Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference 2019 September 17 - 19 / Las Vegas, NV

As the number and diversity of customer stakeholders increases, so does the inherent conflict within the group and difficulty of driving consensus. This workshop will equip you with a better understanding of the barriers that prevent sellers from driving consensus among diverse customer stakeholders and tools your sellers can use to mitigate and address these barriers.

The environments in which customers purchase from suppliers are accelerating in their complexity. More information, more choice and more people involved in the purchase have compounded what is already a complex task for the individuals who are on the front lines of buying. At the same time, our sellers are mired in the complexities of our commercial organizations caused by well-intended but runaway tools, technologies and processes. This critical session will reveal our research into how the best sales executives are taming the complexity their customers – and their sellers – face to grow high-quality deals.

All too often enablement solutions are regarded as bandages for perceived seller pain points. Most organizations treat the symptoms with additional technology, systems or support, without investigating the actual cause of the sellers’ struggle. In this session, you will learn how to successfully employ a process to ensure that business partners and sales enablement leaders identify seller needs and diagnose business problems prior to investing in any solutions.

Frontline managers are uniquely positioned to make a direct impact on the performance of their sellers. Unfortunately, many organizations fail to capitalize on managers' full potential because they don't provide them the data they need to accurately track performance or train them on how to communicate it in a way that changes seller behaviors. Learn how sales organizations can arm managers with high-quality data and strategies for communicating with the sales force.

The amount of high-quality information available to customers far exceeds their capacity to consume it, making it harder for them to buy and resulting in commercial penalties for suppliers. This session explores how sales leaders must evolve frontline sellers’ skills to capitalize on the opportunity presented by the high-quality informational landscape and reap commercial benefits.

Organizational transformation initiatives create immense change among sales teams. In fact, two out of every three major corporate changes produce sub-par results because of reduced employee performance in all areas. Join this session to discover proven strategies to lead your sales team to success in an environment of change and transformation.

Sales leaders understand that perfect sales compensation plans do not exist, and that often prevents them from expecting excellence from their compensation design teams. How can sales leaders judge the quality of their sales incentives when the trade-offs inherent to incentives design are often not obvious in the final plan? Join this roundtable session to share and learn tactics for assessing the quality and effectiveness of compensation plans, given that sales leaders are not privy to all the critical trade-off decisions taken by the design team.

Frontline sales managers have a significant impact on your business performance — a strong, focused sales management bench will drive quota attainment, reduce turnover and improve seller engagement. Join this facilitated discussion with your peers to share and learn tactics for screening sales talent for managerial skills and preparing a bench of frontline sales leaders of the future.

Increasingly complex deals, larger buying groups and higher consensus requirements have dramatically changed how customers buy. Sales processes, however, have not. This workshop will provide the frameworks and tools necessary to begin the process of refining your organization’s sales process to better align to how buying actually occurs.

This workshop lays the foundation for establishing a customer success management discipline. Topics and exercises include goal setting, resource allocation, defining a customer journey stage playbook, improving the customer experience and identifying signals to monitor customer health. How do I improve renewal rates? How do I help customers obtain value? How do I measure customer health?

The number of sellers who are highly engaged and plan to stay in their current job keeps declining. At the same time, sales managers are finding that it is taking longer to fill open sales positions, leading to uncovered territories and lost revenue. We’ll discuss why sellers are quitting today, what they’re looking for in a new job and how sales leaders can craft the right strategy to attract and keep top sales talent in a highly competitive job market.

Only 28% of sales leaders state that their account management channels regularly meet their cross-selling and account growth targets. Unfortunately, the playbook that most organizations use today to renew business and maintain accounts is falling short. Join us for a discussion on how to structure your accounts teams to deliver customer improvement and drive growth.

Throwing money and technology at your sales processes alone does not improve sales execution. Gartner research finds that the average company spends an estimated $1M USD per year on their sales technology program, but 38% of companies fail to achieve revenue growth from that spend. Join this session to learn how to build a roadmap that aligns your technology plans with your business objectives.

Whether attempting to reduce sales expense to prepare for an economic slowdown, or prudently managing expenses to improve profit margin, tiering customer segments is critically important. Learn how sales organizations can use a balanced approach, including cost of sales, to meet goals sustainably.

