sessions

Conference Schedule

Venue 1
  • All
  • Bayou City Room
  • Houston Room
  • Theater
4:20 pm to 5:10 pm
Tue 7 Jun

Developing Sales Managers

Large firms replace one out of six sales managers each year. Some “buy” management talent through outside hires, but most firms put more value on a “build” strategy for manager staffing, one that promotes salespeople into management roles. Replacing lost sales managers and developing new ones is a costly and vexing challenge for firms, and...
10:40 am to 11:25 am
Tue 7 Jun

Sales Leaders’ Misguided Obsession with Sales Content

There’s good reason for sales leaders today to be focused on sales content optimization. Leading technology solutions are touting the ability to tie content usage to sales outcomes, with direct integrations into your CRM. Content analytics have come a long way in a short time. And it’s not that understanding content’s impact on revenue is...
11:40 am to 12:30 pm
Tue 7 Jun

Improving Return on Sales Technology Investments

Sales technology is a growing and increasingly strategic investment for sales forces. But most firms fail to realize satisfactory levels of either adoption or return on their sales tech investments. This session draws upon recent Sales Management Association research on technology ROI calculation practices, and their prioritized importance, accuracy, and prevalence of use. Best practice...
8:20 am to 9:05 am
Tue 7 Jun

Enabling Salespeople in the Age of Agility

Growth-focused sales organizations are quick to embrace process and methodology. These make selling activity efficient and consistent, but can also make sales organizations poorly equipped to manage uncertainty or change. As so many firms learned over the past several years, successful sales forces must anticipate uncertainty and adapt to changing circumstances. This session describes how...
4:20 pm to 5:10 pm
Tue 7 Jun

Measuring Sales Force Activity: Research Based Insights

Selling activities – the essential tasks that comprise a salesperson job, and include things like making customer calls or generating proposals – ultimately determine salesperson productivity. But collecting sales activity data is notoriously tricky, and few firms do so effectively, leaving management with inadequate insight into root causes of performance. In this session we’ll review...
10:40 am to 11:25 am
Tue 7 Jun

Powering Up a Performance Culture in Today’s World

Execution, urgency, and accountability are often stressed in results-focused sales organizations. But managers today may be more reluctant to lean into these traditional aspects of performance culture. The Great Resignation and a highly competitive labor market have made salesperson retention more important than ever. Add in the uncertainty surrounding return-to-office transitions, and many managers may...
9:05 am to 9:40 am
Tue 7 Jun

Using Sales Incentives for Growth

Sales incentives are an essential tool for shaping salesperson priorities and directing desired salesperson behavior, but incorrectly applied incentives can undermine firm strategy and work against the sales force’s long term success. Firms often realize this when using incentives to stimulate growth. In this session, professor Michael Ahearne offers research based insights into why growth...
4:20 pm to 5:10 pm
Tue 7 Jun

AI’s Impact on the Sales Force: Separating Fact From Fiction

Developments in artificial intelligence follow in quick succession. But how can sales executives leverage this novel technology to make better decisions and build a competitive advantage? This talk will discuss what artificial intelligence actually is, how it works, and how far technology has progressed already. We will then look at best practice use cases from...
2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Tue 7 Jun

Symposium on Corporate Sales Force Effectiveness

This session advances a framework for reconsidering the corporate SFE function’s purpose and impact. It presents emerging practices and trends indicative of the sales function’s rapidly changing operating context. Session presenters make the case for establishing (or reestablishing) a new corporate charter for corporate SFE, as a way of incorporating best practices and optimal impact....
11:40 am to 12:30 pm
Tue 7 Jun

Leading Sales Teams to Embrace Change

Today’s sales forces are constantly asked to change. In fact, a majority of sales leaders have three or more change initiatives underway at any given time. Yet, most sales teams have a poor track record in making substantive progress. Why? Here, professor Ryan Mullins draws upon case studies and research findings to isolate key challenges...
9:40 am to 10:15 am
Tue 7 Jun

