As a former paratrooper, Dan Maier’s background has prepared him well for his current assignment: managing a global inside sales team of 75 reps selling a $9,000 solution to hard-hit manufacturers.

Dan Maier’s title is as long as it is deep: VP Worldwide Inside Sales & North America Mathcad Sales, PTC (see Dan’s photo on the left that I snapped at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston).

Like many enterprise software developers, PTC has moved downmarket to sell to SMB accounts (Small & Medium size Businesses). The creation of a strong inside sales team structure complemented by sales through the channel, reflects the economics of selling profitably to this market segment. According to ChannelWeb, 21% of PTC’s revenue is driven through 400 global PTC partners.

At the Sales 2.0 Conference, Dan discussed how PTC has successfully targeted the SMB space by leveraging inside sales. With $1 billion in revenue and 62,082 customers, PTC’s average yearly revenue per customer, including services, is just over $17,000 (from SMB to Enterprise accounts).

PTC’s Siebel CRM system covers the universe of manufacturing accounts. According to Dan, PTC is only adding a couple of thousand net new accounts per year. However, PTC needed to broaden the list of contacts at each existing account. By choosing Jigsaw, PTC significantly improved their prospect conversion rate.

The PTC inside sales team’s objectives are to conduct 250 to 275 calls per week with talk time of 12.5+ hours.

After Dan’s presentation at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston, I asked: is Sales 2.0 an evolution or a revolution?

Dan quickly answered that Sales 2.0 is an evolution. However, he is concerned that his sales team will be inundated with technology. Dan maintains that there has to be a balance between the new facets of Sales 2.0 with standard best practices and core selling skills.

When asked about whether Sales 2.0 was helping to close the gap between empowered buyers and his telesales team, Dan responded that SMB buyers are more agile and conduct more online research than Enterprise buyers. Sales 2.0 has helped PTC to close the gap with SMB buyers. However, there is not as much a gap to close with Enterprise buyers.

With half of his team of 75 outside of the US, Dan is challenged in rolling out Sales 2.0 practices in countries that are well behind the US.

Dan mentioned that there are constant challenges in aligning sales and marketing. Dan is looking for a better framework for sales and marketing to evaluate the effectiveness of Sales 2.0

Finally, Dan talked to me about the biggest impact of Sales 2.0: the metric to evaluate his telesales team has moved from tracking the number of calls to talk time. For Dan, Sales 2.0 has enabled this transition.

To view more pictures of Dan and all of the other speakers in Boston, check out my 27 photos on Flickr.

Joining Dan on his panel at the Sales 2.0 Conference was Travis Fore of Network Solutions. For my interview of Travis, please see my blog post interview of Travis Fore.

Sales 2.0 Boston Conference Links

Sales 2.0 Conference website by Selling Power

Social Networking in Sales: Show Me the Money by Anneke Seley, The Sales 2.0 Advocate blog

The Sales 2.0 Conference Post by Geoffrey James, BNET blog

“Loose Talk” at the Sales 2.0 Conference, Boston, MA by Marci Reynolds, Sales Operations blog

Sales 2.0 Lessons from the Twitteratti by Parker Trewin, B2B Marketing for Faster Sales blog

Photos of Speakers and Attendees at the Sales 2.0 Conference by Robert Lesser

Network Solutions Levers Sales 2.0 for a 360 degree customer view by Robert Lesser, Acquiring Minds blog