I’m on vacation right now in beautiful Northern Italy, on the shores of Lake Garda.  The sun is high in the sky, the Italians are chattering animatedly, the ancient towns and villages exude bonhomie that belies their troubled history, and wines from Tuscany coupled with  too much pasta are making this an all too enjoyable experience - I don’t really want to go back to work!

But then … I just paid the equivalent of $9.12 a gallon to refuel my rental car! Reality bites!

An article in today’s New York Times cites examples of the impact of the increasing cost of […]

This morning was like no other I have experienced in my previous two years riding the commuter train, and it serves as a great case-study of how to (not) leverage Web 2.0 technologies to help me (as a customer ) solve some  problems I have (and was about to have).   You see, I didn’t know or realize that there was going to be a real problem in getting to work this morning.  In fact, the problem would be so bad that it would cost me almost 2 hours of wasted time.

…. I could have benefited from the collaboration of hundreds […]

Karl Goldfield contacted me the other day. illumio flagged one of his posts, so I read it.

In this post, Karl goes on a rant about technology and sales training. Here is my favorite part of his (unedited) challenge to sales trainers:

If you are not tweeting your blog posts and sending newsletters to keep your mind trust strong in the frontal lobe of your prospects and customers; if you are not joining groups and connecting on Linked In or E-cademy, Facebook or Plaxo; if you are not using Jigsaw or Salesconx to find your the top level prospects; if you do not […]

One of most hotly contested issues between the Sales and Marketing disciplines is the topic of lead source quality.Marketing believes they supply quality leads in sufficient quantity to Sales who cannot seem to close them. Sales, on the other hand, believes Marketing does not produce enough leads and those that are provided are of poor quality. Organizations faced with this strategic conflict have difficulty finding a means to arbitrate the dispute.

Sales benchmarking provides such a reliable mechanism. By revealing to an organization which of its own leads are ‘the best’, benchmarking allowing executives to compare performance to that of a […]

There is much discussion today about Sales 2.0 technology and it’s impact on sales process, the buyer-seller relationship, and sales management practices.  Much of the discussion  focuses on the individual and team impact of these technologies in various areas such as knowledge management (CRM, etc.), prospecting (LinkedIn, etc), and  industry knowledge (portals and dicussion boards).  This technology focuses on the sales process and helping sales teams cope with the rapid change they face in their market.  Certainly, there is an impact for Sales 2.0 technology in this space, and I wonder how much more we have yet to see.  As […]

What does Sales 2.0 look like for Salesperson Development?  

 There are many Sales 2.0 tools that can help salespeople learn.  The goal of any of these applications should be to help salespeople increase their personal knowledge and skill.  It should better equip them to deal with the complexities of their industry as well as stay ahead of the competition.   The applications below can provide user-driven web content that leverage the minds and actions of others to achieve sales development:

Stumbleupon: The general idea of stumbleupon is to discover really interesting information without searching for it — sounds like a salesperson’s dream — especially […]

We’ve received a few comments recently on S20N about the fact that most of the posts are about how to use S20 to sell more effectively, and not enough time is spent on how S20 can be used to enhance sales learning, or help folks improve sales competencies. For me, one of the reasons for that, is that I don’t want use the network just to promote the products we offer - but perhaps I’ve let the pendulum swing too far. I will shortly submit a post on our vision for how S2o and Web 2.0 can deliver Learning 2.0 […]

Sometimes it just takes some time. But in the case of Sales 2.0 I’m seeing much greater traction, much more quickly that I could have hoped.  All that Web 2.0 stuff is beginning to make a difference to those of us who care about sales.

In the last few weeks we have seen announcements from Oracle ( Oracle preps first social CRM offering for Enterprise 2.0), salesforce.com and Google (Salesforce for Google Apps), lots of activity at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston last week and lots of continued venture capital investment in Web 2.0 related activities such as Yoono that enable great social media […]

I got an interesting response to a press release we (The TAS Group) issued earlier this week.

The press release spoke about an updated way to deliver sales training. One of our readers sent me a link to this presentation by John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, where he holds a conversation with a person 14,000 miles away, but present on stage with John Chambers - as a hologram!

It may not be available to all of us to use today - but as a glimpse into the future of meetings, sales training workshops, etc. it may be uncommonly prescient. And anyway - it’s really […]

The rate at which turnover occurs in the sales ranks does not change much from year to year. Yet, sales managers keep deploying the same interviewing, hiring, and coaching approaches. No wonder the turnover does not change.

What is a solution to break the impasse? Sales management innovation — in other words, define a new approach to an old task.

Let’s consider one quick example – the retail chain Whole Foods. Based on their innovative business model, which breaks down each department in the grocery store into its own profit and loss center, they developed a completely decentralized hiring model. Only those […]