Conference Program

Critical Inflection Point: Confronting Changing Sales Enablement Realities That Will Shape the Future of our Profession

How many of you have worked months, quarters, or even years with incredibly smart learning professionals to design highly impactful learning programs? You crossed every T and dotted every I. You thoroughly researched and did discovery; you designed thoughtfully; yet your program just didn’t deliver the sustained behavior change or ROI you or your sales leaders had hoped for.

We’ve all been there. This begs the question: Why?

Why do so many sales enablement initiatives led by qualified and talented people not work the way we designed them to? This is precisely what we are going to unpack.

In this session we will discuss two case studies. Each began with the same requirements from the sales organization. Each happened at LinkedIn. And each yielded radically different outcomes.

We will begin with a case study of a time when we should have gotten this right. We had powerful supporting tailwinds, a talented cross-functional team, and a belief that we had what we needed for a successful launch of our program. Yet we were far from successful. So, what went wrong? We discovered what we now refer to as the four failure points that can derail even the best ideas and programs. Understanding these failure points is critical because only once you know them can you avoid them. And when avoided, we can elevate the sales enablement industry and create meaningful value with the sales organizations we support.

You will leave this session with new ideas to consider when launching significant and important programs within your company and insights into the potential sea change occurring in our profession.

By attending this session, you will be able to:

• Identify your potential failure points well in advance of having them derail your work and diminish your results.
• Understand why the results of your programs are tied to the diversity of your team.
• Create your own blueprint for widespread organizational behavior change that sticks.

Featuring Keynotes: Ben Putterman and Kira Pollard-Lipkis

In multiple B2B research studies during the past few years, buyers have reported that they:
• Don’t trust salespeople
• Don’t believe sellers understand them or their businesses
• Do more and more of their own research and avoid sellers when they can
• Aren’t getting the insights they want from sellers
• Don’t think sellers communicate well with their senior executives
• Have grown weary of stereotypical seller behavior

Now more than ever, buyers don’t want to feel “sold to.” Yet, sellers still have quotas and a job to do. That conundrum has been made even more complicated by a global pandemic, which has tightened budgets, increased the fear of making bad decisions or wasting investments, and forced us into selling virtually.

Fortunately, there is a path forward. It’s time to shift to a buyer-centric selling system that prepares reps to deal with modern buyers to “help them buy” while earning their respect and trust and still being able to meet company quotas and succeed in sales.

During this session, find out how to get your sales force moving in this direction and selling in a new buyer-centric way.

For many go-to-market leaders, sales content ownership is a major friction point between marketing and sales teams. To marketing employees, the branded content they spend time and resources creating becomes a shadow of its original self once it’s in the sales team’s hands. Meanwhile, sales employees deem themselves best equipped to build content with stories that resonate with customers, viewing content as something to be adjusted based upon what will entice a customer to make a purchase. The result? Content sprawl, multiple repositories, inconsistent messaging, and a fractured relationship between sales and marketing departments. The reality is that everyone—sales, marketing, and sales enablement—owns content.

In this session, the speaker will break down why it takes a village to build an adaptable and resonant messaging framework and content production strategy. The most successful revenue-generating teams regularly collaborate and iterate on content. You’ll be encouraged to rethink the content production process and how it can support sellers in a better way.

It has been said before that the difference between a formal enablement team and “random acts of enablement” is a charter. But what if you don’t have one? What if your charter is out of date?

You will see, from first-hand experience, how an enablement leader built charters and kept them updated and aligned with the revenue organization’s goals and objectives. You will hear about the theories behind a formal charter and the details of what that means in your organization, what worked, and what didn’t work. And if you are just starting out, you will walk away with a template that you can use to get start maturing your enablement team.

During this session you will learn the methods and practices of establishing and socializing a charter that helps you and your team stay aligned with making a big revenue impact.

Sales training and enablement professionals are under increasing pressure to improve the productivity of their sales teams. From the moment new reps are hired, enablement teams are tasked with training them on the skills and knowledge needed to succeed. But when these programs get deployed, it’s not always easy to quantify if or how those programs are truly working.

To close skill gaps and ensure reps stay on track, enablement teams need to understand how their programs are connecting back to rep performance and overall company revenue goals.

Join us for a conversation around how sales enablement and training leaders can use data to measure the effectiveness of their programs and help their reps crush quota. This panel discussion will cover:

• Identifying the right metrics and KPIs for your sales training and enablement
• The critical partnership between sales enablement and sales leadership
• How to use data to measure, scale and improve sales enablement programs

Moderated by: Kimberly McAvoy, Association for Talent Development (ATD)
Panelists: Greg Keshian, Brainshark; Jason Gwilliam, Abbott Structural Heart; Stacey Unck, Lucid

Frontline sales managers have long been discussed as a force multiplier for growth. To drive performance in a sales organization, the partnership between sales managers and sales enablement is critical. However, even the most respected sales enablement practitioners can be perceived as “the person doing the training” in the eyes of sales leaders, unable to connect enablement activities to business outcomes. To become a true partner to sales managers, sales enablement practitioners must take play many roles—data-driven strategist, coach, and, of course, trainer. From one practitioner to another, learn real-life strategies and tactics that you can adopt right away to drive outcomes in partnership with your sales managers.

