The Global Leadership Summit 2026 has announced 14 faculty speakers, including Jim Collins, Craig Groeschel and Arthur C. Brooks. If you sell to founders, operators or anyone with a leadership title, this is one of the few conferences where your buyers show up voluntarily and sit still for two days. That makes it a prospect list, not a tourist trap.
Most conference advice is generic. Show up early. Work the room. Follow up. Useless. Here's what actually matters when you're deciding whether to spend two days and a few hundred dollars on a leadership event.
The faculty is the tell — and this lineup is unusually practical
Conference speaker lists are usually a mix of celebrity keynotes and filler panels. The GLS 2026 lineup leans toward people who write about how organisations actually run.
Jim Collins is the obvious draw. Good to Great and Built to Last are still the books founders cite when they're trying to explain why their company works or doesn't. If you sell anything that touches hiring, culture or operating cadence, Collins' audience is your audience.
Craig Groeschel runs one of the largest churches in the US and has spent two decades building teams at scale. Arthur C. Brooks writes about happiness and purpose at work — which sounds soft until you realise half your buyers are quietly burnt out and will pay attention to anyone who takes that seriously.
The rest of the faculty follows the same pattern: authors and CEOs who talk about frameworks, not inspiration. That's a different crowd from a generic business expo. People who pay to hear Jim Collins talk about Level 5 leadership are people who make budget decisions.
Who actually attends, and whether they're your ICP
GLS skews toward three groups: founders and executives at small-to-mid businesses, team leaders inside larger organisations, and a long tail of pastors and non-profit directors. That last group matters if you sell into faith-based or non-profit sectors. It doesn't if you sell B2B SaaS to Series A startups.
Be honest with yourself before you buy a ticket. If your ICP is a 40-person professional services firm, GLS is a strong fit. If your ICP is a technical buyer at a 500-person software company, you'll spend two days talking to people who can't sign your contract.
We've written before about how most SDRs treat 6,946 Australian conferences as a single undifferentiated list. The same logic applies here. One conference is not a strategy. The question is whether the room matches your ICP, and GLS matches a specific slice of it well.
What to do before you go, not after
The mistake most founders make is treating the conference as the start of the work. It isn't. The work happens in the two weeks before.
Pull the faculty list and the sponsor list. Cross-reference against your CRM. Anyone you already have a warm thread with gets a short note: "I'll be at GLS on [dates]. Worth 15 minutes if you're there." No pitch. No calendar link in the first message. Just a flag.
Then build a second list: people you want to meet who aren't on the faculty. Look at who's sponsoring, who's speaking on the smaller stages, who's running the workshops. Those are usually the operators, not the headliners. They're also more likely to be your buyers.
If you're running outbound into this list, keep it small. A 40-person pre-conference sequence beats a 400-person blast every time. And check your deliverability before you send anything — we've covered what happens above 100 emails a day when your DMARC is still p=none, and it isn't pretty.
The sessions are the least important part
You will not learn anything from a Jim Collins keynote that you couldn't get from reading Good to Great in a weekend. That's not a knock on Collins. It's just true of every keynote at every conference.
The value is in the gaps. Coffee between sessions. The lunch queue. The 20 minutes after a workshop when half the room lingers to ask the speaker a question. Those are the moments where you find out what someone's actually wrestling with, and whether you can help.
So build your schedule around the gaps, not the sessions. Pick two talks a day you genuinely want to hear. Spend the rest of the time in the hallway. If that feels uncomfortable, remember that everyone else in the hallway is there for the same reason.
Follow-up is where most founders lose the deal
You'll collect 20 business cards and have 8 real conversations. By the following Monday, 6 of those 8 will have forgotten your name. That's not because they're rude. It's because they went back to a full inbox and a week of catch-up.
The follow-up that works is short, specific and references something you actually talked about. Not "great to meet you at GLS." Something like: "You mentioned your team is struggling to keep the sales and success handoff clean. We solved that for a customer last quarter — happy to send the one-pager if useful."
Send it within 48 hours. Not a week. Not after you've "had time to think." The window closes fast.
If you're running this at any volume, this is exactly the kind of follow-up where a tool that drafts personalised emails from your notes earns its keep. We built MiraReach around this workflow — it scores inboxes, drafts the follow-up, and waits for you to press send. Nothing goes out without a human reading it first. If that sounds useful, give MiraReach a try.
What we'd do next
If GLS 2026 is on your list, buy the ticket only after you've checked the faculty and attendee profile against your ICP. Then spend more time on the pre-conference list than on the conference itself. The founders who get pipeline out of events like this aren't the ones who work the room hardest. They're the ones who did the homework first.
— Mira