Attract, Develop, and Export: New Truths That Sideline Conventional Wisdom

The talent landscape has changed and the stakes have never been higher for harnessing top-tier sales talent—an initiative that requires critical, ongoing input and influence from sales enablement.

For decades the traditional approach has been to pull out all the stops to retain top talent in high-production roles, creating a short-term benefit for your company without much regard for longer-term, individual development. Generational shifts in the workforce, however, compel us to confront and challenge this approach. Together we will explore how a dramatic (and selfless) change in your mindset toward people development will ultimately attract and upgrade the talent on your team, preparing your organization for success within the modern marketplace. This session will also discuss creating a culture that fosters multidiscipline learning, leading to higher levels of engagement and performance.

In today’s world, there is pressure to use digital platforms to accelerate the development of sales leaders. While there is a place for just-in-time access to content, there is still a need for social connection. Join this conversation to learn about GlaxoSmithKline’s award-winning approach to using a combination of individual and group coaching to develop leaders. Walk away with relevant ideas on how to bring this to life in your organization and how to develop sales leaders while still driving performance.

Research shows that sales training positively impacts productivity, quality, and financial results. Still sales enablement through training can be difficulty. Every minute a salesperson is away from selling costs the company money. You need fast, effective, and impactful models to develop sales training that works.

In this session, you will learn about digital and analog games that have helped increase sales trainee engagement, sales knowledge and, most importantly, sales results.

Learn how one organization converted a live classroom role-play into an online simulation, increasing sales by 12 percent at the medical device company. See an example of how a customized card game helped sales representatives embrace role-plays. Discover how a VR sales environment is tracking sales behaviors and providing critical decision-by-decision feedback in a game-based realistic situation. Learn how a board game helped pharmaceutical sales representatives learn how to conduct a “whole office call” using consultative selling techniques. Gain ideas and insights for your own sales enablement efforts.

In this session, you will learn:

• How games can help sales professionals practice their skills.
• How you can use games to teach complex systems to sales professionals.
• About the positive impact that sales simulations and games can have on a sales results.
• Design principles that make sales-based learning interventions effective.

Panel Hosted By:

Don Schmidt
Senior Director of Sales Effectiveness, Edmunds

Andrew Sizelove
Director of Marketing, Rehearsal

Take a look inside a current sales coaching program to understand what makes it successful. The mindset, buy-in, measurement, and execution all play key parts. Join Don Schmidt of Edmunds and Andrew Sizelove of Rehearsal as they discuss the anatomy of effective sales coaching.

Driving results with limited staffing and budget is something everyone can relate to. This session will explore how the team at Senior Lifestyle created a learning partner program that capitalized on seasoned sales associates to generate more bandwidth for their sales and marketing orientation program, growing both the seasoned and the newly hired sales associate. You’ll learn how you can apply these techniques to your sales team to increase capacity in training your future sales leaders.

Why does quota-setting consistently top the list of sales effectiveness hurdles? Sixty-one percent of companies say setting and managing effective quotas is one of their top three sales program challenges. Ineffective quota-setting can impact the company’s ability to hit its business plan, affect the ability of the organization to reach its goals and target compensation, lead to higher turnover, and hinder the company’s ability to attract top talent.

Solving the quota problem requires new thinking to break down the challenge into its components and apply a problem-solving approach that engages the organization. Gain insights on the quota problem from the new book Quotas!, starting with understanding your quota challenge, the story and analytics behind it, and applying Sales Design Thinking to solve it.

In this interactive presentation, Mark Donnolo, managing partner of SalesGlobe, will address the biggest quota challenges, reveal new research on quotas, share proven quota methodologies, and start you on your Sales Design Thinking journey toward finding new solutions for your organization.

Getting sales onboarding right is an ongoing challenge in many organizations. There is so much to teach, and the pressure is high to get new reps selling faster and better—not to mention the “forgetting curve” and lack of reinforcement that can weaken the effectiveness of the training you provide. Get your new hires selling faster with better results. During this session, Mike Kunkle will share an onboarding approach that has produced the following results across various companies and industries:

• Decreased new-hire sales rep ramp-up time by 23%, 34%, 47%, 52%.
• At 120 days, new reps outperformed a control group of 5-year reps by 21%.
• Increased sales per rep in the 90 days post-training by 48%, resulting in a $36.6M increase in YOY new-hire production.

To make change happen and improve performance in a sales organization, frontline sales manager partnership is critical. At the same time, even the most successful sales enablement practitioners can be perceived as the “person doing the training” in the eyes of sales leaders.

During this session, we will explore how becoming a true partner to sales managers and sales enablement practitioners requires a willingness to play many roles—strategist, coach, therapist, trainer. From one practitioner to another, learn real-life strategies and tactics you can adopt right away to empower sales managers with varying tenures, establish credibility, and “coach to coach” to drive change.

Changing technology and changing behavior mean businesses need to rethink how they go to market—and thus how they prepare their sales executives. Sharon Ruddock will present her view on how rapid changes in automation, artificial intelligence, and other areas might affect the sales enablement field. As a group, we’ll share collective, practitioner-based experiences while considering next steps for future planning, recommendations, and investment into the right technologies that will equip a modern-day sales function.

Panel Hosted By:

Don Schmidt
Senior Director of Sales Effectiveness, Edmunds

John Elsey
President and CEO, Richardson

Bill Ball
Sales Enablement, Training and Talent Leader at DISYS