Learning From The Best Sales Minds at Dreamforce

I'm off to Dreamforce in San Francisco next week and cannot wait to hear from the biggest brains on the planet concerning B2B selling at the Quotable Sales Summit. It's being hosted my friend Vince Cotte who will take us on a journey where we will see how to leverage the 5 disruptive forces of social, mobile, cloud, big data and AI to improve sales; along with trends, innovations and case studies that truly inform best practice today. All of the speakers understand the importance of people, technology, and processes coming together to create awesome human experiences.

Today's customers expect us to truly know them, personalise their experiences and anticipate their needs

Buyers are changing the way they engage and failure rates in selling have never been higher despite the fact that it's easier than ever to identify, research and find the contact details of target customers. We must get better at selling in the best interests of our customers by using every insight, tool and technique available to us. Sales, marketing and service must come together for customer experience as the primary point of difference in every business.

Combinations are the key: Sales Navigator AND Salesforce for top-of-funnel and sales process enablement. Social and the phone for effective outreach. Value and relationships to secure an account. There are essential COMBOs everywhere but here are my top-three sessions that I will be attending and why I think they are important.

Why Sales Enablement Fails to Boost Productivity. Brent Adamson from CEB (now Gartner)

Brent is co-author of The Challenger sale and The Challenger Customer. He is also Principal Executive Advisor, CEB, now part of Gartner. Brent will be talking on how much of today’s well-intended sales “enablement” really actually enables seller productivity. He claims that from a rep’s perspective, the support designed to make selling easier, has actually made it harder—a phenomenon especially frustrating to sales enablement executives bombarded nearly every day by front-line seller requests for “better tools” and “more help” because the resources they’ve been provided so far “aren’t really what we need.”

Brent believes that in a world where sales complexity means we can no longer leave reps to fend for themselves, that "less is almost always more" when it comes to building the kind of sales enablement that not only supports the sale, but supports the seller at the same time. Find out why some forms of sales enablement actually crush productivity and really hurt business.

AI: Friend or Foe for sales? Trish Bertuzzi (President & Chief Strategist, The Bridge Group), John Barrows (legendary sales trainer) and Doug Landis (Growth Partner, Emergence Capital).

I believe that no matter how passionately you sell, you must still battle the evil forces of competition, commoditization, globalization, disruption, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) technology—because they all seek to eliminate your very livelihood. Winning requires dramatic changes in how you operate. By embracing technology with real human engagement, you can prosper in the arena of sales. This combination will elevate you and make you hyper-effective in breaking through to engage with the impossible-to-reach people who need your help.

Some of the brightest minds on the planet, including Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking believe that the biggest threat to human existence is artificial intelligence (AI). An amalgam of The Matrix and Terminator is a very real possibility—so much so that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have launched a nonprofit to ensure that AI is used for social good. For almost half a century, mankind worried it had created the instrument of its own destruction by splitting the atom. We survived the Cold War, but automation and linear computer logic is giving way to genuine self-learning algorithms that will inevitably lead to the Singularity— the moment when AI becomes self-aware. It is projected to occur sometime between 2035 and 2050.

What does this mean for sellers? What will happen with the fusion of biology, nanotechnology, and all of human knowledge? Could super-sellers of the future carry chips in their brain with Minority Report–style sensors and contact lenses providing real-time data? The question is whether a human will really be needed at all—wouldn’t an android be sufficient for many transactions?

Make no mistake. Right now and over the next 10 years, the bots will be coming for your sales job if you allow yourself to be a mere transactor of commodities. You must move beyond low-value relationship-building and instead elevate every conversation by setting the agenda on insight and value. You must aspire to be your customer’s trusted adviser and earn that position over time by consistently delivering value in every conversation and always acting in their best interest. But you must also harness technology if you are to survive and prosper in the age of the machines and empowered buyers. Technology may be able to crunch big data and blast massive amounts of tailored offers across myriad channels, but it cannot be creative, generate real insight, or build relationships. These are the things that make you the emotional favorite and trusted adviser, which is how you fend off disruption of your sales career.

