Sales 2.0 Newsletter

Using the Internet to generate leads isn't enough to make sales professionals productive, according to Chip Terry, vice president and general manager of sales intelligence at ZoomInfo, a business information search engine. "If you don't qualify those leads, you could end up wasting valuable time pursuing deals that aren't real," he explains. Terry cites the example of a security company whose software did not run on a popular operating system platform. As a result,...read more.

CRM was never intended to be a tool for sales professionals – an oversight that Sales 2.0 corrects, according to Razi Imam, founder and CEO of Landslide, an on-demand "workstyle management" software and service vendor. As Imam sees it, CRM was designed to track the various steps of a sales process, but because it was primarily an internal tool, it tended to define processes in the way that vendors wanted to sell....read more.

Sales managers can find themselves swamped by too many technology choices, according to Barry Trailer, a partner at sales effectiveness research and benchmarking company CSO Insights. The problem? There are so many tools that impact so many aspects of the sales process that it can be a full-time job simply figuring out what's available. "I had a sales manager tell me recently that if she bought all the CRM and Sales 2.0 technology that are available to her,...read more.

Xactly not only creates and sells Sales 2.0 software, but also uses a number of other Sales 2.0 resources to be more productive, according to Karen Steele, the company's Chief Marketing Officer. "We use a software package called Manticore for lead generation and nurturing, another package called BigMachine to manage our quoting process," Steele explains. "We use Genius.com to gain insight into the leads that come into our system,...read more.