What am I learning at the Sales 2.0 Conference?

Definition of Sales 2.0, as per David Thompson, CEO of Genius: Sales 2.0 combines customer-focused processes with Web 2.0 productivity technologies to enhance the art and science of selling while creating customer value.

It's all about driving more revenue, more quickly, through the pipeline.

According to Thompson, it's all about Marketing & Sales:

• Being in alignment with the customer throughout the buying and lead life cycle.
• Working collaboratively to approach buyers when they're ready, extracting timely and relevant insights and sharing customer intelligence.
• Accelerating and optimizing every phase of the sales funnel by connecting with the right prospects at the right time.
• Measuring and improving the lead-to-opportunity conversion equation and sales performance.

Thoughts from Scott Santucci, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc.
Santucci covered the entire lead generation & sales process - what's broken & what needs to be done. Key points include:

• The salesperson IS your company to prospective customers. Most companies are asking their sellers to learn so much! What's broken right now is the conversation between the buyer and seller.

• Both buyers and sellers are suffering from complexity problem. Customers are suffering from too much info, vendor fatigue, more stakeholders involved & longer decisions. Sellers also have complex portfolios, random acts of enablement and changes in their company.

• Need to flip the focus of Marketing/Sales: Model it around customer problems/decision process; Map it around the problem portfolio. Then, Match sales tools to this process to support customer conversations.

Key take-aways from Jim Dickie, CSO Insights:

• Lead generation #1 sales effectiveness initiative this year. Recent study: qualified leads that turn into discussion now at 39%; down from 55% .

• Need to recognize Buying 2.0 too! Customer now get all sorts of information about your products, services, capabilities - way before they talk to a seller.

• Recommended customer engagement objectives for 2009: 1) Optimize prospect intelligence; 2) Develop enhanced messaging; 3) Create enhanced sales/prospect engagement tools; 4) Nurture sales leads and 5) Integrate lead management/CR analytics.

• Companies must make existing lead follow-up more effective. They don't have big enough marketing budgets to keep generating more leads.

I'll be back this afternoon with more insights!