The role of the sales enablement function is evolving from simply supporting the sales organization to a strategic function responsible for driving commercial impact. Join this interactive discussion with an expert panelist to learn how to position your sales enablement function for success by aligning it to the overall sales and business strategy.

In a world of empowered customers and increasingly complex purchase decisions, a seller hoping to close high-margin deals must help customers think differently about their business, make sense of the information available to them and facilitate consensus among a diverse set of stakeholders. In this session, we will explore the competencies that differentiate high performing sellers.

Sales organizations invest heavily in sales systems and analytics platforms to drive sales productivity. But many sales analytics programs struggle to answer the questions that sales leaders and sales managers regard as most crucial to their teams’ success. Join this facilitated discussion with your peers to share and learn strategies for selecting metrics that align with sales strategies, and driving action prescribed by resulting analytics down to the seller level.

Organizations invest in sales performance management tools expecting a significant return on their investment including increase in profit or revenue, not just cost savings and automation. But many organizations fail to see how technology, process and people along with change management are required to see significant improvements. Join us for an interactive discussion with two Gartner analysts spanning topics from sales tools and technology to strategy and change management.

AI technologies are providing deep insights into long-winded B2B sales processes and can support the automation of business process steps. Together, they promise significant impact on revenue growth. This session looks into current AI technologies and the potential impact on sales you need to know about.

Today's B2B customers prefer to self-serve, relying on independently sourced information over engaging with sellers to make a purchase decision. But few sales organizations have adequately updated their capabilities and operations to keep up with this new buying reality. Join this facilitated discussion to explore challenges and opportunities presented by the evolving digital landscape in enabling B2B buying.

The best sales organizations win high-quality deals by helping customers complete critical buying tasks. In this session, learn how progressive organizations build "buyer enablement" content that not only helps customers complete the critical buying tasks but also reduce the complexity of the seller job. Specifically we will examine the building blocks of effective buyer enablement content and provide actionable examples of such content.

Most sales organizations recognize the need and urgency to drive seller skill transformation and better enable sellers to engage highly informed customers. That said, the implementation of new skills is a significant undertaking that often falls short with companies deploying selling tools and training as quick-fix solutions that fail to drive long-term behavior change. Join our panelists to learn how best-in-class sales organizations achieve sustained, long-term behavior change.

Disruptive technologies, changing customer dynamics and rapidly-shifting economic conditions are challenging heads of sales to rethink their functional priorities and investments. In this session, you will learn about the top priorities CSOs are focused on going into 2020, and strategies for developing and communicating sales strategy to the C-suite and the broader sales force.

Every day we are hit with a barrage of economic news that sometimes seems relentlessly negative. To be sure we need to guard against business cycle gyrations, but how do we cut through the clutter of the headlines and focus on what we really need to know about the outlook? In this engaging presentation, economist and author Linda Nazareth talks about the short term economic forecast for the U.S., putting things in terms of scenarios and focusing on the risks and opportunities for those in the front lines of it. Switching gears, she then looks further out in terms of demographics and trends so you can best position yourself and your team for the longer term. Whether we are talking about financial markets today or talent wars tomorrow, making sense of the bigger picture will keep you ahead of the curve and give you an edge for the future.

More information coming soon.

Sales enablement plays a critical role in driving seller productivity and effectiveness. However, delivering on sales enablement promise increasingly requires close collaboration with Marketing, L&D and Product teams. Join this session to learn how you can align sales enablement with other functions to deliver consistent sales enablement content and training support to your sellers.

Sales operations can no longer claim to be “world-class” simply by partnering consultatively with sales leadership. Increased selling complexity and rapid changes in technology have opened up new opportunities for sales operations to create competitive advantage for the sales organization. Join this session to understand how these changes have thrust the sales operations function into a position to help shape sales strategy, and how sales leaders can make the most of this emerging opportunity.

Changing B2B buying dynamics are forcing sellers to fundamentally change their selling approach. Consequently, sales managers must adapt their coaching and support to help sellers respond to greater complexity and variability in sales. Join this session to learn the competencies of effective front-line sales managers and strategies for developing the frontline sales management force of the future.

