1702051200

sessions

Conference Schedule

Venue 1
  • All
  • Room 201
  • Room W525
8:45 am to 10:00 am
Thu 7 Dec

Sales Leadership’s New Priorities

Sales leaders are adapting to an unprecedented amount of uncertainty, disruption, and change. Consider just the past five years – a period which saw sales forces roiled by the abrupt onset of a global pandemic, and then an uncertain recovery with accompanying swings in demand, supply shortages, and financial markets. Compounding these challenges: an uncertain...
10:30 am to 11:20 am
Thu 7 Dec

Improving the Sales Organization’s Planning Capabilities

Without capable planning, sales forces find it difficult to allocate resources, manage performance, and implement change. Yet few sales organizations plan effectively, and planning competency is too frequently a skill deficit for many sales managers. This session considers the planning disciplines needed in sales management, and profiles sales organizations that plan effectively. These organizations are...
10:30 am to 11:20 am
Thu 7 Dec

Developing Sales Managers: New Priorities, Approaches, Resources

Sales managers are evolving just as the organizations they lead are also changing. New sales leaders need skills different than those of an earlier generation – skills essential for interpreting new data, leveraging technology, and aligning their organizations with shifting customer and market requirements. And as before, they’re also expected to assemble high-powered sales teams,...
11:30 am to 12:20 pm
Thu 7 Dec

Competing on Sales Talent

Sales organizations in many sectors are suddenly finding salesperson hiring and retention more difficult. This seems to be due in part to one of the pandemic’s enduring impacts: redrawn expectations of employers from many workers. These changing expectations are amplified by the workforce’s younger-skewing demographics, and its shrinking supply. In a sellers’ labor market, sales...
1:30 pm to 2:20 pm
Thu 7 Dec

Upgrading Sales Talent in a Challenging Labor Market

Few sales leaders could have predicted the talent management challenges facing sales organizations in 2022. As unfilled job openings soar, managers now find it necessary to rethink decades old approaches to salesperson hiring and retention. For firms attempting to upgrade the sales force’s capabilities, these challenges are especially daunting. This session explores how sales organizations...
1:30 pm to 2:20 pm
Thu 7 Dec

Managing Sales Culture

Sales organizations can sometimes have distinct cultures – unique combinations of values, traits, and characteristics that define their salespeople and approach to selling. Recent SMA research identifies strong correlation between firms with distinctive sales culture and firm sales productivity. In this session, we explore the origins and influences on sales culture, its impact on sales...
2:35 pm to 3:50 pm
Thu 7 Dec

Bold Futures in Sales Technology

Technology has profoundly changed the sales function over the past four decades, but many observers believe the most substantial technology-driven impact is currently on our doorstep, in the form of generative AI. Experience has shown that sales organizations are more likely to integrate technology into adapted sales roles, rather than replace sales workers wholesale with...
4:10 pm to 5:00 pm
Thu 7 Dec

RevOps: Best Practice, Emerging Trends

An emergent function of the subscription economy, Revenue Operations (RevOps) departments are integrating approaches to three often siloed, customer facing functions: demand generation, customer acquisition, and customer adoption and retention (or “customer success”). RevOps has two earmarks of a management fad: a rebadging of old concepts, and a commercial class of evangelical boosters, each with...
4:10 pm to 5:00 pm
Thu 7 Dec

Digitalizing Sales: Where Firms are Finding ROI

Advances in commercial software continue to impact sales organizations, who now evaluate, implement, and integrate applications in a semi-constant state of “sales stack” optimization. For salespeople, the result may be a dog’s breakfast of poorly coordinated tools. It’s likely that many organizations see disappointing returns in their sales stack technology investments; SMA’s research shows a...
5:15 pm to 6:15 pm
Thu 7 Dec

Cocktail Hour Oxford Debate

Watch in horror as four overly argumentative sales thought leaders publicly engage in a moderated, Oxford-style audience debate. Their topic: Over the next 10 years, investments in technology will yield greater productivity gains for sales organizations than will investments in talent development. Paired teams will prepare in advance both an affirmative and negative case. Then,...
9:00 am to 10:30 am
Fri 8 Dec

Transforming the Sales Force

Few functions within the firm confront as much change as sales organizations. In the past five years, they’ve adapted to a global pandemic, then an uneven return to normalcy; they’ve been whipsawed by sudden spikes in demand and product supply, uncertain labor markets and worker shortages, and the introduction of new generative AI tools, technology...
11:00 am to 11:55 am
Fri 8 Dec

Training, Coaching, and Development in Change Intensive Sales Organizations

Salespeople now work in less predictable operating environments, adapting and improvising to a greater degree than last generation’s sales force. In response, leading sales organizations are dismantling the aging conventions that have defined sales training over the past five decades. They’re moving away from classroom-centered and in-person, instructor-led training and toward learning delivery that is...
11:00 am to 11:55 am
Fri 8 Dec

Leading Agile Sales Organizations

Almost all sales organizations operate in change-intensive environments, forced to respond to shifts in competition, demand, labor markets, and buyer preferences. Firms are increasingly likely to embark on large-scale sales transformation initiatives; SMA’s research shows an average interval of just three years between such comprehensive change initiatives in large organizations. As a result, senior sales...

#SFEC in numbers

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15+

Workshops, Panels, and Keynotes

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20+

Speakers

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120+

Companies