The problem with easy to use technologies some times, is just that – they’re easy to use, and sometimes people can confuse simple with simplistic.This was brought home to me last week when I was speaking to a sales person who was really excited about sales 2.0, felt that the time had come to cast off his threadbare coat of traditional approaches to selling and to don a new shiny suit called sales 2.0. Why was he so excited? Well, he felt that the technology could do a lot of the work for him, and he wouldn’t have to work as hard, or think as hard about each sale.Well, he’s right about the first bit – sales 2.0 can help in many ways to automate tasks, share information, guide selling tasks, and remove many of the non-productive tasks that unfortunately are an all too common part of a sales person’s day.It’s the second part that I have a problem with. Although sales 2.0 can help guide sales activity, it cannot remove the requirement to think, or in this particularly case to target the customer appropriately, and then ask the hard questions to qualify ruthlessly. In this person’s case sales 2.0 meant 50% brain engagement – and that just doesn’t help at all. It just means you screw up faster.










June 9th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Donal,
Too many individuals–and unfortunately their managers as well–are looking at Sales 2.0 as the latest universal elixir for sales-related problems. Those are the same people who expected CRM to come to the rescue and fix all their problems, and then complained when it didn’t.
Whenever you’ve got vendors hyping a new paradigm and, at the same time, users looking for the next silver bullet, there are going to be problems. It’s just part of the process.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:01 am
I agree. Everyone’s hanging their hat on xyz 2.0 these days, didn’t take long before the buzzword became mainstream. I saw an advertisement for an ‘Enterprise 2.0′ event yesterday, what does that mean?
Technology is just the medium, not the message. It’s the medium which is changing the sales game for sure, but it’s still not the message.