Changing buying dynamics and increasing selling complexity have placed significant pressure on sales leaders to achieve revenue growth. Join us as we interview heads of sales about the decisions they have made and the lessons they’ve learned on their journey to success as a sales leader.

Are you either considering or are in the early stages of building a dedicated sales enablement function? While the sales enablement function’s role and design vary from one company to the next, the goal remains the same: Making sellers more effective and efficient. Join this discussion with a Gartner analyst to explore tactics for designing a sales enablement function including prioritizing resource investments to demonstrate early wins and defining the range of potential enablement responsibilities.

Sales leaders understand the importance of exerting control over the buying process to achieve predictable revenue. But influence and control can elude even the best sales teams in a world in which buying groups rely on third parties for validation and sales teams struggle to control even their own buying process. This roundtable will provide a forum for CSOs to share ideas and challenges in taking control of the purchase process in a highly variable and complex buying environment.

In this session professor of psychology and behavioral economist Dan Ariely illustrates ways in which humans are predictably irrational and how we can change behaviors. He will address this topic from two different views, first from the perspective of designing the environment to drive change and second from the perspective of changing peoples’ minds more directly. He will demonstrate the value of this general approach using one example from the world of financial savings and one example from the world of health behaviors. We’ll discover other important inputs to decisions, namely the value of showing effort and the value of social norms. Ariely, one of the world’s most recognized leaders on this topic is known for providing insight and ideas that is clear, relatable and practical.

In a recent Gartner survey, 32% of respondents said that organizational politics was their biggest obstacle to the success of their CRM program. This session will examine:
● The political and cultural barriers faced, including: executive leadership, program ownership, and process change
● The necessary components of CRM governance that address these barriers
● Practical solutions for overcoming the barriers that you are facing

Commercial insights are critical to move deals today — but are hard to develop. A strong sales and marketing partnership is essential to both create commercial insights that help customers advance through a purchase, and ensure that these insights are used consistently and effectively across the organization. Join this roundtable to discuss ways in which sales and marketing leaders are coming together to find new sources of insights — and are effectively communicating them to buying groups.

The increasing scope of sellers’ responsibilities is overburdening sellers, making internal organizational complexity a key cause of stalled or lost deals. Sales organizations’ efforts to alleviate the problem — while well-intentioned — are only making it worse. This session explores how to simplify the seller experience and increase the overall productivity of the sales force.

Can you afford to have your sellers ill-prepared for the precious time they have in front of prospects and customers? Many organizations struggle to build lasting learning programs for sellers that are effective, scalable and repeatable. Join us to find out how sales organizations are creating opportunities for “always-on” learning to help sellers capitalize on the opportunities presented during customer interactions.

Technology has transformed how sales is onboarded, trained and coached. This session will explore why it's critical to invest, what capabilities are important, where we are today with technology and where the future lies. We'll look at how technology advancements will help your organization perform at a higher level.

Business pressures are forcing more and more companies to embrace continuous change. This is impacting how many purchases they consider on an ongoing basis--and how they make decisions. This session will help sales leaders understand changing buying dynamics and how to help customers build confidence and consensus to drive decisions and success.

Increased customer preparedness and decreased customer access have introduced high variability in the selling environment requiring sellers to swiftly adapt and respond to deal roadblocks. But what happens when an organization’s sales climate makes this challenging for even the best sellers? In this session, learn how to create a sales climate that enables, not hinders seller performance.

This session will explore real-world examples of sales enablement approaches and applications of technology that have resulted in double digit results. What programs and technologies were used? How did they measure effectiveness? Gain inspiration and ideas from these sales enablement case studies of companies who have experienced success and demonstrated results.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle will help sales leaders assess the relative maturity and business impact of sales technologies. Key drivers of technological developments on this Hype Cycle are improvements and innovations in the user experience, platforms, integration, mobile usage, and predictive/prescriptive and ML analytic insights. Sales organizations should evaluate and use these technologies to gain competitive advantage.

The average buying group now has 11 people, making it difficult for customer stakeholders to reach consensus on a purchase. Faced with increased consensus requirements, sellers struggle with price-driven conversations, extended sales cycle time and more stalled deals. Learn how sellers succeed in the consensus-driven world by effectively identifying and managing Talker, Blocker and Mobilizer stakeholders.