Sales 2.0 Conference: A Stream of Consciousness Report

“I’d like to begin with an exercise. Cover your eyes with your left hand and with your right hand point north.” 500 people stand up and do just that. “Okay, now open your eyes.” Most people are pointing toward the podium – North – but some clearly have a faulty internal GPS. “When we search for something, we need somebody to tell us where to go, where North is.  We’ve arrived at a point in the economy where everybody says where North is, that this is where the promised land is… but nobody knows.” So began the 3rd annual Sales 2.0 Conference, with a keynote address by Selling Power founder Gerhard Gschwandtner.

Gerhard’s was, for me, easily the most impacting speech of the day, though as the organizer of the conference he didn’t receive the iPod Touch that was awarded to the top vote-getting speaker. Tangent: Giving feedback on lecturers is standard. Voting for a “winner” is a little different, potentially inspiring, and interesting at the very least. Enabling the audience to cast their vote via a text message is, well, so very fabulously 2.0. Displaying the number to text, though, in small print on a large screen at the very front of the room wasn’t so hot. Every time a lecture ended the text-this-number-to-cast-your-vote screen would appear; for the first couple of rounds I saw half the room look to their neighbor for help seeing the number to text, but by the afternoon the novelty had worn off. I’ll give the endeavor an A+ for 2.0-ness and and C (get it?) for execution.

One of the standouts of the conference was the Twitter coverage; this was a thoroughly 2.0 event. There were so many #sales20 Tweets coming out of the InterContinental that we managed to have our IP temporarily blocked by Twitter. At the inaugural Sales 2.0 Conf in ‘07 I doubt only a handful of attendees had even heard of Twitter, but fast forward two years and you have @Damphoux (Mike Damphousse of GreenLeads) live-blogging with 200 or so Tweets, bloggers and execs in the audience posting their own updates, and people following the conference remotely and even asking questions that @Damphoux would then relay to the panelists.

Some confusion did ensue, though:

I say the best Tweet of the conference came after a ringing cell phone interrupted Gerhard’s keynote speech:

Another great Twitter moment came when Jep Castelein of LeadSloth sat down in front of me. I had never met Jep before, but I KNEW I had seen his face before. I scrolled through the #sales20 coverage on TweetDeck and sure enough, there he was, @jepc. Clearly the introduction would need to be made via DM:

Some True-or-False Questions about conducting business in 2009, via David Thompson of Genius

• My sales reps can speak to 8-10 prospects an hour? T
• I can get an alert the instant a prospect opens my email? T
• Can find a new prospect w/o relying on anyone else? T
• I can harness the collective intelligence of my sales organization? T
• I can easily predict the outcome of a new compensation or incentive plan? T
• My sales people can dictate their call reports by phone and they are automatically recorded in the client record in Salesforce? T
• I can sign contracts fast by getting prospects to sign contracts online? T

Yes, each question was a glancing plug for a vendor, but I appreciated the subtlety.

A Great video presented by Salesforce re: CloudComputing

Some of my favorite quotes, re-quotes, zings, and thoughts

Gerhard Gschwandtner quoting Zig Ziglar: “‘Money can buy you a great mattress – the best in the world – but it can’t buy you a good night’s sleep.’ The same goes with tech. There’s a limit to what tech can do; you can implement tech but you can’t guarantee 100% adoption or 100% improvement.”

Gerhard on market researchers: “Your Achilles heel is that your definitions – although very bright – are always 2 steps behind reality. Reality is more complicated than charts.” Zing! Scott Santucci of Forrester Research, sitting not far from the stage, wasn’t a huge fan of that one. Also: you can download complimentary reports by Forrester here, provided to conference attendees and, uh, Daily Anchor readers, too, I guess.

Gerhard on information overflow: “Over the last year we’ve been in an amazing revolution, the same [magnitude of] revolution as way back when, when creatures came out of the water and onto land.  We’re drowning in an ocean of information and are losing our solid state that we’re used to.” Also: Gerhard on Retroactive inhibition:  “This new information erodes the information that we have… the knowledge we have is eroding through the new flow of information.”

