Rhymes with Cars

D'oh, I realized halfway to San Francisco that I forgot my camera. Double d'oh. So early this morning, I embarked on San Francisco to come to the Sales 2.0 conference. This is my second S2.0 and I was really honored to be asked by David Thompson and Gerhard Gschwandtner to come up on a media pass to blog the show. I'm not a live blogger because my spelling is horrendous and my attitude is snarky until I think about things, but I'll be putting together a series of posts about the conference and the seminars I attended. I had a bunch of real work pop up, so some posts may be longer than others. I'll finish the series with just a series of random notes throughout the day. If you weren't here, it probably won't make sense. Some are snarky. The opening key note was great and David always does a wonderful job engaging the audience.  The theme was momentum and exciting. he quickly turned over the podium to Gerhard who asked everyone to point north.  It was funny to see everyone point in different directions. I went off of where I thought 101 was, which is usually my barometer when I'm anywhere.  The point was that we needed to get pointed towards true north.  Tools can help, but there is a limit on to what technology can do and it is important that sales people leverage these tools appropriately to move things forward. In fact, he stirred the pot a bit by saying that sales people are 2 steps behind their customers.  Often times, customers are more informed about products than sales people are.  He used the analogy that we are like early animals coming out of the water but being stuck in the mud.  There is too much information and we can't get a good footing.  The trick is to more quickly weed out the bad information. Entering the Conversation Economy

1. Knowledge of what we know can hurt us.  Gerhard went on to explain that when a group gets together, reason sometimes goes out the window.  It is the Achilles heel of Web 2.0.  We are now entering a conversation economy in which sales people need to 'ditch the pitch', develop a conversation with their customers and truly help them.
2. Transactional sales are going to die in the next 3 years.  If you aren't selling in a  consultative manner, you are going to starve.
3. You have to live in a world of co-creation. Don't sell, co-create with your customers.  Help them build what they want.
4. More science is coming to sales.  A big them is around Total Quality Management (TQM). Companies need to take a Six Sigma approach to sales leveraging metrics to drive productivity in the right way
5. In the old days, companies created customers.  Today, customers can make or break a company.

There is no bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.