Three Trends and Takeaways from Sales Operations Leadership Council’s March’19 conference

Over 30 sales and commercial ops leaders gathered in New Jersey on March 15 to uncover the latest trends, discuss their challenges and goals, and take away best practices from their peers in the life sciences industry.

This was ’s first formal showing at a life sciences forum and we could not have asked for anything better. A closed knit group of Life Sciences commercial ops leaders, cohesive space, genuine interest to learn about new technologies and abundant positive energy all around defined the SOLC conference for us.

The organizers had thoughtfully selected only 19 companies to exhibit and the format of the event encouraged all participants to visit every exhibitor booth for quick interactions. This arrangement facilitated a genuine dialogue between attendees and exhibitors making the event effective overall. There were light banter, deeper conversions, and many laughs all around.

Here are the most exciting topics we discussed with our booth visitors and grabbed attention throughout the show, together with our takeaways:

1. Help Find Knowledge in Text, Insights in Numbers

Most executives visiting our booth cited that their enterprise sits on heaps of data scattered in systems and apps, buried in websites and documents and trapped in tribal knowledge. In the digital world, everyone is experiencing data overload and information explosion. Knowledge workers’ are wasting productive time in searching for information. We learned that for most executives whom we met, their number one goal is to deliver contextual, actionable, real-time sales and marketing insights, so they can enable business users to make better-informed decisions.

2. Sales Analytics are Beyond Reports, Dashboards, and Training

The role of any sales enablement software is to surface relevant information for the sales teams, support decision making for the sales leaders and facilitate the next best action. However, after speaking to the participants we learned that their current enterprise software landscape does just the opposite — poor interface, scattered data, too many integrations, and heavy dependence on IT for reporting! This results in low adoption of software among business users. We think that sales analytics is beyond just dashboards and reports and IT is beyond a data reporter. Organizations need an AI-driven, ever learning data interpreter and reporter so IT can focus on more strategic assignments.

3. The Power of Innovation

It was WhizAI’s very first public appearance and we definitely made a mark because our platform could address many of their enterprise problems. Many SOLC members visited our booth saying they heard good things about us and wanted to learn more. Some participants thought we were the breakthrough technology for life sciences sales teams and even our peers admired us saying we should have won the most innovative vendor award at the conference. Such encouraging comments and feedback are surely a morale booster and a positive affirmation that we are on the right path. To top it, a great follow up from companies post the event is an awesome ROI.

I think that the SOLC forum meetings serve as an invaluable resource to all members to learn, share and grow together and urge you if you are from the life sciences and pharma community — industry insider or a solution provider — to apply for your SOLC membership today!