Gone (and buried, hopefully) are the days of running back to your desk after a trade show with a hand full of business cards and sitting down to make semi-cold calls and then entering basic data into either ACT or Goldmine. Both good basic sales automation tools- back in the day-when the alternative was an over-stuffed Rolodex spilling out hundreds of cards in all shapes and colors with coded notes scribbled everywhere that sometimes only the CIA could interpret.

Today, connections from most trade shows are either dead or in the terminal throes of dying. They were always a stupid, high cost, no-accountability idea fostered largely by less creative marketing people who didn’t know how else to generate leads. I guess, to be fair, back then there were very few alternatives of creating effective lead gen.

So, trade shows are terminal and even more worthless than they were before. Connections generated from event sponsorships are down 60% from 2008. ACT and Goldmine have been replaced with real CRM systems from Salesforce.com, the strong market leader. And more importantly today, much better connection tactics exist everywhere, and they exist in a rich environment where everything becomes seamlessly plugged into virtual networks with instantly accessible analytic-rich data that connect us to prospects, customers and referrers at the touch of an iPhone app. And, the most exciting part is that this level of providing targeted connections is just in its infancy.

Making sales connections and generating new leads today in a Sales 2.0 world has created a true revolution in the way that we market and we sell, and personally, I don’t believe that any sales professional who wants to continue to be relevant has any choice but to fully embrace what is happening.

A couple of ideas to think about over the Dog Days.

Math, Analytics & Process

If Sales 1.0 was all about relationship building and solution selling, the evolution from 1.0 to 2.0 is like the leap from the invention of a simple transistor in the 1960’s to today’s iPhone chip which houses three times more computing power than was in the entire first Apollo moon lander. In a 2.0 world, “relationships” are simply a given and merely constitute the foundation on which highly quantifiable 2.0 connections are going to be identified, qualified, discovered, value propped, ROI’d and closed.

If Sales 1.0 is about playing golf, having dinner and “stopping by the next time I’m in the area”, then a deep dive into the 2.0 world mandates process, function steps, perfected tools and trigger points as absolutes with statistically analyzed metrics at every step all wrapped into online software apps seamlessly tied into your CRM.

Want to start the journey? Download to your iPad or Kindle the book, Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology. A bit dated since it was written two years ago, but a great introductory primer which we make a mandatory read for everyone on the sales teams we coach once the leader decides to move ahead into this brave new world.

Be Like Dave

I recently attended the June Sales 2.0 Conference held in Boston. I wanted to see what was new and since one of the senior people from Salesforce was speaking, I wanted to see if I could finally understand the hyperbuzz on what Chatter was all about. The conference was run by Selling Power, the leading media company focused on all things Sales. In his introductory remarks the Selling Power CEO defined my friend and associate, Dave Fitzgerald, the EVP of Sales, Marketing & Service at Brainshark, as “The Poster Child for Sales 2.0?. Dave was the final speaker in this fact-filled, entertaining and highly productive day, and held the 300 plus person audience in rapt attention as he described what the highly effective sales environment that he and his sales and marketing team have created at Brainshark, one of the leading SaaS players.

Obviously as a co-founder of Brainshark, I’m biased and certainly Joe, Dave and all the senior managers at the company have done a terrific job of putting lots of points on the board, but as the conference proceeded, I had the opportunity to reflect a lot on just who Dave is. Certainly a very strong leader and sales guy, who likes to play golf and dotes over his prized Harley, but at the very heart of it, Dave’s an engineer. He loves process, statistics, metrics and timed experiments, so it’s not surprising to find that Brainshark’s sales success is built on a platform of highly defined sales and marketing systems, rules, automated reports, and lots of automated plug-ins for SFDC. The system works because it’s highly engineered, no one is allowed to color outside the lines, and the Brainshark sales and marketing process produces excellent financial results for the salesguys and therefore for the company.

I should also add to this that Dave’s an old guy, so if Dave can achieve this level of success in less than two years-at his advanced age, there’s simply no excuses for any of us.

Just Plug In

If you are still wondering about whether 2.0 is for you, or you’re not really sure how it would apply to your company, what I would recommend is just plug yourself in over the next couple of months and start immersing yourself in the dialogue of the revolution. A couple of ideas to start:

- Read the Sales 2.0 book that I recommended as a starter.

- The next book I would recommend would be the 2nd Edition (Make sure that it’s the 2nd edition-July, 2010) of The Facebook Era

- Plug yourself into the Sales 2.0 Group on Linked In and RRS their blogs to you.

- Subscribe to the online edition of Selling Power and immerse yourself for 6 to 8 weeks in their articles and blogs.

- Although a bit more about Marketing, in a Sales 2.0 world, somewhat by definition there cannot be any dividing lines between Sales and Marketing anymore, so start reading everything on the Hubspot site from their articles to their books.

As long as we’re on the issue of HubSpot books, you absolutely must read the just released Marketing Lessons from The Grateful Dead. Have read it twice already and just ordered 30 copies for my incoming class of shiny new marketers at Tufts.

And then, just simply plug in. I assume that you have a Salesforce or Saleslogix CRM system (everything else is “just ok”). If you’re not fluent, now is the time to immerse yourself. Then tie in a marketing app from Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot or Silverpop, take any of them out for a spin and try them out. Assess your comfort, start measuring the results and you’re on your way. A lot of this simply comes down to you making the personal commitment to learn how to become fluent in a new language, and just doing it.

Enjoy the rest of the summer & Good Selling !

Jack