groI’m half way through the first day of the Sales Intelligence Summit and I have to tell you that it’s one of the best business events I’ve been to in a while.  You know it’s a good show when the guys taking a bio-break sing its praises over the urinal divider.

The keynoter was Jim Dickie of CSO Insights.  If you are at all interested in sales, the sales process or what differentiates great companies from the rest in terms of sales then you need to check this guy out.  It really was one of the most informative keynotes I’ve heard in years.  While his core audience is people running big Fortune 1000 sales machines, his lessons are of great value to even the smallest company.  He’s also a very good speaker.

Also heard from Dennis Chapman of the The Chapman Group and Dave Roberts of Siebel Systems Users Services.  While both focused on the importance of sales intelligence and the sales process, Dennis spent alot of time on how you can take the subjectivity out of the sales process (make it more measurable) and Dave focused on how you can use sales force automation tools to help your average sales people improve so that they perform more like your star sales people.

Favorite line of the day came from Dave:  "A fool with tools is still a fool."  Of course Dave’s British.

More later.