Good info.

Beware, Sales 2.0 "process" can get you fired. Verify if your company is still using carrier pigeons, telegraph and "door to door" selling. (which actually can work ok depending on how you do it).

Beware of the "mustache pete" old school manager" IE. "just make more calls" or "when I was a rep, I could find 10 prospects a week and close 3!" Too bad your need 250-1000 companies in the funnel to-day. Hello McFly, reps are out of TIME. (see Sirius surveys) http://www.siriusdecisions.com

If your company/boss is old school, then the top of funnel leadgen is most likely very weak in to-days economy.. In many companies,sales reps are expected to generate 100% of their own leads. In fact CSOinsights surveys indicate sales reps find 40-45% of their own leads. (http://www.csoinsights.com)

They have to, as there is no integrated inside sales/demand system. Add to these the 5-6 meetings to close deals, the ton of product/competitive info to read, etc. no wonder 90 hour weeks are the norm- and so are the divorces.

CRM 100%? SMB sector CEOs', SVPs, sales Managers in many industries including IT, telecom don't even know about ideal customer profiling> ICP database marketing, clean CRM databases, drip marketing, nurturing etc.

They didn't have to 15-25 years when they first got into the business. I used to sell MITEL door to door just after telecom de-regulation. 100% leadgen RATE. EVERY company said they were considering a new PBX to save 100% vs Bell. I remember generating 39 requests for quotes in ONE day worth $1.95MM

MANY Sr Mgrs still measure their reps by these "by gone days metrics". (I used to work at Digital, where the founder Ken Olsen firmly believed that sales commissions were not required and, reps were an annoyance. maybe he had a point, clients would WALK in the front door to BUY).

CRM 100% adoption? sorry its less than that. I'd say about 80%. (installing it doesn't mean your using itI ). Recently I was with the CEO of Toronto based IT VAR who's ranked in the lower half of Top 100 VARs in Canada. Sales have dropped 40% in one year. They were using Excel spreadsheets to manage CRM until 3 months ago. They have 20 employees, $7MM sales. They can only "manage" about 150 relationships (50 existing clients, 50 former clients and about 100 "suspects". Now that 80% of what they are selling are commodities services/products, they need to manage 500-1000 company relationships to create a funnel flow.

Of course MANY companies are drinking the sales 2,0 "process kool-aid": and building inside sales > leadgen process etc, and that's "a good thing".

Henry Ford did it

my 2 cts from Canada

Yes, all the social media tools are valid. I totally believe Inbound vs outbound is the way to go.

Real world trick though is TIME MANAGEMENT. It's my observation that sales people need to super time managers in order to excel. Trish nails the point of where to spend most of your TIME. Social media is a great "time absorber" so we sales people need to figure out the ":social media usage formula" that works for our SPECIFIC market and with our specific prospects. For example, in our own market I see a big difference in the activity of marketing managers vs sales managers on Twitter.

Nigel

Thoughts?