Sales 2.0 - What Happened?

After years of telling myself that I need to start capturing what I'm learning myself and from other smart people, I begin this blog on Sales 2.0. As far back as 8 years ago I noticed a number of landslide changes in the buying process. Notice that I didn't sales "sales process." We can try to shoe horn in any sales process or methodology, but if it doesn't match how our prospects make buying decisions, we're out of alignment and we are destined to fail. I have a number of observations that I've been thinking about for several years.

1. Where once sales people were the holders of the secret knowledge and prospects needed us for education, prospects can now go to multiple web sites and get near perfect knowledge.
2. Buyers have placed more shields around themselves to avoid talking to sales people. They use voice mail to block calls and prefer most communications via email so that they can better control their daily schedules and have documentation about vendor conversations.
3. Since we offer white papers, free downloads and webinars for their name and an email, we think we are generating leads and push them to sales people. What has happened is that prospects have become visible earlier and are beginning an education process for projects 6 to 12 months in the future. Once we treat these as current, active leads, we have lost credibility and trained our early stage prospects to avoid us in the future.
4. Google and other search engines have replaced trade magazines as the primary way to find solutions to perceived problems.
5. Traditional cold calling is a failed strategy. If they don't know you, you're being immediately round filed regardless of how clever your voice mail message.
6. You need to select and invest heavily into your CRM system. It takes a team of people to make a software or SaaS sale and your CRM is your central point of account and prospect information. There are many great systems, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Maximizer, Siebel and many others. Which ever one you select, you need a top down mandate to capture all customer interactions including sales and support incidents into a single system.

Unfortunately, although I wrote an internal paper on these changes in marketing and sales when I started at Keynote Systems 7 years ago, I wasn't smart enough to begin compiling best practices and write a book. Over the next several weeks, I am going to attempt to discuss the strategies and ideas I believe can help transition you towards success in this new world. If you have any ideas or reactions, please comment!