Last Friday the group of sales experts and vendors that I have dubbed the “Sales 2.0 Mafia” put on the second annual Sales 2.0 conference at the W hotel in San Francisco. Gerhard Gschwandtner of Selling Power was the primary cat herder for the conference that was sponsored by 8 technology companies including Jigsaw. About 100 VP and Director level sales managers, primarily from companies based in the Bay Area, came to network, trade best practices for sales efficiency and optimization, and presentations from several sales leaders (customers, not vendors). I personally invited six customers to the show and had one (Lars Nilsson from Arcsight) present how his sales team uses Jigsaw to cut down on prospecting time and boost sales.
What is Sales 2.0?
As tempting as it is to just lump any company founded before 2003 (input data dinosaurs here) into the old Sales 1.0 category, or just say “it’s Web 2.0 for sales,” there really is some good thinking behind the tagline. One of the pre-conference goals was to define the term Sales 2.0, which Pelin Thorogood does nicely in the following white paper I like the one sentence summary “Sales 2.0 brings together customer- focused methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science..” Even though the interpersonal communication that good sales people excel at will forever be an art form, I nonetheless think that automation and measurement is not only possible but critical along all parts of the sales and marketing funnel.
Much to my horror, I think that my thoughts from the show can be best portrayed in Twitter –sized snippets. I spared the world (or at least the 40 people that follow me on Twitter) by refraining from Tweeting and instead compiling these comments below:
- Obviously the recession was at the top of everyone’s mind- I had a customer there from Sun who received news that 6,000 of his co-workers got the ax that morning- but if anything this fuels the need for customers to “do more with less.” In fact, most of the sponsoring companies, including Jigsaw, stated that they were doing better as customers focused their dwindling budgets on revenue generating activities in sales and marketing.
- This conference further solidified a point that I have made over and over on this blog- the days of the Silver Back sales guys who don’t know how to prospect and use technology are over. It’s too bad, too- my kids are no longer babies and I was going to dedicate myself to improving my golf game.
- The Internet has produced an explosion of available information that has transformed the way people buy things. Customers now demand to be sold to how they want to be sold to and are no longer dependent on the sales guy to make buying decisions. This makes the Sales 2.0 professional (and his company in general) become much more customer centric in order to compete.
- Another key component of Sales 2.0 is synching Sales and Marketing
- I heard rumblings from some attendees that the customer presentations were “thinly veiled sales pitches.” Not only did I think the presentations/panels were interesting (the circa 2001 keynote excepted) and very metric focused, but most of them highlighted several unique processes and technologies used in addition to the vendor that sponsored them. And fancy lunches at the W ain’t free, Wendy Whiner.
Overall, the conference was a success. If nothing else, we got 100 sales execs from different companies to sit for an entire day and actually think about the overall process of selling- and I got to goof around with Larissa and Lisa Gschwantner, who incidentally do all the real work for their father at Selling Power. See video:
