2026 LSU Sales Symposium 

Leff Bonney (PhD, MBA) is currently an Associate Professor of Marketing at Florida State University where teachesboth graduate and undergraduate courses in sales and sales management. Leff also serves as Director of ExecutivePrograms for both the FSU College of Business and the FSU Sales Institute. He helped create and grow the FSU Sales Institute which has been recognized as the premier university sales program in the US. Leff serves on the Board of Directors for the Sales Education Foundation. He also founded and is director of the Sales Educators’ Academy which is a program designed to help university sales faculty from all over the world be better equipped to teach sales andsales management at their respective universities. Recently, Leff won the American Marketing Association’s Don McBane Award which is given to sales educators and sales leaders who have made a lasting impact on the field of sales and salesmanagement.

Prior to joining the faculty at Florida State University, Leff worked in sales leadership roles for two Fortune 500 companies. Specifically, he worked for 7 years on major accounts for RR Donnelly, negotiating large multi-year print contracts. Leff also spent two years leading a field sales and marketing team for Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals. Over the last 10 years Leff has consulted with dozens of corporate clients on sales force effectiveness including areas such ascustomer segmentation and targeting, sales process design and adaptation, sales messaging, and sales training design and implementation. Leff has also designed and led training programs such as basic selling, sales coaching, advanced situational selling, sales operations leadership and negotiation

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Session Information

How Buying Behavior Has Changed in the Age of AI

Synopsis coming soon!

Dr. Howard Dover is Director of the Center for Professional Sales at the University of Texas at Dallas and a nationally recognized authority on sales technology, artificial intelligence, and sales capability development. He advises organizations, revenue leaders, and technology firms on how the sales function is evolving and how to build teams for an AI-driven market.

At UT Dallas, Dr. Dover leads the redesign of sales education around AI, including the AI for Sales Certificate. He also directs the Sales Technology Landscape Project, tracking the global sales technology ecosystem; the Business Acumen Project, focused on developing commercial thinking and curiosity in sales talent; and the Pulse Report, which distills insights from more than 2,000 executive interviews into biannual industry reports.

He has been invited to present at Gartner’s CSO Conference, Dreamforce, and Emblaze, and serves as the Sales Technology Expert for the Sales Educators’ Academy. His research earned the 2025 Best AI Paper Award in Marketing Science. He is the Amazon bestselling author of Sales Innovation Paradox.

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Session Information

The End of Spray-and-Pray Outbound:
How Precision, Relevance, and AI Are Redefining Go-To-Market

Today’s buyers are harder to reach and far less responsive to traditional sales tactics. High-volume email and cold calling continue to decline in effectiveness, forcing sales leaders to rethink how they generate pipeline.

This session explores how modern sales teams are shifting from activity-based selling to precision-based selling—using today’s tools to tightly target the right accounts and deliver relevant, timely messaging at scale. Drawing on applied work from the University of Texas at Dallas, this presentation will show how these motions are producing higher response rates while reducing wasted effort.

More importantly, this session reframes what growth now looks like. A new generation of AI-first companies is demonstrating that leaner, highly enabled teams can outperform larger competitors—achieving exponential impact without the infrastructure, headcount, or investment that once made scale possible. Attendees will leave with a clearer vision of how AI-equipped selling organizations can compete differently, move faster, and unlock new levels of efficiency and growth.

Kip Knight is an Operating Partner at Thomvest, a $500 million VC fund based in the Bay Area. He is also a board member at Netbase Quid, a leading consumer analytics company. Knight has worked in over 60 countries. He began his career at P&G in brand management and went on to hold numerous senior executive roles at PepsiCo, YUM Brands, eBay and H&R Block, including CMO at Taco Bell and president of H&R Block. He is founder of the U.S. Marketing Communication College, dedicated to teaching communication strategy to diplomats in the State Department.  In addition, he’s founder and CEO of CMO Coaches, a national coaching network for senior marketing executives. Knight is co-author of Crafting Persuasion: A Leader’s Handbook to Change Minds and Influence Behavior and author of Learn to Leap: How Leaders Turn Risk into Opportunities. He earned his B.S. degree from LSU in marketing and his MBA from the University of Cincinnati. He is also a 2023 recipient of the LSU College of Business Hall of Distinction award. Kip and Peggy Day live in Southern California and have been married for over 40 years. They have two sons (Tom and Chris) and two grandsons.

