[This is the fourth in a series on 6 Factors that are transforming B2B Sales in 2012. This factor deals with Social - and I have broken that down into four separate posts. This is the second of the posts on Social.]

Social Trust

We are seeing a fundamental shift in the interactions between buyers and sellers, and indeed between all commercial entities and their customers. Attitude and preference, as they relate to how a customer thinks about a business, are more likely to be informed by peer groups than by expensive commercials or company statements.

For any network to work effectively, it has…

[This is the third in a series on 6 Factors that are transforming B2B Sales in 2012. This factor deals with Social - and I have broken that down into four separate posts that will be published over the coming week.]

If Mobile is the needle, then Social is the thread.

Mobile makes information accessible anytime, anywhere, and can make information location sensitive.  But Social weaves all of the information together, and we each get to create our own tapestry – being curators of information from multiple and varied sources, engaging and allowing us to shape, create, and co-create information in our own…

[This is the second in a series on 6 Factors that are transforming B2B Sales in 2012.]

The inexorable rise of mobile device ownership is one of the most significant changes in the business landscape that any of us has witnessed in our lifetimes.  In most developed economies in the world, practically everyone has a cell phone, an increasing number of which are smartphones, and the rapid growth of tablet ownership, pioneered by Apple’s iPad, is the fastest market penetration of any device we have ever seen.

The Mobile Landscape

Unless mobile is a core element of the strategic plan of any business,…

I spoke at InsideView’s Insider Summit meeting in March 2012. The topic was about sales metrics that you might measure to calculate your sales velocity – the revenue you can achieve every day – and some ideas about what you might do to improve your sales velocity, and also achieve accurate sales forecasts.

The video has been edited to remove the Q&A and to make some of the slides easier to see. Click play to view the video. It runs about 25 minutes.

This is my first video blog, and I’d welcome any comments on the format, or comments or questions on…

Time is precious, and the sales person’s time is incredibly precious, both to them and to the sales organization looking to maximize the performance of their key quota-bearers.  Since so much of a sales person’s time is spent moving between A and B and back again, does it make sense to equip them with the tools to connect to their stakeholders to the greatest extent possible?

As with many important strategic decisions, though, it becomes a question of degree.  To what degree should we enable our sales people to be on the grid when they’re mobile?  Where on the spectrum of…

I recently had the privilege of speaking at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.  My session – entitled Six Factors that are Transforming B2B Sales – seemed to strike a chord.  Over the next few posts I want to recount the thoughts I shared and get your views.

I started my presentation with a perspective on the current landscape and the environment in which we all seek to survive and thrive.

– o – o – o – o – o –

Do you ever have one of those days when you get up and hope that just for one day nothing changes? …

I read a blog post from the CEO of one the leading brand names in sales training and it bothered me greatly. If this is representative of what is being taught in sales training classes today it is not only worrisome, but plainly wrong on a number of counts.

The post talks about the frustration that a sales person may experience when the Economic Buyer – a truly outdated concept, in my opinion – supports the sales person’s solution but can’t proceed because his team wants to go in a different direction.  The post goes on to suggest a framework to…

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking at a conference for one of our partners. My presentation – “So, you have a $500k sales forecast?” – was essentially a story about the impact that good sales process design, planning, automation and measurement can have on revenue achievement.

The company in the case study I used achieved a dramatic revenue improvement (194%) by working the four levers that impact sales velocity. Also, because they planned, measured, and automated everything along the way, the system they used automatically produced an uncommonly accurate sales forecast.

I’ve written before about the value of sales process and the…

It’s been too long since I’ve posted here. We’ve been a little busy with the new release of Dealmaker (big news – now it’s fully iPad enabled); we recently launched a new website; just completed the deployment of Dealmaker to one of the world’s largest companies, and signed a very significant partnership with a global powerhouse. You will hear more about that soon.

But it is time to get back to the blog.

The big news in the mobile market in March was the launch of the new iPad. Notwithstanding the fact Apple’s new tablet is a bit lacking in the nomenclature department…

In my previous post, Which B2B Social Network is the Most Valuable? I referenced the research we did through the DealmakerIndex and it was very clear that LinkedIn is valued a lot more by B2B professionals than any of the other outlets in the Social Universe. There has been much written about LinkedIn best practices, but just this week Dave Stein at ES Research put together his thoughts on LinkedIn and some observations about how it is used.

I liked very much what Dave had to say, and with his permission I have included his thoughts here. The comments in [italics] are my additions.

In Dave’s…