I was an invited speaker at the recent Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and want to share some of the insightful, inspiring highlights of the event.
The conference was sponsored by Selling Power magazine publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner (www.sellingpower.com), who once again displayed his unique style and insight in uniting the many stakeholders of Sales 2.0. Co-host David Thompson, founder of Genius.com (www.genius.com) and founder of the first conference, kicked things off.
I’ve chosen four highlights to list below:
1) The customer will continue to dictate how they want sellers to collaborate with them and how they want to buy from sellers.
2) The funnel will continue to play a key role in the business process of selling.
3) Sellers have never had more tools and resources available to sell than they do now!
4) Creating a culture of measurement and analytics is part of Sales 2.0 ‘DNA’.
1) The customer will continue to dictate how they want sellers to collaborate with them and how they want to buy from sellers.
One of my favorite quotes was from Barton Goldenberg, futurist and founder of ISM, Inc. who opened the conference by citing statistics about customer decision making patterns. He said that “customers will dictate how they want to collaborate with you (sellers).” This is especially prevalent and only getting stronger in this age of the internet, mobility, instant business, and ‘constant connection’. It is a powerful statement that suggests many things about selling to customers in a 2.0 arena, but perhaps the most important suggestion is the one that asks us how are you adapting to selling to customers who dictate how they wish to buy from you?
2) The funnel will continue to play a key role in the business process of selling.
From the opening slide by Gerhard, and through nearly all presentations and panel discussions, people identified the funnel as playing a key role in Sales 2.0. We’ve always known the funnel to be an excellent metaphor – in sales 1.0 it was about ‘the sales process’. But this seller-centric approach has become outdated and nearly useless. Funnels that are designed this way serve very little 2.0 purpose. The new standard in funnel design is one that follows the customer’s buying process (http://www.funnelprinciple.com/bcf.html), a design that chronicles the journey a lead takes from discovery to close. When customers control the pace of the buy, sellers have little choice but to focus on the customer’s buying process to maximize their sales effectiveness. The value of having the buying process as the central theme of the way you sell is that you can leverage all of the technologies for lead generation, customer engagement, lead conversion, and all funnel analytics. The other value of using a buying process funnel model is that it provides the best leading indicator of your funnel’s ability to cross the finish line at year’s end with a high-five quota achieving smile on your face. It’s simply a smarter, evolving way to run your business.
3) Sellers have never had more tools and resources available to them than they do now!
I try not to use too many exclamation points but this one is too tempting to pass up. It’s utterly ridiculous the depth and breadth of quality tools available to a seller. From getting access to key decision makers (www.connectandsell.com), to getting on-demand business search and intelligence (www.insideview.com), or to quickly accessing company information (www.jigsaw.com), sellers have little excuse but to be supremely prepared. One attendee, an executive VP of Sales put it well when he said “if you don’t know how your prospect makes money don’t bother to pick up the phone.”
We heard how one large telecom provider put process to its proposal management function using technology from Sant (www.santcorp.com). This was no small feat for this telecom company – streamlining the handling of proposals for literally thousands of salespeople, each one with his or her own proposal approach. The results were a dramatic, bottom line improvement in efficiency and effectiveness.
As you might expect at any sales conference compensation was a hot topic. One of the key Sales 2.0 objectives mentioned was the need to give salespeople real-time status of how any given sale would impact their compensation. This isn’t just some courtesy to the rep; it’s a motivator and incentive and huge credibility and time saver for the head of sales. One of the more popular services mentioned was that from Xactly Corp. (www.xactlycorp.com).
4) Creating a culture of measurement and analytics is part of Sales 2.0 DNA.
Jim Dickie of CSO Insights (www.csoinsights.com) reminded everyone that measuring cause and effects of our marketing and selling efforts is totally 2.0 required. Why is it that still many companies treat sales as way too much art and not nearly enough science?
We heard senior level sales executives describe the tools they use to put powerful analytics at their fingertips. One VP of Sales described how Lucidera’s on demand analytics (www.lucidera.com) help him be certain about his company’s pipeline velocity, information he then converts to action and execution. Better understanding of funnel health through analytics leads to better action plans territory by territory. That’s a path toward achieving quota if I ever saw one.
Another company found themselves rocketing to the 2.0 world when they engaged with Landslide Technologies (www.landslide.com) to automate their sales process. This was already a very successful company selling large compressors to the industrial market, but it had the foresight to change the way it ran its business. Landslide gives them more than simply visibility or organization of funnel and other data; it provides insight to that data that management can proactively act on and coach to.
Closing
It was so refreshing to ‘check’ the doom and gloom of the economy at the Sales 2.0 Conference door and instead be surrounded the entire day by fantastic technology, inspired leaders, collaborative people, and actual users of the technology. Gerhard reminded all of us that our view is a mindset choice. He told the story of monks at a monastery in Big Sur fighting back wild fires that threatened their community. “It is not the fire that we fear”, they said.
I’ll describe the current state as ‘harmoniously disruptive’. On the one hand sellers are facing new challenges at every step of the sale (or buying process). On the other hand sellers have never had so many technologies and resources to sell. It can be confusing and even overwhelming. But somewhere in the chaos is order. Isn’t that what makes all of this fun? No one said it would be easy, it just ‘is’. At the end of the day, Barry Trailer put it well when he said, “it’s still just people buying from people selling.”
| Mark Sellers - |
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Mark Sellers is the CEO and Founder of Breakthrough SalesPerformance, a sales consulting company focused on helping clients use the sales funnel to achieve quota and dramatically increase productivity. He is the author of the book The Funnel Principle, available at www.funnelprinciple.com and at Amazon. Read More >> |
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