Kicking Sales Coaching Up a Notch: Five Things Leaders Can Do

Research shows effective sales coaching has a dramatic impact on overall performance. It raises the percentage of successful salespeople in the sales force, enhances salesperson engagement and retention, and improves overall sales productivity. But many firms do not coach salespeople enough – and when they do, do not coach well. In this presentation Factor 8...
11:40 am to 12:30 pm
Tue 7 Jun

Diagnosing Growth Bottlenecks in the Sales and Value Delivery Chain

Large firms often have multi-solution offerings, matrixed sales roles and teams, and layers of channels and go-to-market routes. When growth falters in one part of such firms, it’s often difficult to diagnose where the problem lies and how to address it. This session focuses on diagnosing growth bottlenecks and capability gaps in complex selling organizations....
10:40 am to 11:25 am
Wed 8 Jun

Modeling Selling Capacity to Unlock Sales Force Success

Sales managers don’t really manage “sales.” Sales are outcomes, determined by many different inputs and variables – the things that sales managers can in fact manage. Effective managers understand the inputs that determine success, and focus their efforts on influencing the right ones. This session provides managers with a model for identifying the inputs that...
11:40 am to 12:30 pm
Wed 8 Jun

Sales Learning and Development’s New Success Metrics

Measuring sales training effectiveness is notoriously tricky. In the past, sales trainers used activity or completion statistics as weak substitutes for training outcomes. These offer unconvincing arguments for sales training’s ROI. Today, much about sales training is changing, beginning with a shift away from classroom training. And, most firms now embrace “learning and development” as...
11:40 am to 12:30 pm
Wed 8 Jun

Emerging Manager Competencies in the Effective Sales Force

Sales manager competencies are evolving. Newly important competencies are likely to support organizational adaptiveness; they embrace broad ideas of culture and leadership, but also hard skills relevant to first-line sales managers. These emerging competencies emphasize new decision-making approaches, process orientation, fluency with technology, change leadership, and analytical acumen. In fast-moving organizations, these skills help leaders...
10:40 am to 11:25 am
Wed 8 Jun

Sales Performance Management (SPM) Software – New Research On How Customers View Their SPM Investments

Sales Performance Management (SPM) is a fast-growing technology that tackles salesperson assignments and territories, quota management, incentive compensation administration, and sales and incentive performance reporting. (Notable providers are Xactly, Varicent, SAP, Oracle, and Anaplan. SPM promises management greater control, richer insight, and faster decision making. But SPM solutions are sometimes marketed with vague descriptions, confusing jargon,...
9:30 am to 10:15 am
Wed 8 Jun

Optimizing Sales Force Deployment Decisions

Sales management – especially in larger firms – requires making complicated resource allocation decisions. Changes in sales force deployment, sales jobs, assignments, quotas, and incentives can create a knot of complexity. Untangling this knot offers big rewards for sales organizations, in the form of increased productivity, broader distributions of salesperson success, and improvements in firm...
9:30 am to 10:15 am
Wed 8 Jun

Unlocking Academic Sales Centers’ Partnership Potential: What Sales Leaders Need to Know

Many sales leaders aren’t familiar with academic sales centers. They’ve been growing quickly on college campuses worldwide, where they educate business students on professional selling, and prepare graduates to succeed in entry level sales careers. A few elite level academic sales centers are also educating managers in their MBA and executive education offerings, contributing to...
8:50 am to 9:30 am
Wed 8 Jun

The Four Salesmen of the Apocalypse: The Armageddon In Store For Your Sales Organization

In the Book of Revelation, four horsemen (Death, Famine, War, and Conquest) open a can of world-ending whoop ass before the last judgment. Four forces are similarly positioned as harbingers of the sales force’s demise. They are automation, artificial intelligence, global pandemics, and disintermediation. Pundits would have us believe these forces will end the sales...

#SFPC in numbers

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25+

Workshops, Panels, and Keynotes

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35+

Speakers

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200+

Companies