Hundreds of leaders in sales and sales management are headed to the 9th annual AA-ISP Leadership Summit in downtown Chicago this month.
As usual, the AA-ISP has put together an impressive lineup of educational events, including 65 sales and leadership sessions, 48 tactical workshops and 4 pre-event certification workshops. There’s plenty to choose from, so where should you focus?
That depends on your role. We put together a quick list of our top ten events for sales management and sales VPs to check out at the conference. Take a look:
10 sessions at the Leadership Summit for sales management and VPs
1. Sales Technology – Past, Present, Future
- For: VP of Sales
- Featuring: Velocify Vice President of Marketing Matt Reid
- Location: Sheraton Ballroom — Level 4
- Date & Time: April 18 at 1:30 p.m.
- Description: “In this session, we’ll reveal the results of a new study conducted jointly by Velocify and AA-ISP. We’ll take a look at the evolution of technology over the past decade and how it [has] influenced sales communication trends of today. We’ll explore what the sales tech stack looks like in most sales organizations, [including] planned investments in the near future. And finally, we’ll theorize what inside sales technology might look like in the next five to 10 years.”
2. Where Should We Focus to Drive More Revenue
- For: VP of Sales, Sales Management
- Featuring: Factor 8 Sales Training founder and President Lauren Bailey
- Location: TBD
- Date & Time: April 18 at 2 p.m.
- Description: “Is it me or is it getting noisy out there? Each year, there’s a new buzz around the latest sales / marketing trend. Listen, it’s not that these ideas are bad or that they can’t apply to us, but the honest scoop is that so many of them don’t apply to the majority of us — Inside sales is a different sport than field sales, right? And which one should we focus on? Are we ready for this new idea?”
3. Call Your Shot: Predicting Performance Through Coaching
- For: Sales Management
- Featuring: Xvoyant CEO Robert B. Jeppsen
- Location: Sheraton Ballroom — Level 4
- Date & Time: April 19 at 10:45 a.m.
- Description: “As organizations chase double-digit growth with single-digit (or flat) headcount increases, the sales world is turning to coaching. Coaching is the catalyst for sales performance and salesperson engagement and retention. However, very few people agree on what coaching really is. Join this session for a best-practice-driven blueprint of coaching success and tactics sales leaders and sales executives alike can use immediately to make the development of people and teams their most defensible competitive advantage.”
4. Keynote Speaker: Building a World-Class Inside Sales Team from the Ground Up
- For: VP of Sales, Sales Management
- Featuring: Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Inside Sales Debbie Dunnam
- Location: Sheraton Ballroom — Level 4
- Date & Time: April 19 at 11:15 a.m.
- Description: “During the final keynote presentation, Debbie Dunnam, the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Inside Sales team, will provide insight into how Microsoft is transforming and digitizing the sales experience for customers. The company’s inside sales organization is leveraging leading-edge technology, world-class infrastructure, and a highly trained specialist sales force to enable them to drive business success in an era of digital transformation.”
5. Workshop: Build Your Own Call Coaching Scorecard
- For: Sales Management
- Featuring: ExecVision founder and CEO Steve Richard
- Location: Huron — Level 2
- Date & Time: April 19 at 1 p.m.
- Description: “You will walk away from this workshop with a call coaching scorecard – objective criteria for evaluating what a ‘good’ call is in your company. Steve will share best practices learned from over 100 companies and facilitate small-group working sessions. If you’ve been meaning to put in place a call review sheet forever or want to refine the one you have, this is your session. Come prepared with your current call evaluation sheet if you have one (though not necessary).”
6. IDEA EXCHANGE: Training & Development Best Practices & Tips
- For: Sales Management
- Featuring: Factor 8 Sales Training founder and President Lauren Bailey, Experien SVP of Growth Channel Larry Sheffield, Lessonly Co-Founder and CEO Max Yoder, and SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter
- Location: Superior B — Level 2
- Date & Time: April 19 at 2:15 p.m.
- Description: “Consistently reported as a top challenge for inside sales leaders and reps, it’s time to get serious about training your teams. So what should be trained? How do we get started when we have limited resources? What are the advantages of building or buying? And what does good training look like? Come pose questions to your peers and experts during this interactive panel.”
7. Account-Based Everything: Social Selling + ABSD = Increased Deal Velocity
- For: VP of Sales
Featuring: Sales for Life CEO Jamie Shanks & #SocialSelling strategist Jill Rowley - Location: Mississippi — Level 2
- Date & Time: April 19 at 4:15 p.m.
- Description: “In this 45-minute session, Jamie Shanks, CEO of Sales for Life, and #SocialSelling Strategist, Jill Rowley, will show you the tactics that hundreds of the leading inside sales departments are leveraging with social selling + ABM. For these companies, it’s ‘account-based everything.’ This session is all tactics, no theory, as Sales for Life has trained 75,000 sales professionals, including AA-ISP member companies like Thomson Reuters, ServiceNow, Tibco, ADP, Oracle, Intel and many more.”
8. Motivating Your Sales Staff to Drive Engagement and Performance
- For: VP of Sales, Sales Management
- Featuring: ZipRecruiter SVP of Sales Kevin Gaither & ZipRecruiter Senior Director of Inside Sales Jason Blais
- Location: Arkansas — Level 2
- Date & Time: April 20 at 8:30 a.m.
- Description: “As in the book ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ in today’s sales environments, we’ll always be moving our sales staff’s cheese as we optimize our products and services or our processes. To be successful, though, sales leaders must be effective at motivating their staff to come in every day and put in the effort to keep finding their cheese and do it in a way where they still feel valued, engaged and rewarded.”
9. How the Best Inside Sales Teams Use KPIs (New Research)
- For: VP of Sales, Sales Management
Featuring: LevelEleven CEO Bob Marsh - Location: Huron — Level 2
- Date & Time: April 20 at 10 a.m.
- Description: “LevelEleven’s research team analyzed 3,000+ sales KPIs being used by 800+ sales teams to find out which leading indicators sales managers should focus on. Leaders will walk away with an understanding of the most common KPIs used by the top inside sales teams, as well as how those differ with other selling roles. You will leave this session with a clear understanding of why a KPI-based approach to managing your sales team is important, a roadmap of how to define your own KPIs, and how to get them in place quickly.”
10. Is Customer Experience the Key for More Revenue?
- For: VP of Sales
Featuring: ServiceSource SVP Selling & Operations Services Grant Clarke - Location: Mississippi — Level 2
- Date & Time: April 20 at 11 a.m.
- Description: “As customers and consumers have greater access to more options in everything from technology to retail goods, the main differentiator becomes their experience. What we see happening is customers are no longer buying a product or service. They’re buying to have the best experience, or the outcome. Leaders in this space must wrap their heads and business models around new and different outcomes desired by customers of the future – new consumption types, new key performance indicators and new success metrics. This means that customer experience teams are coming to center stage and up-sell / cross-sell opportunities regularly have higher revenue potential than the initial sale.”
Are you heading to the Leadership Summit? Grab a free copy of the 2017 Sales KPI Report and stop by our booth in the Technology Expo Hall to tell us what you think!