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Session Information

How Sellers Can Build Custom Apps To Attract and Qualify Buyers.

This presentation explains how the buying process has fundamentally changed in the age of AI, with buyers completing most of their research before contacting sellers. It shows how sales professionals can quickly build simple, custom apps using Replit to intercept modern buyers earlier, qualify opportunities more intelligently, and create differentiated, personalized buying experiences without needing coding skills or IT resources.

Dan Hamilton Rice is Associate Professor of Marketing at Louisiana State University’s E. J. Ourso College of Business, where he holds the Herbert Huey McElveen Professorship for Developing Scholars and the Leslie and Dal Miller Professorship. A consumer psychologist trained in experimental research methods, Dr. Rice studies how motivation, persuasion, affect, and technology shape consumer decision-making and marketplace behavior.

He earned his undergraduate degree and MBA from Cornell University and his PhD from the University of Florida. Dr. Rice has received multiple teaching awards and is consistently recognized as one of the highest-rated instructors by students, with teaching experience spanning high school through PhD education across in- person and online formats.

Dr. Rice has served as principal investigator on three Louisiana Board of Regents grants totaling nearly $750,000, supporting the development of LSU’s behavioral research laboratory, which he currently directs. He also serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Business Research and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Consumer Marketing.

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Session Information

The Salesforce–Customer Interaction: Modern Perspectives from Consumer Behavior Research

Synopsis coming soon!

Bob Rickert challenges how organizations think about selling. With more than 25 years advising Fortune 500 and growth-driven companies, he has seen firsthand why traditional product- and price based selling fails to deliver sustainable growth. He is the author of Profit Heroes: Breakthrough Strategies for Winning Customers and Building Profits, which introduces a profit-centered selling approach that helps sales teams earn executive-level credibility and the ability to deliver measurable financial impact.

Bob works with CEOs, CFOs, and sales leaders to help sales teams sell measurable business and financial outcomes—closing the business literacy gap that undermines performance and margins. As founder of Profitable Selling, LLC, he helps organization transform sales from transactional selling into a strategic, profit-driving force. He has delivered his solutions across manufacturing, technology, financial services, building industry, medical devices, and industrial distribution.

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Session Information

The Buyer–Seller Exchange Is Being Rewritten

Buyers don’t need salespeople to buy anymore—but they urgently need them to decide. Inthis provocative session, Bob Rickert explores how AI, digital access, and information overload have eliminated low-value sales behaviors while elevating the importance of clarity, insight, and decision leadership. Attendees will learn why traditional sales roles are becoming optional, how top organizations are redefining sales as a sense-making function, and what it takes to move from price pressure to relevance, value, and confidence in complex buying decisions.

Dr. George Talbert is an Assistant Professor of Marketing and Sales at Elon University’s Martha and Spencer Love School of Business. He brings more than 25 years of senior level industry experience specializing in large B2B, multi-million dollar sales solutions, executive coaching, and go-to-market strategy development.

In addition to his academic role, Dr. Talbert consults with organizations on sales leadership development and buyer centric strategies. His work focuses on helping firms understand how buyers gauge value, make decisions, and navigate complexity in modern purchasing environments. As a scholar practitioner, he bridges theory and practice through experiential learning and leadership focused teaching, preparing future sales leaders to align selling strategies with how buyers actually buy.

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Session Information

From Pitch to Perspective: Why the Future of Sales Starts with the Buyer

For decades, sales strategies were designed around the seller’s process. Prospecting. Pitching. Closing. But buyers have changed. They are more informed, more connected, and more empowered than ever before.

Today’s buyers do not follow a linear funnel. They evaluate risk before value, seek peer validation over product claims, and often make critical decisions long before a salesperson enters the conversation.

This session explores the modern buying journey. What truly drives buyer decision making, how technology and data have reshaped expectations, and why understanding the buyer’s perspective is no longer optional but essential.

By the end of this session, you will learn that success in sales today is not about controlling the conversation; it is about aligning with how buyers actually make decisions.

Let’s begin with a simple question.

Are we selling the way buyers want to buy?