I'm sure that this luminary panel comprising Trish, John and Doug will show us how to avoid 'sales disruption' and achieve success by merging technology and people to efficiently and effectively build relationships through insight and value.

Examples of AI assisting sales today include Salesforce Einstein, Seamless.ai, Complexica, Troops.ai, x.ai, Nudge.ai, Node.io, and Slackbot. It’s already possible to automatically sync data to Salesforce and have a virtual sales assistant schedule meetings for you. LinkedIn themselves are delivering new levels of integration to predictively provide insight data on meetings in your calendar and then syncing data seamlessly with Salesforce and other leading CRM systems.

The Top 5 Trends Disrupting Sales Now. Tiffani Bova (Global Sales Growth and Innovation Evangelist, Salesforce), Michael Litt (CEO, Vidyard), Joe Fuca (President – Worldwide Field Operations, FinancialForce), Paul Wituschek (Executive Vice President, Global Business Development, ICON)

Sales has changed in a good way, and Tiffani Bova will share the top five trends disrupting the future of sales. She is a truly brilliant speaker and will share how these trends are ushering in a more scientific, highly productive salesperson and offering sales teams the opportunity to anticipate and predict what customers will need next.

I don't know her exact content yet but I'm sure that social, mobile, cloud, big data and AI will figure in the conversation if technology is the focus. Tiffani will certainly talk with the panel about how sales leaders are taking advantage of the trends and harnessing the power of change. In my opinion, at a human level, sellers are facing these challenging trends:

• Buyers are increasingly resistant to outreach as they are bombarded by sellers across digital channels.
• Average deal sizes are going down as competition reduces prices and buyers seek to manage their risk by starting small.
• Sales cycles are blowing-out as buyers feel overwhelmed by information and choice while also needing to gain consensus within their own organization.
• Status-quo has become our biggest competitor as buyers go through evaluations and decide to defer their decision or stay in current state.
• Buying organizations are becoming less stable with higher turn-over of executive staff meaning that long-term relationships that once guaranteed success and less reliable, and fear is paralyzing the decision-making process.

Ironic, given the fact that it's never been easier to identify, research and then obtain contact details for buyers... hint: Pick up the phone and go COMBO!!!!!!!

Beat the Clock — and Your Quota — in the Age of Distraction. Jill Konrath (Best Selling Author, Sales Acceleration Strategist)

Jill is one of the best speakers in America today. She will talk about the fact that as we get busier and busier, we compensate by adding more hours to our workday. She asks the question: Are we really fixing the problem, or making it worse? I know Jill will share how to take back control of your time. This is personally my #1 problem at present as I am being crushed under the weight on my success in building a strong personal brand and publishing blogs and books. People regularly give me the advice of "charge more and work less" but it's much more difficult than that. I respect Jill enormously and can't wait to hear what she has to say.

I believe that none of has a shortage of opportunity or potential prospects... we have limited time and resources with which to execute. The way we use our time and the way we operate is the biggest determinates of our success.

Vince will be hosting the Quotable Sales Summit and he is one cool due from down-under... luckily for the audience, he is one the few Australians who is actually understandable.... 'nawhatameanmate' haha!

If you’re going to Dreamforce, please find me and come say 'hi'. If you're not going, then live stream the event so that you don’t miss out on the wisdom of others that can transform your own results.

I cover all of this in my new book, COMBO Prospecting. If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' button and also share via your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook social media platforms. I encourage you to join the conversation or ask questions so feel free to add a comment. Please also follow my LinkedIn post page for all my articles and visit my website at www.tonyhughes.com.au if you would like to engage me. Or www.RSVPselling.com for sales methodologies that generate pipeline and manage complex opportunities. main image from Flickr: ibthx1138 - Inscrutable wisdom.