Given the circumstances over the past several months, it’s evident that we need virtual training. Virtual training can be highly effective. When executed well, it’s one of the best ways to arm your team with the skills they need to succeed in the modern business world. The question, of course, is how can companies execute it well?

Modern virtual training can’t simply be a repurposing of traditional sales training once delivered in a classroom; companies must embrace technology and deploy the right training in the right way to achieve ROI.

Join experienced sales training and enablement leader Doug Wyatt as he discusses what it takes to:

• Choose the right sales training topics strategically.
• Produce virtual training content that draws and keeps the attention of busy salespeople.
• Support and reinforce the learning process to ensure results.

When conducting sales training, organizations expect to increase sales performance and enhance the business with more revenue. But how training has been evaluated for many years is by measuring completion metrics. The idea of understanding who viewed a piece of content or who completed a module has left the business and managers with minimal access to data on where to coach their sales reps.

You know training is necessary for your sales team’s success. But how do you quickly get high-quality, engaging training into the hands of your salespeople? Turn to Rise, the all-in-one online training system sales teams love. It makes online training easy to create, enjoyable to take, and simple to manage. In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Easily create engaging online sales training, product guides, and more.

• Put mobile-friendly sales training content into the hands of your teams so they always have the information they need to win the deal.

• Use Rise to track and analyze the effectiveness of your sales training content.

Consultants like Deloitte and McKinsey can charge high prices for services as their business agreements link to tangible results. They use repeatable maturity models and frameworks that are fixed enough to be repeatable but flexible enough to fit unique clients and projects. Too often, organizations underinvest in enablement, driving a high-rep ratio for the role. In these situations, its crucial to institute a programmatic approach to manage strategic one-to-many initiatives and evaluate their effect on the business.

• How to set expectations that your Enablement function is a strategic partner
• How to implement the ADDIE model for project managing business critical initiatives
• How to tell a story with data by evaluating impact with the Kirkpatrick model

As the buying and selling landscape shifts quickly, sales teams need to be equipped to respond with an agile set of selling skills. Enabling teams with these skills requires a balanced journey that favors speed and effectiveness. This session will focus on how to create an agile performance journey that uses data to motivate and inform sellers in real-time about their skill development, coaching and their next-best step in the sales pursuit.

There is a lot of talk across businesses of all sizes today about aligning sales. But what does it look like when sales is NOT aligned? Low conversion rates. Excessive time spent on unused content. Fragmented customer’s view of the business. A drop off in sales after the “innovator” and “early adopter” phases.

There are multiple input streams that feed a thriving sales process. However, you often see those teams scattered across various departments. Without those streams working together there will always be a disconnect. In this session you will learn how Sales Enablement can take a pivotal role in guiding the alignment of those organizational streams into a single fluid selling motion.

Sales enablement is often defined as “salesperson enablement”—or, how we help our salespeople to execute day-to-day responsibilities. Astute organizations realize that just as important, if not more, is the notion of Sales Manager Enablement. This includes providing frontline managers with the tools, training, and technology they need to elevate the skills and stature of their sales team and transform all salespeople from order-takers to value-makers—for the organization and customers.

This session will share strategies to:

• Cultivate an environment where frontline managers are viewed as extensions of the Sales Enablement organization.
• Overcome the time compression issue to save managers from constant drowning and reacting to daily fires.
• Elevate mindset from an ad-hoc mode to a more strategic and programmatic approach.

Moderated by: Kimberly McAvoy, Association for Talent Development (ATD)
Panelists: David Mattson, Sandler Training; Michelle Kanan, Amazon; Andrew Quinn, Hubspot

Did you know that only 12 percent of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job at onboarding new employees (Gallup)? Additionally, those who had a negative onboarding experience are twice as likely to seek another opportunity soon.

A strong onboarding program can decrease turnover and increase productivity. While that perspective comes from onboarding sellers, the ideas you’ll leave with will work in any onboarding program to improve the satisfaction and productivity of new team members.

During this session you’ll learn about:
• Measuring success
• Aligning with company goals and values
• Incorporating self-learning opportunities
• Engaging leadership and peers to increase new hire proficiency and productivity
• Focusing on people and strategy rather than administration

Don’t be concerned about doing too much during onboarding; be concerned with doing too little.

