I just returned from the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. 

I was stationed at the bloggers table with Geoffrey James, amongst others.   For a great recap of the event and some candid comments, check out Geoffrey’s posts on the Sales Machine blog.

Jim Fisher, Director Sales Effectiveness at Bluewolf, a Cloud Computing consulting organization, spoke at the Conference on how Bluewolf targets their market.

Unlike Bluewolf, most organizations define their market based on industry, size of organization and geography.

Bluewolf selects their customers based on their approach to embracing innovation.   Two of the criteria are notable:

• Prospects who are willing to evolve and embrace a vision.
• Prospects whose culture embraces experimentation and accepts constant change.

That prompted me to ask the question of Jim:

What you have described is an early adopter market that is traditionally a narrow slice of the market.    Is this segment sizable enough to meet Bluewolf’s requirements?

Jim responded that Bluewolf has more than enough target accounts to pursue.

What does this imply about technology adoption and where innovative, Cloud applications (aka Sales 2.0 tools) fall on the bell curve?

It has been almost 50 years since Diffusion of Innovations was published by Everett Rogers and just shy of 20 years since Geoffrey Moore adapted this thinking around innovations to disruptive technology adoption with the release of his book Crossing the Chasm – the revered tome of tech marketers.

BlueWolf’s target prospects seem like visionaries: early adopters who take risks on a new-to-market solution and unlike the pragmatists of the early majority, do not demand customer references or proven ROI in their evaluation.

What are your thoughts on the subject?

1. Have Sales 2.0 tools crossed the chasm to the stage of the early majority?
2. Do these low risk, user-friendly tools accelerate the adoption of technology?
3. Similarly, have these tools changed the shape of the bell curve by enlarging the size of the early adopter phase?

Like a digital smoke signal picked up the watchful eyes of social media monitors, I would like to invite the folks listed below to weigh in on these questions.

Over the past year at the Sales 2.0 Conferences, I have had some great discussions with each (sorry if I missed anyone):

• Gerhard Gschwandtner, Selling Power
• Jim Dickie, CSO Insights
• Barry Trailer, CSO Insights
• Laura Ramos, Forrester Research
• Scott Santucci, Forrester Research
• Joe Galvin, SiriusDecisions
• Umberto Milletti, InsideView
• Garth Moulton, Jigsaw
• Peter Poulin, Hoovers
• David Thompson, Genius
• Anneke Seley, PhoneWorks
• Trish Bertuzzi, The Bridge Group
• Pelin Wood Thorogood, The Aegean Group
• Mac McIntosh, Mac McIntosh Inc.
• Miles Austin, Fill the Funnel
• Nigel Edelshain, Sales 2.0 LLC
• Jeb Castelein, LeadSloth

Further Reading:

• IDC Sees Clouds Crossing the Chasm
• Sales Enablement Tools Make the Selling Simpler
• Sales Enablement in a Sales 2.0 World

The day long event featured provocative presentations and success stories on innovative approaches for sales to better meet the advanced needs of buyers and lower the cost of lead generation and selling.

Geoffrey James, blogger of the Sales Machine, proved his mettle as the ‘Blogging Machine’ by publishing a ‘running update’ of the conference. Check out this unbelievable recap of the Sales 2.0 Conference.

In the afternoon, I sat at the blogging table (distinguished by having its own power supply) with Ardath Albee who authored these two posts on the conference: here and here.

By the end of the day, the bar was open and David Thompson, co-founder/CEO Genius was doing stand-up Sales 2.0 comedy (read David’s post on the success of this Conference series).

As we were packing up, Ardath and I reflected on the challenges that attendees will face in implementing many of the compelling ideas.

It’s with this in mind, that I thought I would share a perspective on making the most from this thought-provoking conference:

Make sure the basics are covered – Sales & marketing alignment continues to be a thorn in the side of Sales 2.0. Ensure that sales and marketing agree on target marketing, messaging, lead definitions, SLAs, key metrics and demand generation workflow.

Fit to Strategy – How do these tools and practices fit to your organization’s strategy? Increase sales conversion? Lower costs? Given that many of the Sales 2.0 tools are SaaS based and easy to deploy, there are few obstacles to get up & running. Fit to strategy will be the one of key considerations.

The best ideas can be mapped on a grid with High Impact on one axis and Ease of Deployment on another. This will help prioritize what might be a lengthy list and plan for a rollout of your ideas over a longer term.

