Smashmouth B2B Blog: Sales & Marketing Demand Gen

5 Thoughts About Sales 2.0 Conference Opening Remarks

  

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This morning's Sales 2.0 Conference lead off speaker was Polly Sumner of Salesforce.com.  Although she spoke about Tools, her real message wasn't about tools as much as it was about use, and ways of working.

It Gerhard Gschwandtner, the conference host,captures it with a question to Polly, "so it's about a mindset?" 

• Explore tools with an eye for how your team will adapt to it.  How they will use it. How it will change the way they work
• Challenge yourself to identify where efficiencies can be gained. Can you gain time?  Knowledge? Trigger events?
• Don't get caught up in the hype.  Look through demos and presentations, does the tool change the way you will get your job done?
• The best Sales 2.0 apps are adopted without being forced on users. Quote from a beta tester of Salesforce Chatter two weeks ago at CloudForce Boston "We just turned on Chatter, a week later we had 700 active users."
• "Failure is OK," says Polly. Don't be afraid to take risks, it's risks that can introduce change into your organization.

From our experience with Sales 2.0 tools at Green Leads, we had an immediate impact by making an extremely risky decision 18 months ago.  Instead of hiring new people and adding headcount to our appointment setting team, we took a major risk by implementing ConnectAndSell.  It allowed us to double the weekly production of our best people for about half the cost of a new hire. We didn't push it, we let our team adopt it at their own pace. It organically became a part of their daily routine.

What risks have you taken related to Sales 2.0?  Has it changed the way you work?