Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
I am so fed up with the Sales 2.0 hysteria.
Sales 2.0 - it's about getting found and using the social networking tools to make connections - and that's all good.
But none of it replaces good old fashioned Sales 0.0 or 1.0 and to believe it does is a dangerous thing.
Whether you are performing SEO to help you get found, using LinkedIn, Facebook, Google or Twitter to let people know you are here, or using any one of the array of cool new tools to determine how best to connect, make the connection or continue the dialog, all of these tools are used as a means of getting your new prospect to the phone and/or a face to face meeting.
What you can't do with Sales 2.0 tools is use them to sell. You can't take short cuts, you can't sell or have a conversation via email and you can't express yourself effectively in print unless you are an award winning novelist; and most prospects don't have the attention span to read that many words.
If by using all of these tools, your salespeople still have an empty or weak pipeline, they must pick up the phone and make calls the way salespeople have been doing for decades. Of course it's more difficult to reach people today, but that is not a reason to stop calling. If you need to schedule meetings, they surely won't happen by themselves!
Sales 2.0 tools, just like the face-to-face networking that came before it, are supplements to phone calls, not the other way around. If you can't control it, you can't depend on it. If your salespeople must have 12 appointments per month, then they must plan to make calls to schedule 12 appointments per month. If along the way they happen to receive 4 introductions from customers, clients, their social networking or their local network, then great! Then they'll only need to make calls to schedule 8 appointments this month.
Sales 2.0 - I love the tools, but they don't replace the basics.
