The fact that we need to transform how we engage and collaborate with customers today is clear to most sales executives, how to do that is not.Jim Dickie is an Independent Research Fellow for Sales Mastery, and was formerly the co-founder of CSO Insights. As a research firm, Sales Mastery specializes in benchmarking how companies are leveraging people, process, technology, and knowledge to optimize the way they market to, sell to, and service customers.Jim has over 29 years of sales and marketing management experience. Jim began his career with IBM and Sterling Software and then went on to launch two successful software companies. Jim is also a contributing editor for CRM Magazine and Top Sales World; and the author of The Chief Sales Officers Guide to Transforming. Sales, Insights into High Tech Sales and Marketing, and the co-author of The Sales & Marketing Excellence Challenge and The Information Technology Challenge. He is a board member for Baylor University’s Center for Professional Selling, a guest host on World Business Review, a Trustee for The Morris Animal Foundation, and an often-requested keynote speaker at artificial intelligence, sales transformation, CRM and social selling conferences.Over the 25+ years Jim has been conducting research , he has surveyed of over 30,000 sales optimization initiatives, and these study findings have become the benchmark for tracking the evolution of how the role of sales is changing, the challenges that are impacting sales performance, and most importantly what companies are doing to address those issues.Specialties: #artificial intelligence, #salesprocess, #ai, #salesmanagement, #salesenablement, #crm, #salestransformation