Gartner Opening Keynote: Sustaining Growth Through Unrelenting Disruption
Speakers: Alice Walmesley, Director, Advisory
Scott Collins, Managing VP
Key take-aways
- Customer understanding: Understanding customers’ buying actions through tactics, such as information journeys or interpersonal dynamics, and technology, such as pipeline data and conversion intelligence
- Customer engagement: Focusing reps on the highest value sales activities through tactics, such as customer verifiers and buyer enablement, and technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI)
- Operating model: Establishing clear rules for effective cross-functional collaboration through a unified commercial engine and technology, such as communal data and intelligence-led decisions
Featured session: The Transformation to RevOps Is Not as Daunting as It Seems: 5 Key Steps to Change
Speaker: Craig Rosenberg, Distinguished VP Analyst
Key take-aways
- Bring go-to-market functions together in a commercial coalition by generating executive support for the RevOps vision and redesigning functions accordingly.
- Align the end-to-end revenue process to the full customer life cycle transparency by mapping buyer journeys, agreeing on revenue process milestones and supporting multiple routes to market.
- Identify interconnected workflows by designing cross-functional workflows, integrating systems to automate processes, and support handoffs and service-level agreements.
- Capture revenue process data in a shared data source by agreeing on data strategy, governance and quality assurance, ensuring data quality, and consolidating relevant data into accessible sources.
- Leverage unprecedented data for more intelligent decisions by leveraging analytics, creating a data decision framework and enabling data literacy for stakeholders to draw their own insights.
Featured session: Revenue Enablement Is Key to Reducing the Complexity of the Modern Sales Ecosystem
Speaker: Doug Bushée, Senior Director Analyst
Key take-aways
- Align roles and functions: Silos create friction in the buying and selling process. Revenue enablement transcends the customer journey, simplifying the commercial journey and providing consistent customer experience (CX).
- Unify technology: Sellers today are using up to 17 different tools in the sales tech stack. Revenue enablement takes a holistic approach and audits tech used for sales execution, account retention and growth, and pipeline generation.
- Gather data and deploy AI: This simplifies selling and helps sales organizations make data-driven decisions, improving everything from onboarding to engagement.
Featured session: How Should the Sales Organization Be Redesigned in Response to the Talent Shortage?
Speaker: Robert Lesser, Director, Advisory
Key take-aways
- The talent shortage, shifting buyer preferences, digital commerce and cross-functional collaboration — each makes a compelling business case for change.
- Talent is the second largest risk facing organizations according to Gartner research, right behind ransomware. Chief sales officers (CSOs) report that recruiting sales talent is difficult and attrition rates are high, creating a leaky bucket of talent they can’t fill.
- Progressive CSOs are driving change by redesigning go-to-market roles: Over 50% plan to change the basic responsibilities of sales roles, introduce new sales roles and overhaul customer coverage approaches.
- Headcount arbitrage, burden reduction, targeting and alternative channels are all strategies that go beyond simple cost cutting to deliver a superior buyer experience and improve seller productivity.
- The three steps to launch a sales redesign are plan, build and monitor. Adopt a timeline that is geared to the pace of market change to sustain competitive advantage.