Entries posted in July, 2010

I recently attended the Sales 2.0 Conference, East at the Renaissance Waterfront Hotel in Boston and was impressed with all the energy at the conference. Sales people are an interesting group, they are full on enthusiasm, eager to talk and mingle and learn from each other. The conference emphasis was on tools that are used to help sales people with prospecting, managing accounts, and making their jobs more efficient. By having tools to help with these areas of sales, the results would be better revenue numbers creating a win-win situation for both the company and the individual sales person or sales team.

I think social media was on the mind of people in the audience and in the overview for the conference, but it didn't come up in any session, at least the social media marketing that I know and is on the mind of most companies today. When asked what was the most important sales tool for you, each panel expert named a tool they felt was important like Salesforce, Kadient, Jigsaw, Hoovers and Marketo among others. What I was surprised about is that not one of the panel members mentioned their website as a tool for sales. In fact the website as a tool for sales never came up at all. Knowing what I know many companies get 80% of their sales from their online marketing and web leads, I felt this was a shocking discovery. The real shock is that somehow the message of a well built website from a sales and marketing perspective is not the first thing a company today ought to be looking at is what amazed me.

I question, what does it cost to hire, train, manage, and compensate one sales person? I am not saying that building a website as a tool for sales is the only thing that a company should do, but it is certainly an important thing to do right. The cost of a well built website that is built from a sales and marketing perspective would be a very cost effective way to use the Internet channel to not only support the sales team but to generate business. So why is it not done? Are companies not ready to do this? Is it they don't see a payback or are there not enough web developers that build it from a marketing and sales perspective? Either way, it should be done, and it is a must to find a company that can actually address the Internet as a channel for business and find a company who can actually build it right, put in all the analytics to measure the results correctly and know how to tweak it continually to make the website the most effective tool you can have to generate sales and position your business against your competitors.

In the end, I was glad I attended the conference, met some wonderful people, ate some delicious food and attended a break-out session in the afternoon that gave me a great take-away, that being “Harness the trigger events that turn prospects into customers” from Craig Elias who has a book called, Shift, which discusses this principal in effective selling. I also got to meet the conference guru, Gerhard Gschwandtner the Founder & CEO of Selling Power.