What’s your favorite part about attending a sales conference? Is it the knowledge and skills you gain through attending speaker sessions and chatting with fellow practitioners? Or is it expanding your professional network through introductions and connections? Maybe it’s finding and nurturing new leads through in-person interactions?
No matter what you find most appealing about sales conferences, there is always plenty to gain, and if you’re interested in attending one you’ll have no shortage of options in the coming months.
The next few weeks will feature two of the biggest annual events in sales, so this felt like an apt time to highlight the many upcoming conferences worth attending for salespeople. As you plan out your schedule for the year ahead, consider whether any of these industry gatherings might make sense for you or your team.
Sales Conferences in 2019
Seismic Shift: Nov. 5-7 in Carlsbad, CA
With strong focuses on sales enablement and marketing alignment, Shift is very much positioned at the forefront of modern selling. As a user conference for Seismic’s software, it is fairly product-focused, but the speaker lineup includes plenty of forward thinkers from across the business spectrum. Session topics include content activation, messaging personalization, collaborative enablement, and more.
Dreamforce: Nov. 17-22 in San Francisco, CA
The king of conferences. This year’s unbelievable speaker list includes Barack Obama, Megan Rapinoe, Tim Cook, and Emilia Clarke. As that prestigious lineup would suggest, Dreamforce is an event that transcends sales, with a broader scope encompassing technology, disruption, and business transformation. The learning and networking opportunities at Salesforce’s flagship event are endless.
Sales Conferences in 2020
Sandler Sales & Leadership Summit: March 4-6 in Orlando, FL
Sandler is one of the biggest names in sales training, and puts professional growth at the center of its annual summit. Sandler Training CEO David Mattson leads a speaker group that also includes Krish Dhanam and a number of trainers and speakers from Sandler offering a variety of different specializations. Come with an open mind, and be ready to fill it up with practical insight.
TOPO Summit: April 23-24 in San Francisco, CA
Covering six different tracks — Customer Experience, Account Based Marketing, Sales Development, Sales Effectiveness, Marketing Ops & Tech, Sales Ops & Tech — TOPO runs the gamut of today’s business development mainstays. Speakers include the company’s co-founder Craig Rosenberg as well as Mya James of New Relic, Hilary Headlee of Zoom, AJ Gandhi of RingCentral, and more. With heavy-hitters from both fields, this will be a great place to learn about the intersection of sales and marketing.
SiriusDecisions Summit: May 3-6 in Austin, TX
There hasn’t been a ton of info revealed yet for next year’s iteration, but the SiriusDecisions Summit annually features a powerhouse stable of speakers and guests. Content and community lead the way in one of the calendar’s premier B2B conferences, where technology and innovation are omnipresent themes.
B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange: 2020
B2B Marketing Exchange has long been a popular event based in Arizona (the next one is coming up in February). B2BSMX is a spin-off of sorts, and held its inaugural gathering in Boston this past August. A combined effort from FlipMyFunnel, RevTalks, and Demand Gen Summit, the newly formed conference enjoyed a very successful debut with a wealth of ABM/alignment content, and will presumably be back for an encore (perhaps at the Encore again?) in 2020. Stay tuned for more details.
SELL Conference: 2020
An acronym for Sales Enablement Learning and Leadership, SELL is a conference put on by the Association for Talent Development, with a focus on interactive learning experiences guided by internal practitioners. Rather than elevating big-name keynote speakers, SELL relies on subject matter experts who can deliver valuable and practical guidance on improving sales processes. While the dates for next year’s event haven’t been announced, it’ll likely be in the fall; the 2019 SELL conference took place in Las Vegas on October 8-9.
Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference: 2020
Whereas most of the conferences listed above are aimed at sales professionals of all sorts, this one from Gartner is for the executive and leadership crowd. The 2019 event, held September 17-19 in Las Vegas, featured four tracks: Sales Enablement, Sales Operations, Sales Talent, and Sales Transformation. Among the topics covered in sessions: the pains of commercial complexity, scrutinizing sales compensation, making a business case for sales enablement, managing talent in a tight labor market, and more. More than most, this conference is very targeted for a specific audience.
Learn, Grow, and Connect at These Sales Conferences
No matter where you’re located or what you specialize in, there’s probably at least one sales conference that makes sense for you to attend. The eight events listed above are all extremely well-regarded, offering opportunities to learn from leaders and peers while expanding your professional network and maybe even drumming up some business along the way.
We’ll see you out and about!
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Topics: Sales trends
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