Livescribe Smartpen comes to the fore

I’ve just left Chicago having had the opportunity to attend the Selling Power Sales Leadership conference on Monday. Selling Power assembled a brilliant list of speakers including Neil Rackham – author of SPIN Selling; and one of the founding fathers of modern sales thinking.

With such a stellar cast of thought leaders, I was really looking forward to the event and also using my Livescribe Pulse Smartpen to capture the audio. Starting with Gerhard Gschwandtner’s opening address, I was able to capture each session and across the day captured over 6 hours of notes and audio. Each session has its own page and includes key comments, illustrations and audience questions. In a large room, distant from the speakers, Livescribe really shows its worth.

Given the uncertain times we’re faced with and the climate of fear being propagated by the press mongrels from around the world, Gerhard gave an inspiring address to the audience. It’s a fantastic example of the power of positive leadership – something lacking in political leaders everywhere at the moment. I’m going to upload the opening remarks of Gerhard to the Livescribe website and make the file available by invitation. If you’d like to listen, post a comment and I’ll add you to the access list on Livescribe

Three of the presentations really stand out as being incredibly valuable and I’m extremely happy to have captured them:

1.       Malcolm Rees – Global Head of Sales for DHL Express. Managing a sales group of 6,000 is not without it’s challenges and Malcolm gave a really interesting, detailed insight into how he extracts maximum performance from his global team

2.       Mary Delany – CSO at CareerBuilder.com. Mary chaired a panel discussion on Coaching Salespeople. Her opening remarks were a real highlight of the conference and she went on to chair a very interesting panel discussion on coaching.

3.       Neil Rackham – Author of SPIN Selling. Neil is one of the founding fathers of modern sales leadership thinking. Neil’s comments were very interesting an quite an inspired take on the current situation we’re all facing.

The audio is a bit scratchy at times, primarily as I was on a noisy table, but overall, the quality is sufficient for someone to create transcripts if required.

Sales Leadership Conference

I’ve just arrived in Chicago for the Selling Power Sales Leadership Conference. I came up from Australia back in March for their Las Vegas event and found it so relevant and informative that I’ve made the effort to come back for this event.

The agenda looks really interesting and I’m pleased it’s got a strong focus on leadership and culture. I spend a lot of time on these two topics as I find they are always at the heart of the issues and challenges that we are engaged to deal with for our customers. I’ve noticed that Sales 2.0 seems to have really taken hold in the US, but is still virtually unknown in Australia or APAC for that matter.

This event kicks off two weeks in North America for me. I’m hitting Atlanta, Boston, and San Mateo also – speaking to a range of vendors and potential partners. A number of these are really exciting and represent the opportunity to work with some really smart, innovative people.

Hopefully I’ll have some downtime to catch up with my buddies in Boston, maybe catch a Patriots game and get re-acquainted with my good fried Sam Adams.