Gerhard on the economy, quoting a Farmer’s Almanac from Austria: There’s “no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing”

Gerhard on corporate budgets: “Companies that significantly reduce their sales and marketing in 2009 will be gone by 2010.”

David Satterwhite of newScale quoting Larry Ellison: “If you’re not a sales rep and you’re not an engineer, then you’re overhead.”

Fact: Salespeople make the worst booth-staffers

Why? They’re too good at selling. They’re great at forming relationships, but the sales process doesn’t translate well to an expo-booth. At every booth I would introduce myself, say who I was with, and then say, “so tell me about [insert company/product here].” What ensued was often a non-interactive and lengthy soliloquy, sometimes a lesson in history or technology, and always a sales pitch muddled with too much information and no bottom-line.

With few exceptions, every conversation failed to convey the bottom-line value of the product. I heard a lot about features, heard A LOT of buzz words and web 2.0-speak, saw some great user interfaces, and was intrigued by some awesome new technologies, but not a single person made a matter-of-fact statement about what value their product offers.

Every product or service must meet at least 1 of 3 criteria to justify a purchase: it must help generate more revenue, help cut costs, or help increase efficiency. More revenue. Less expense. Less time. In all of my very wonderful conversations with some very wonderful people yesterday, not a single person told me how their product would help me generate more revenue, cut costs, or save time.

Execs take note: I know this was the Sales 2.0 Conference, but Sales 2.0 means having a tight integration with Marketing, and that means staffing your booth with Sales reps AND Marketers. Marketers are used to boiling down an abundance of information to its bare essence; turning a physical product into a one-sentence value proposition. Sales + Marketing Integration For The Win.

Further Reading

• Sales Collaboration Learnings from Sales 2.0 | GroupSwim
• Three Actionable Items from the Marketers at the Sales 2.0 Conference | Genius
• Sales 2.0 Day 1: View from the Demo Floor | Genius
• Sales 2.0 Data Points and Anecdotes | LucidEra
• How Can You Accelerate Sales in a 2.0 World? | Jill Konrath
• What Should You Be Measuring? Insights from the Sales 2.0 Conf | Jill Konrath
• What am I learning at the Sales 2.0 Conference? | Jill Konrath
• Sales 2.0 Conference Kickoff | Jill Konrath
• Using Twitter to Cover the Sales 2.0 Conference | LeadSloth
• Remote live-blogging of the Sales 2.0 Conf by following the #sales20 Twitter stream | Karl Goldfield
• Sales 2.0 Conference 2009 | David Chao

Here’s my #FollowFriday of the most active #sales20 Twitterers

(I just can’t bring myself to say Tweeps)

@TheDailyAnchor
@damphoux
@gerhard20
@lauraramos
@funnelholic
@annekeseley
@SaaSman
@KaizenSaad
@jepc
@insideview
@trisler
@RichBlakeman
@nedelsha
@karlgoldfield
@JoeManna
@annekeseley
@lucidera
@greenleads
@jillkonrath
@ajaybharadwaj
@SameerPatel
@KathyHerrmann
@Jason_Rothbart
@Mimiran
@BtoBGuru
@salesforceIUS
@ForceBrain
@RonGoch

The Bottom Line

The 2009 Sales 2.0 Conference was a great success. I heard excellent presentations, enjoyed great panel discussions, met some brilliant people, and though I was already acquainted with most of the vendors, I was introduced to some cutting-edge companies and products. I was also excited to see that familiar companies have recently launched some amazing value-add features.

Oh, and as a quick aside, even in the chaos of the exhibit floor, try to respect personal space. A good rule of thumb is that if you keep stepping on your prospect’s foot during a conversation, you’re probably standing too close. Anyone know where I can get a good shoe-shine in SOMA?

Photo credits: Robert 101

Tagged as: Genius Pro, GreenLeads, Jill Konrath, Karl Goldfield, LeadSloth, LucidEra, Mike Damphousse, Sales 2.0 Conference, San Francisco, SellingPower