Join other like-minded attendees to converse about the sales enablement topic most relevant to your work. Choose from one of five speaker-hosted events and lend your perspective to the discussion. You will have the chance to regroup on this same topic in part 2 and focus more on practical ways to advance the work you are doing in your practice. We strongly recommend that attendees continue with the same speaker for part 1 and part 2.

In 2020 and beyond, now is the time for sales enablement practitioners to consider how diversity initiatives can add greater dimension and impact to their sales talent strategies.

More diverse teams bring a broader range of perspectives to the table—both internally and externally.
When you unleash a diverse sales team into the equally diverse marketplace, the collective impact of these differing backgrounds, cultures and viewpoints all working together to evangelize your company’s brand and solutions is nothing short of exciting.

The keys to leveraging diversity as a strategy within your sales enablement practice are authenticity and long-term commitment. As you lean into both, you will emerge as a role model among your colleagues on how to do this well, while strengthening your company’s competitive advantage in the marketplace.

By attending this session, you will be able to:

• Identify and define the various dimensions of diversity that all sales practitioners should know.
• Learn how to leverage the diversity of your team to optimize your sales success.
• Understand best practices of building a diverse sales team.
• Learn how to adapt the value proposition of your product or service for your diverse prospective clients.

Building off part 1’s engaging discussion, you are invited to regroup with the SELL speaker host previously selected and colleagues with a targeted focus on application. As you prepare to return to your organization, this interactive exchange will support your efforts to lead from within, leveraging new insights and plans to elevate your sales enablement practice. Due to capacity limits, we strongly recommend that attendees continue with the same speaker for part 1 and part 2.

In this session, Mike McNary, vice president of acquisition at Mimeo, will touch on his more than 18 years of experience, offering strategic and tactical advice based about what he’s learned throughout his career and provide ideas that can support you and your team in today’s landscape.

Takeaways from the session will include:

• Proven tactics to succeed as a sales professional
• Ways Mike supports sales enablement in his current role
• Tools sales enablement professionals can use today

Most salespeople were thrust into suddenly selling and interacting with clients primarily virtually. How does it compare to in-person selling? Are there best practices or mistakes to avoid?

While the fundamentals of effective selling are consistent, there are some missteps that sales professionals can unknowingly take that may hurt your chances of progressing your opportunities.

In this session you will learn the three traps of selling virtually so you can sidestep them and confidently sell in this new reality.

Learn how to build and implement a world-class sales enablement program and empower your sales team. This presentation will walk you through what high-performing sales leaders are doing with their sales enablement programs to empower their teams to win more often.

• How high-performing sales leaders are building their sales enablement programs
• Why sales enablement programs are critical to the success of your sales team
• Vital characteristics of building a powerful sales enablement program

3D Immersive simulations are emerging as powerful tools to accelerate sales success. What was recently science fiction is now becoming mainstream to solve everyday sales training and development challenges.

Many common issues facing sales organizations -- hiring and onboarding, launching new products and solutions, continuous performance and skill improvement – can be addressed by adding simulations to your sales training stack. Learn how to tap the potential of simulations to improve your sales performance.

In this session, you will learn:

1. How accessible and practical sales simulations can be (they are a popular topic, but no one knows how to use them; we will unravel the mystery and mystique)

2. The broad range of sales-organization issues that can be addressed through use of sales training simulations

How simulations can help you adapt and pivot to meet your goals for 2020 and prepare for 2021

Looking to improve your sales team's performance and revenues? There's hard data about the most important qualities needed in a sales professional to guarantee success. This microsession presents data-driven information on the most important components of coachability.

1. The four components of coachability
2. The attitudes that block coaching
3. Actionable solutions to improve the quality of your coaching.

This microsession is with SalesFuel CEO C. Lee Smith, recognized as one of the nation's Leading Sales Consultants by Selling Power and the author of "Hire Smarter, Sell More!" and "SalesCred."

Buyers expect sellers to know their business and consistently bring relevant ideas for improving it. Remarkably, HALF of U.S. salespeople don’t even look at the prospect’s website before making the call. When your sales reps take just a few minutes to do pre-call preparation using this framework, their credibility with the buyer will soar!

What you’ll learn:

1. What buyers want from sellers

2. The 7 things to research before approaching a buyer

3. Why preparation is vital to your sales credibility

This microsession is with SalesFuel CEO C. Lee Smith, recognized as one of the nation's Leading Sales Consultants by Selling Power and the author of "Hire Smarter, Sell More!" and "SalesCred."

Come see how AI can help you empower your teams to sell better.

1. Leverage AI to better meet the needs of the modern learner

2. Create a sense of community in a virtual environment

3. Strategies to scalably increase practice opportunities.