It’s no wonder why 1000+ sales and marketing practitioners gathered at TOPO Summit this week. In just 2 days, 50 sessions and workshops covered actionable best practices for scalable revenue growth across Marketing and Sales.

Trends we observed:

• Revenue operations empowers impact. Marketing ops and sales ops are about so much more than CRM and marketing automation systems. These teams, focused on revenue growth, are carefully building technology stacks to drive memorable buyer experiences, add efficiencies to repeatable activities, and building the reporting for leaders to get the intelligence they need to make decisions. Not quite sure where to focus or start? Jairaj Souderrajan, Head of Global Sales Operations at Twilio presented, “If you do nothing else as a sales ops person, own the metrics.”
• Micro targeting with ABM. Account-Based Marketing was a prevalent theme, with a focus on how to deliver meaningful marketing tailored to your specific buyers that produce results for your company.
• Coaching sales. Building sales teams that deliver consistent growth requires a lot more than talent. A recurring subject was giving the right tools, coaching and resources—not simply to help reps learn, but to create a foundation for scaling growth.
• Listening with technology. Tools are emerging to bring efficiencies into typically time-intensive activities like shadowing sales calls. This helps sales reps onboard faster, sales managers be more efficient and sales teams improve the quality of their messaging and selling.
• Driving data. “My CRM data is a mess” is something we all hear or experience. Help is clearly on the way from a wide range of companies with technology and data sources to cleanse, enrich, harness and analyze lead, contact and pipeline data. Experts in sessions highlighed the insights gained from the information they tracked, and growth opportunities in tackling new aspects of data and information processing.
• Forget the linear approach. Your sales process needs to create value for the buyer on their terms. Buyers aren’t moving in a perfect, linear path from your marketing materials to your sales meetings to a sale. Complex, multi-touch interactions are the reality of B2B sales, with marketing interactions woven through-out the sales process as multiple B2B buyers engage to make a purchase decision. Adam Sold of FinancialForce presented a smart way of looking at this new reality, “Instead of trying to sell to companies, build relationships with the right people to lead to a sale.” Focus on serving the people in your accounts, with needs and preferences that go beyond your product, to demonstrate understanding and fit with their company’s business needs.

Content rich and full of insights, we recommend you check out TOPO if you haven’t already.  It’s a growth experience!