What I learned at the XANT NEXT Conference 2020

The recent XANT Conference in Salt Lake City was an awesome experience. 

In case you missed it, Insidesales.com recently rebranded to XANT, and as CMO Matthew Langie puts it, intends to push beyond Sales Engagement to come the “Waze of Sales”. To that end, XANT has become a crowdsourced, AI-enhanced prioritization engine to turbocharge your Sales Development and Inside Sales efforts.

And, you can now do all this from your phone. 

A few takeaways from XANT NEXT:

If you’re building a Go-to-Market Execution Sales Machine, think Silicon Slopes

In practitioner talk after talk, I was in awe of the focus on pure go-to-market execution in “Silicon Slopes”. For some reason, Utah-based sales teams seem to have carved out a niche in nailing go-to-market execution. In describing how they set up their programs, and reinforced by people I spoke with in the halls, locals demonstrated a maniacal focus on turning over every rock to find greater efficiencies, digging deep into the processes and focusing on the “Moneyball” aspect of Sales Development and Insides Sales more than anywhere I’ve seen. They are taking sales execution to the next level. 

After seeing this trend for years I’d say if you’re starting a company, once you nail your niche and demonstrate a repeatable sales process, go build your go-to-market team in Silicon Slopes. 

I also hear the cost of living is way less than on the coasts. 

Where you can, take the rote repetition out of the hands of SDRs/ISRs and give it to robots. 

Hours become days, and days become months, and months become years. If your sales team is spending hours and hours each day researching, looking up information, prioritizing data, writing “best-guess” sales pitches and reaching out in vain attempts at initiating conversations, that is all time not spent building trust and making real human connections. Give repetitive activities to robots. 

All that hard work only starts the hardest part of the process - actually talking to prospects, building rapport, doing discovery and closing sales. Think about your revenue machine in parts and do everything you can to automate, delegate or eliminate anything in the process that doesn’t have to do with having meaningful conversations with prospects. 

XANT customers seem obsessed with taking the rote repetition out of the hands of SDR and putting it in the hands of the robots, the AI and the machines. XANT has listened and set up it’s program to facilitate this. 

Rebranding is hard but necessary - and sometimes it works 

For years, Insidesales.com was the go-to solution for automating the drudgery SDRs and Sales Reps had to endure each day. Finally, manual dialing and trying to keep track of all the people you needed to call was a thing of the past!

I remember walking into a sales floor at a start-up cranking insidesales.com on all cylinders, and it was a thing of beauty to see all that activity. It increased efficiency, through the power-dialer and other innovations, making life easier for Reps and giving companies the ability to go-to-market faster. We were all power-dialing!

As years passed, Insidesales.com went up-market and many other companies entered the space on the SMB and Mid-Market side. Some of those became darlings of the scene and a couple even achieved ‘Unicorn’ status. By last count, there are over twenty companies in the Sales Engagement quadrant on the Tenbound Market Map. It was time for Insidesales.com to evolve in order to stay relevant and demonstrate its innovative spirit. XANT was born. 

Although it will take time to ensure the market knows Insidesales.com is now XANT, the rebranding liberates the company from the past, while building on the legacy it started and launching it into the future. It gives the company a new chance to stand out in a crowded and growing market and earn a renewed reputation. 

As Buckminster Fuller said “we are called to be architects of the future, not its victims”. By rebranding and making a bold statement, XANT is architecting its own future. 

Sales Development is called lots of things

Speaker after speaker couldn’t seem to figure out what Sales Development was supposed to be called. There was BizDev, Inside Sales, BDRs, Business Development Team, Prospectors, Qualifiers, and on and on... the department has a lot of different names and nobody seems to be able to decide on each one. I might have even heard a few “Telemarketing”. Yikes! 

Let’s just set the record straight. Sales Development is SDR work, i.e. the connective tissue between Marketing and Sales that goes outbound to reach new accounts and qualifies inbound leads in order to set appointments and demos for Sales Reps. 

Business Development is a totally different department doing totally different things, such forging partnerships between companies and revenue sharing partnerships. Can we just all agree to call what we do Sales Development please. 

Getting the most out of your sponsorship is your responsibility 

This was one of the first conferences Tenbound sponsored, and it was interesting to be at the expo booth as opposed to running the conference. (we run The Tenbound Sales Development Conference- Early Bird tickets available!). 

Sponsoring a conference is all about hustle. Have one person posted up at the booth to smile at people walking by (no phone staring!) and send the other one out with one goal: meet everyone at the conference. Everyone. 

Shy? Just walk up to people and say “what brings you here?” and smile. I actually said this to the CEO of XANT. He looked at me like I was nuts, but it was pretty funny. It was a great conversation starter and I got into several long conversations with people from a lot of different industries outside of tech. I walked away with a ton of new business, including busting into a company I’ve been prospecting for 4 years unsuccessfully. 

Events work to build a fat pipeline, but only if you work!

To make the most out of your sponsorship, work your tail off.

Want a fat pipeline? --> join us at The Tenbound Sales Development Conference in NYC on June 18th, 2020 and/or August 17th 2020 in San Francisco!

David Dulany has built high-performance Sales Development programs for Glassdoor, Cisco/OpenDNS, Infer & Act-On Software. At Tenbound Research & Advisory, he helps companies start, optimize and turn around Sales Development programs at some of the highest-growth companies in the world. Visit tenbound.com.