The Challenge: Traversing the Cloud of Sales 2.0
Sales 2.0 is recognized today as an essential means of doing business and the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco was buzzing. Maneuvering through the maze of possibilities is more daunting.
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Print“There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear”
Those words sung by Buffalo Springfield during confusing times more than 40 years ago would have fit right in at the Sales 2.0 Conference this week in San Francisco.
We all know about the oft-confusing array of new technologies, the social media, and the explosive growth of virtual means of learning about prospects and reaching out to customers. The Doubting Thomases are fewer and farther in between and almost all of us are converts. We’re on the bandwagon.
OK, but now what? If Sales 2.0 (often referred to as social selling) is about merging Web 2.0 technologies with traditional sales strategies, which tools should we use? How many? What is productive and what just wastes our time?
Now it’s all about collaboration tools, virtual customer engagement and sales productivity in the cloud. We iterate or we die, to roughly translate an observation by Selling Power’s Gerhard Gschwandtner at a Hoover’s VIP dinner during the conference.
Is Sales 2.0 a more efficient, more effective way of selling? And if so, as most of us are coming to believe, how can we become more proactive and less reactive in its application (again, a Gerhard perspective)? How do we make it an easier buying experience for customers?
We’re full of questions, but we want to get there. The conference was jammed with more than 500 sales and company leaders who recognize something big is going on even if they aren’t quite sure how to harness it.
Marshall McLuhan infamously said the medium is the message. Gerhard took it a step farther. “This,” he said at Sales 2.0, “certainly is the medium.”
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