I don’t know if a movement & a mindset crosses the chasm like products do. What I know is a sales organization that has not implemented ANY of the processes enabled by sales 2.0 technology, and still living in the 1.0 world, they are already in the late majority and very soon will be laggards. In other words, they will lose deals to their competitors, their best people and fade from the market.
I already see this as some of our customers who are ahead of this curve are squeezing out their competitors in the market.

I see the key areas of sales 2.0 technology as:
- forecasting
- analytics/reporting
- marketing automaton
- sales intelligence
- sales compensation & incentives
- process playbooks
- quoting/configuration for complex offerings
For many customers, what comes in their SFA in these areas is enough, others need more. The idea of assembling 15 third-party solutions on top of a CRM gives me a headache to just think about.

Lastly, it’s easy for a multitude of 1.0 vendors to say: We are Sales 2.0; the same way enterprise software companies now have “cloud offerings” because it’s convenient. Like I said on stage, if you’re not getting visible business benefit in any of these important areas, look for a better solution.

Umberto

Jep – completely agree that the mentality is one of the hardest things to change. Our focus as an organization is to assist early stage software vendors looking to enter the US market avoid the mistakes associated with the high cost/high touch sales model. We are always surprised at just how quickly an organization will look to go to this model without fully understanding their own value proposition, ASP and preferred sales model just because it is what they know best.

Process vs. Tools – I’m not sure that I agree on this one. I read a great post by Mike Damphousse earlier today that called up the MIT study on the best times and day of the week to prospect. Included are great statistics on web leads and the significant drop-off in conversion rates depending on response times. If we are most effective in converting these web leads by following up within 5 minutes, surely we need to be deploying the right tools in support of our process?

Thanks again for the great post and comments.

I agree that processes are the core of Sales 2.0, not the tools. I’m still meeting a lot of old-fashioned high-touch sales people who don’t believe in phone/web but want to go out and meet in person (even for relatively low-cost SaaS products). A tool is easy to adopt, but a mentality is much harder to change: my gut feeling is that it’s going to take 10+ years before Sales 2.0 practices are mainstream (essentially until a new generation of sales leaders arrive).

Regarding the tools: several panelists mentioned they were using 15+ Sales 2.0 tools. In my opinion, if you have to patch together so many tools, we’re still in the early adopter phase. Only when more integrated solutions are available, it’s really going to cross the chasm.