I was recently invited to attend the Sales 2.0 Conference, which takes place on March 4 & 5, 2009 in San Francisco. I always like to attend conferences, so I gladly accepted. But I did wonder:
How does Sales 2.0 relate to Marketing Automation?
In the traditional way of thinking, if something is labeled “sales” it is clearly not marketing. Luckily, things are changing. The best definition of Sales 2.0 captures this, by mentioning the importance of having a customer-focused process that is supported by both sales and marketing:
“Sales 2.0 brings together customer-focused methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science. Sales 2.0 relies on a repeatable, collaborative and customer-enabled process that runs through the sales and marketing organization, resulting in improved productivity, predictable ROI and superior performance.” – Pelin Wood Thorogood and Gerhard Gschwandtner
Having applied Sales 2.0 techniques in my own job, I’ve seen that the collaboration between marketing and sales has improved significantly: the sales team now knows what they can expect from marketing. The processes are better defined, and the outcomes are more measurable.
Sales 2.0 Tools
On this blog I often cover solutions that support the marketing & sales process. If you look at the sponsors of the Sales 2.0 Conference you get a good overview of the type of products offered in the Sales 2.0 space. This is just a subset:
- Genius.com
Email and analytics tools for demand generation; Genius.com offers products for both individual sales people as well as marketing teams - Marketo
Lead Management software, to streamline the lead generation process from inquiry to sales-ready lead - Xactly
Compensation management software; seems most interesting for larger sales organizations - LucidEra, Angoss, Birst
Sales & Marketing Analytics; they will probably be upset that I bundled them together,but based on their websites it looks like they do a similar thing: providing better insight into sales & marketing performance - GroupSwim Sales Collaboration
Collaboration software for Sales & Marketing teams; includes a strong knowledge sharing component.
And then there are a whole range of sales productivity tools (e.g. ConnectAndSell and Xobni) and data vendors (like JigSaw). Also, services vendors are present, from lead generation services to sales training.
The Conference Schedule
In addition to interesting Sales 2.0 vendors, the conference has an nice line-up of speakers. This includes Brian Carroll (author of Lead Management for the Complex Sale), Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer of CSO Insights, Judy Fick of Unisys and many more. The event is hosted by Gerhard Gschwandtner of SellingPower and David Thompson of Genius.com. If you want to meet up, please send me an email (
) or Tweet.
Are you planning to attend the conference? It looks like there will be some interesting topics for demand generation marketers, what is your take?
Jep, look forward to seeing you at the conference. I’ve been working with the conference organizers and it should be a great conference with focus on how both sales and marketing can leverage Sales 2.0 to be more sales focused. Specifically, Genius CEO, David Thompson is moderating a great panel of CMOs which you might want to check out. It’s called Marketing for Sales Success. The panelists include Gail Ennis, CMO of Omniture, Kendall Collins the new CMO at Salesforce and Mark Wilson the head of Corporate Marketing at Sybase. It’s at 3:30 on March 4th.