Sales 2.0 Event Spotlights Need For New Metrics, Collaboration Tools As Edge For Agile Companies

Nearly 600 executives in sales and marketing turned out in San Francisco this week for the latest of the Sales 2.0 Conference series. Under the theme, “Sales Productivity in the Cloud,” executives from salesforce.com, Intuit, ADP, Microsoft and others shared insights into how they are using sales and marketing automation tools to drive revenue growth and customer satisfaction.

While many companies are struggling to drive growth in the current business environment, Gerhard Gschwandtner, Publisher and Founder of Selling Power Magazine suggested companies must transform their business models to keep pace with the rapid changes being driven by the Web. “We are going through multiple revolutions right now and companies must align their core business strategy with the revolutionary trends that are transforming our world or we will become a victim of change,” Gschwandtner said. “Survival demands a strategic transformation on two fronts: outside alignment and inside refinement.”

One of the core ways companies are gaining a competitive edge is through the use of sales and marketing automation tools to accelerate sales cycles and improve their flow of qualified leads. While growth rates in software and many other sectors have been in the single digits for the past two years, the conference speakers consistently demonstrated that Sales 2.0 organizations are enjoying higher growth rates and customer loyalty by accelerating their sales cycles and improving collaboration by utilizing automated tools and processes.

The panel session “Innovations in Lead Generation & Customer Acquisition,” featured speakers from Intuit, ON24, TriNet and ADP sharing how their organizations had improved sales efficiency and increased the volume of opportunities through the use of sales intelligence tools, lead scoring and reducing the response time to new leads. TriNet, in particular, pointed out that the company had reduced time to productivity for its growing sales force was reduced from 18 months to 7 months by adopting Sales 2.0 tools and processes.

In another session on sales & marketing alignment, Kirk Crenshaw, Director of Marketing at Appiro, shared that the company’s lead volume has grown by 195% in the past year since the company deployed the Marketo lead management suite. The company’s pipeline has also increased by 100%, its volume of marketing attributed leads has climbed by 180%, all while its overall marketing spend dropped by 50%.

Collaboration was also a key theme at the conference as attendees got a peek into a new enterprise collaboration tool generating a lot of buzz when Brett Queener, SVP of Products at Salesforce.com provided a preview of the company’s Chatter application. Currently in private beta with approximately 300 Salesforce customers, the enterprise collaboration tool applies similar features and functionality to consumer tools like Facebook.

However, in addition to following co-workers, Chatter allows users to follow and share key documents and data in real time, which Queener predicted would help users “unlock institutional knowledge.” As collaboration is continuing to emerge and evolve within most organizations, Queener pointed out that “functional silos are breaking down” and there are more “give to get scenarios.”

Chatter is slated for general release this summer and Queener said it would be provided at no additional cost to additional Salesforce clients. In addition, employees within Salesforce customer organizations will be invited to join and use Chatter, even if they don’t have a Salesforce license.