Especially in CEE region, startups and founders sometimes focus too much on the technical development of the product. However, the product by itself doesn’t guarantee the success of the company. No matter if the business model is classical SaaS or customized B2B solutions, it is the job of sales professionals and chief revenue officers to deliver it to the customers in the right way and generate money which is to fuel further growth of the company. Sales is also about building relationships and customer success, as quoted by Bob Hooey: “If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will.”
PipeLine Summit – leading regional conference with a mission of bringing sales professionals together – has just happened in Gdansk, North of Poland, on May 17. It’s the second edition of the conference, which this year featured 12 prominent sales experts as speakers and brought together sales professionals from across the CEE. Many of them are here also to attend the sister event infoShare happening May 18 – 20.
Good morning cloudy @Gdansk 🙂 #PipelineSummit #InfoShare #3hack pic.twitter.com/VZyuACHSw9
— Maciej Jankowski (@netcamp) May 17, 2016
This year’s event was focused around the topics of strategy, management, lead generation and customer retention. Some of the best advice regarding strategy was to focus on both short term and long term goals, with measurable KPIs and milestones. Chris Gallen from UXPin was also talking about the importance of growing sales through cultivating team culture and values.
Piotr Mrozinski from LinkedIn and PipeLine Summit’s organizer Mick Griffin from Brand24 discussed the topic of social selling in their presentations, pinpointing the power of leveraging your connections and network in sales process, as well as why it’s more fun and satisfactory to close sales via building relationships not only in offline but also in online environments.
As it happens, the process of sales is very personalized and each professional has his own opinions. The event was all about sharing the opinions and approaches for common good, cultivating common visions and nurturing the culture of data-driven and professionally organized sales process.
#PipelineSummit "You may go with number of CRMs, but you'll end up @salesforce anyway." — @wiktorschmidt Now that's the testimonial!
— Ludwik C. Siadlak  (@ludwikc) May 17, 2016
Today many of the participants of PipeLine Summit will meet again at infoShare conference, largest event of its kind focusing on startups and tech in CEE bringing together 5000 people from over 30 countries.
