The GroupSwim Diving Board

We attended the Sales 2.0 conference for the last 2 days.  It was a great experience.  While I didn’t get to hear every speaker, the ones I did hear spurred great discussion and ideas.  Here are some of the things that caught my attention:

• I was very impressed by Brett Queener from SalesForce.com.  This company really knows how to do marketing and messaging.  They are a benchmark as far as I’m concerned.  While they don’t have the best software in my opinion, they do a fantastic job of focusing on business value, not features.  I really liked the video he showed on why cloud computing is awesome.  Here is a link to it if you are interested.
• A question during this session I liked was how SalesForce measures ROI when prospects ask about it.  Brett’s response was to ask the customers what metrics they use today.  The implication is most customers probably have no metrics to calculate an ROI.  This is an excellent way to avoid or control this discussion.  If the customer is sophisticated enough to have good metrics, then they are probably willing to sign-up for it.  If not, it is a moot question.
• On SalesForce, I do think there is mismatch with all the lip service they pay to usability and listening to customers on the product.  I find SalesForce to be very un-intuitive and hard to use.  It does some things well, but it is definitely not user friendly.  It is hard to believe that they have 3 rounds of user testing before releasing product.  Or, I would be interested in meeting these “customers” because I must be using a different version than they are.
• Much of the focus in the sessions I attended was more on lead and demand generation.  I can see why given the state of the economy.  One of the speakers commented on how you need 50% more leads just to run in place and that sales cycles are all getting much longer as the economy sinks further into the abyss.
• Twitter received significant attention during the wrap-up session.  In fact, there were at least 10 to 15 people including me who were tweeting updates the entire conference.  Click here to see the list of tweets used during the conference.  It was very interesting.  Most people there don’t get Twitter, which I can understand.  Sales people are very busy and want to focus on sales, not Twittering.  I had a good conversation at my table about Twitter.  My take on Twitter is it is good for company and personal exposure; I actually use it as a channel.  I monitor a series of key word searches for GroupSwim on Twitter using Twitter search and Google Reader.  I watch for things like “sales collaboration” or “customer community”.  When I see someone Tweeting a question about online collaboration or GroupSwim, I Tweet them back.  This is the only really practical application I’ve found for Twitter (I truly don’t care how good your burger was at lunch).  I was thrilled to speak with a prospect early in the week.  I asked him how he heard about GroupSwim and he mentioned that I had Tweeted him.
• Gerhard Gschwandtner was great in pushing on how there are too many tools and too much information and knowledge out there to absorb.  He said the key to sifting through all the information was search and that having knowledge is no longer the advantage; the thing is the ability to find what you need when you need it.  I liked this comment given search is one of our strengths.
• He also spoke of the ridiculous number of “Sales 2.0″ tools on the market now, and don’t just use these products without a plan on how they all fit together.  Don’t just buy something because it is the shiny object.  Twitter is free but I think it is the ultimate “shiny object”.  If I were Twitter, I would sell the company tomorrow.  They have never had to earn a dime and can only one direction from here, which is down.
• Tom Barrieau of IDC made some great comments on the importance of tribal knowledge for sales teams.  He was referring to the documents and information that people trade, but aren’t formally released by marketing.  This is one of the key things that GroupSwim helps manage so I was obviously a fan instantly.  He also spoke of the importance of tagging which we also spend an enormous amount of time building.

There was much more than this at the conference but I missed much of it while sitting at the GroupSwim booth.  What did you learn or take away?

Tags: conference, GroupSwim, Sales, Sales2.0

This entry was posted on March 6, 2009 at 12:26 pm and is filed under GroupSwim, Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.