Customer Insight – It all starts with the customer and now the customer is in the driver’s seat. Without customer insight, we substitute our personal opinion as a proxy for that of the customer leading to inappropriate conclusions and costly mistakes.

Culture – This may be the most substantial obstacle. With this economy, many organizations may be unwilling to experiment or innovate or do anything that will take away from lead generation and closing deals.

Or perhaps senior management will not buy into Sales 2.0 and refrain from providing the top down momentum to drive Sales 2.0 realignment.

Scott Santucci, Senior Analyst Forrester and speaker at Sales 2.0 San Francisco, wrote this recent post on the significant issues that sales leaders face in instituting change. As a follow-up to the Sales 2.0 Conference, don’t forget to register for Scott’s complimentary teleconference “Are you Mounting a Value-Selling Engine on a Product Selling Chassis?”

The best of success to you in rolling out your Sales 2.0 initiatives!

Photo Credits: Robert Lesser

Top Photo: Chicago skyline from Millennium Park
Middle Photo: Dave Fitzgerald, VP Sales, Brainshark & Dan Demko, President, SBTV.com
Bottom Photo: Kevin Hooper, VP, Technology Solutions Group, Hewlett-Packard Company

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

I spoke with Travis prior to his appearance on a panel discussing ‘Sales Lead Management 2.0′ at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston.

Network Solutions has expanded its offering beyond domain registration to online services in such areas as search marketing (SEM), ecommerce, website design and hosting with customers spending from $500 to $50,000 per month. Approximately 300 direct sales reps target small businesses across the US.

One of my questions to Travis concerned buyer dissatisfaction. According to a recent survey, a large issue for buyers are sales reps who make promises that are then broken when the prospect becomes a customer.

Travis admitted that Network Solutions is still working on aligning sales and service. Travis believes that buyer dissatisfaction with broken promises is a problem with most sales channels, especially those selling complex products.

At Network Solutions, a significant amount of training is conducted with sales reps on how to set customer expectations.

A wiki has been created with Salesforce.com, Network Solutions’ sales CRM system, that helps reps find answers to their questions. All collateral and training materials are posted to Salesforce.com including a one page cheat sheet with FAQ.

With Travis sitting in the middle of sales and service, he has found that he can cut through the ‘BS’ (note to reader: Travis is not referring to the balance sheet).

Network Solutions tracks all cancellations by reason and by solution. Travis’ team can quickly determine if training is the root cause of an issue.

Travis discussed with me some of the Sales 2.0 tools that have improved his team’s decision-making, lowered costs, enhanced customer value and allowed Travis to manage a widely-dispersed and mobile workforce:

For more on Travis’ panel at the Sales 2.0 Conference, tune in to this blog or my tweets at www.twitter.com/RobertLesser.

The first day I sat at a table with Garth Moulton, VP of Community /Co-Founder at Jigsaw and blogger. Last fall, I had met Garth in Chicago when I spoke at a Chicago Association of Direct Marketing conference sponsored by Jigsaw. Garth and I spoke for a few minutes on best practices in using Jigsaw.

During the reception it was great to catch-up with two Forrester analysts who I had not spoken to in a while: I last met Laura Ramos, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and blogger when I presented at the MarketingProfs‘ B2B Summit 2008 in Boston and Scott Santucci, Senior Analyst at Forrester in San Francisco where I spoke at a MarketingSherpa B2B Summit a few years back (Laura and Scott posed for this photo that I took).

Laura noted to me some of the obstacles that large businesses face in adopting social media. I pointed out that social media were especially well suited to small business. Although small businesses are passionate, Laura has found that resources at small business often become constrained in meeting the demands of content creation.

Jill Konrath, Chief Sales Officer, Selling to Big Companies, author and blogger confided in me some of the challenges that she faces in expanding her sales training organization in this downturn.

AnnekeSeley, Founder & CEO of Phone Works, author and blogger was very receptive in discussing with me alternative inside sales models in a Sales 2.0 world. Anneke (see photo on left) was one of the standout speakers on a panel later that day.

Jim Dickie, Partner at CSO Insights gave a stellar presentation at the conference. Although hardly participating at the same level, I offered up to Jim our learning through our LeadGen Tools Research. The photo below

was taken of Jim (left) with Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Personal Selling Power and host of the conference.