Your order of operations is.
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In this fireside chat, Tiffani explains why most AI sales deployments underperform: teams buy the tool everyone else bought, drop it into a broken process, and skip the sequencing question entirely. She unpacks what sequencing means when the thing you're deploying is an agent rather than a campaign, and how to tell whether a process is ready to be automated before you automate it. The uncomfortable premise: your AI isn't underperforming. Your order of operations is.