It has been a great trip and I had the opportunity to speak at the event on Sales & Marketing alignment.  Not a new concept but the tools and technologies to drive it continue to evolve – none of which is effective without a shared set of expectations and pervasive selling mindset.

I was excited to catch up with Nancy Nardin of Smart Selling Tools, chat with Anneke Seley of Phoneworks and meet Jim Keenan for the first time in person.  Like most events the conversations between sessions and in the hallway proved the most valuable.

It was also great to catch up with Meetul Shah of LookAcross and meet Michael Leeds of IntroRocket in person.  Meetul has just moved to Sunnyvale to be part of the most recent 500 Startups crop and rounding out the Seattle contingent I had the great pleasure of meeting JP Werlin from PipelineDeals.  Easy to use, on-demand sales pipeline management (no, you don’t need Salesforce.com for this).

All of these folks are looking at ways to innovate and rethink sales based on new levels of connectivity, information availability, and speed – I’ll collectively call it sales & marketing hacks.  I did, however, think this group was underrepresented in the panels and keynotes.  The Sales 2.0 gang is definitely looking forward but many of the vendors present are stuck in the past just getting better at bad things.

A “live prospecting demo” brought this home clearly which included one of the most memorable live demos but also one of the most uncomfortable ones I’ve ever witnessed.  If you were there, you know what I am talking about.  If you were not, let’s just say listening to someone cold call their way through a company directory and receptionists screams all that is wrong with current accepted approaches to prospecting and selling (ping me and I’ll tell you the company if you are curious).

I’m looking forward to doing a full session at the November Sales 2.0 event in Santa Monica.  I’ll be sharing more details about Nearstream and how we are taking a different approach to lead generation by starting with the buyer – a simple but overlooked concept.  Stay tuned for more on that!