Sales 2.0 Conference Recap Part 1

Yesterday, I spent a whole day emersed in a world of new tools and technologies at the sold out Sales 2.0 conference. Now that I’ve had a chance to reflect on the day and the conversations, I wanted to present some of the hightlights and my opinions of the various topics discussed.

What is Sales 2.0? I’ve already tried to answer that question once, but let me give it another try. Sales 2.0 is a change to people, process and technology that allows sales and marketing teams to do their jobs in a more intelligent way. It is either very customer or productivity focused (depending on who you ask), but probably not both at the same time.

The theories presented and tools demoed were mostly focused on enabling Sales reps with information that allows them to move closer to consultative selling. However, the final session of the day was defined by the use of ConnectandSell, a smarter version of a dialer that allows reps to efficiently communicate with lots of customers. To gain that efficiency, reps are trained to “just start talking” when they hear a beep in their ear. While that may sound efficient and is likely cost effective, it is the furthest thing from Consultative Selling I’ve ever heard of. How can you be consultative when have no idea who you are going to talk to a second before the connect? Maybe I’m missing the point, but this seemed to be contradictory to everything else discussed at the conference.

Some highlights from the agenda:

Polly Sumner, Salesforce.com’s chief adoption officer was a facinating person to listen to. Polly is a veteran of several of the technology giants and is now helping SFDC get into more places. She is passionate about the technology, and couldn’t wait to demo an iPhone version of the app to an eager group. Her description of “Chatter” led me to proclaim operational sales reporting’s death. I also came to the conclusion that SFDC will lead to more tech savvy and analytically focused sales management over time. I’m sure I’m not the first to come to that conclusion.

Polly spoke about SFDC using their own tools and publishing their best practices for all of their clients to grab. While not unique, this approach arms her adoption conversations with real experience rather than Marketing fluff. Polly showed us how she would follow an account, opportunity, contact or sales rep using chatter to understand an account. By doing so, she no longer had to waste an hour with an account review to prepare for a client meeting.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from Polly was to take an individual focused approach to implementing CRM. Make it simple for an end user to use a couple of CRM / SFA applications, and they will be more likely to ask for more. Present too much at once, and they will be overwhelmed. She also talked about enabling C-Level executives with Dashboards allowing them to see directly into their CRM system, which could be a revolutionary step that disrupts boardrooms in the future. Imagine the CEO having better information than the Head of Sales? That would be exciting to say the least.

Up next in Part 2: My panel on Sales and Marketing and the end of IT!

CRM and Marketing Measurement to Drive Sales

How do you drive the Sales team to follow up on all those leads you’ve provided? And how do you get your marketing team to provide qualified leads instead of rows of uninteresting data? The answer is to measure both and use the resulting reporting and analysis to find gaps in your marketing and sales processes.

Your marketing and sales systems do what they are supposed to. They keep track of your interaction with customers (CRM) and help your Sales force plan to sell (SFA). They also keep you in touch with your customers through some combination of inbound, outbound, email, direct mail, and other marketing services your company provides. You may have even integrated your social media, web analytics, and online media, but chances are that you have not.

So what’s next? Convergence time.

Let’s start with a basic CRM program and build on valuable layers of information along the way. My company sends out lots of email marketing, so that’s what I talk about more than anything else. Once I’ve executed an email campaign, the first thing I want to look at is the result of any of my tests. Did recipients open emails more frequently when I did A vs. B. Next I want to know whether people clicked through the action buttons I provided them. These first two points are marketing centric, but next comes the fun part.

Once I know who clicked through the email, I have a new segment of interested parties. This segment can be divided up into customers and prospects (based on data available in your CRM system). As a next step, what did those people do when they clicked through to your landing page or site? Did they look at one page and leave? Or follow a path toward a product that you advertised? Or follow a path to a different product? We have now added another level of advanced segmentation from your Web Analytics platform. From a marketing perspective, you can now define lead nurturing programs.

And from a Sales perspective, we have defined richly qualified CRM and Web segments. So what happens when you add a note to your SFA system letting the rep know that a contact or a prospect account has clicked through an email and pursued a specific product? If your marketing team has built credibility with sales reps and management, you can be sure that the rep will trust this information and follow up to drive a sale. If you haven’t built credibility (or communicated this new approach), then the rep will see another bad lead and do nothing.

Either way, you need to report on these cross functional results. When presented Marketing qualified leads rather than bulk leads, what was the action taken by each sales rep. How much revenue was generated for each lead delivered? What about for each lead worked by a rep? If you are able to, you should test delivering different segments to different sales teams to determine which teams are best able to drive results. Maybe inside sales has a better chance to make a qualified lead sale since they are available to follow up immediately when provided a triggered lead. Alternatively, the product path followed online may define the sales rep that should get the lead. Or it could come down to rules of engagement on who gets what.

Once you are able to present segmented results showing which teams follow up on leads and drive sales and which teams let leads sit, you can have better conversations with Sales and Marketing management. This will expose issues with both your Sales and Marketing departments, but can lead to conversations that help both organizations mature. Are your marketing teams communicating well and enabling the sales with the appropriate collateral to sell to these leads? Are your sales reps following the playbook and working the leads the way management thinks they are? Show the results and let the conversation lead to change at your company.

Sales and Marketing Alignment Series Intro

I will be joining a panel discussion on June 28, 2010 at the Sales 2.0 Boston Conference. The topic for my panel is Sales and Marketing Alignment, so for the next couple of weeks I’ll be writing a series of posts on related theory. To cover the subject, I will be scratching the surface of very complex subject matter. Please let me know if you have any questions or would like me to dive deeper into any topic.

Here’s my initial list of topics, although these could certainly change as I go. 

1. Intro and What is Sales 2.0
2. CRM and Marketing Measurement to Drive Sales
3. What is a Qualified Lead?
4. Systems Integration - Connecting Web, CRM, and SFA tools
5. Global Sales and Marketing

This is a departure from previous posts about Data Governance, Customer Intelligence, etc., but it’s what I’ve been thinking about. I hope you enjoy.

What is Sales 2.0?

Most of the information about Sales 2.0 is from companies affiliated with the conference. That makes sense as this is about the intersection of Sales and Marketing, and these companies are eating their own dog food (my favorite cliche from my consulting days). It may be that there are lots of other people writing about it as well, but it’s no surprise that the content Google is finding first is from these Marketing focused companies.

What the hell is Sales 2.0? I’m not the first person to ask that question. HubSpot, a conference participant, asks that very question on their blog and their guest writer, Nigel Edelshain claims to have coined the phrase. N. B. I have no reason to doubt him, I’m just excited how nicely the Google results are shaping my blog post. If that’s intentional from the marketing spend of these companies, they are doing a great job of guiding my understanding of a new topic. It’s good to think about these things when approaching advanced Sales and Marketing techniques, because your ultimate goal should be to replicate this approach.

Nigel defines Sales 2.0 thusly: “Sales 2.0 is about sales people using Web 2.0 tools and social media to sell more effectively.” Alright. I get that. A good standard definition that everyone can buy into. I think it may overlook some of the CRM plumbing that makes this concept functional, but I like how concise that is.

What about others? How do the vendors promoting the theory define it? Inside View, who is another conference sponsor, has a whole page dedicated to defining Sales 2.0. They have been supporting the conference and concept since 2007 and confim Nigel as the creator of the original concept. Their definitions page links to other definition pages, and I count at least 30 different definitions for Sales 2.0.

I’ll stop there, but continue soon with CRM and Marketing Measurement. I look forward to your comments.