sales 2.0

Sales 2.0 Recap: New connections, old friends, & an awkward demo

/ Robert Pease / 2 Comments
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I spent the past couple days in San Francisco as part of an 8 day road trip that took me to Atlanta to meet with the LoopFuse gang, St. Simons Island for a bit of golf watching at the McGladrey Classic with my brother and Dad then to San Francisco to be part of the Sales 2.0 event.

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!

Headed to the Inside Sales Leadership Summit in Minneapolis

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

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I am on my way to Minneapolis where I will be giving a presentation around the bottom line results that can be derived from using social media in the sales process.  I'll be co-presenting with Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing and am looking forward to showing off how to use Gist as a sales tool at the event. 

If you are going or are in Minneapolis and want to connect, let me know robertcpease at gmail dot com.

I'll post summary thoughts and key takeaways as well.

So, what is Gist?

/ Robert Pease / 1 Comment

Arguably, we have been perfectly vague publicly about what Gist is, what it is used for, and how it fits into your daily life.  This is due in large part to being in a limited release where we continue to add features, refine the product, and incorporate feedback from a phenomenal set of beta users. 

So the question remains, what is Gist?  Is it a contact manager, better contact management system, new way to think about CRM software, a new type of sales or business intelligence software?  I guess the answer is that it embraces a bit of all of these things focusing on blending how your contacts, connections, and all the associated content you share and they generate comes together for your use.  Kind of a whole new approach to personal relationship management that combines elements of all of the above.

I use it daily because a) I work there and b) because it fits with what I do – contact people, respond to people, follow up with people, look for a reason to reach out, etc.  Ultimately, Gist takes the broad set of people that you communicate with or desire to communicate with, aggregates information about them, and serves it up to you in rank order with you having to do pretty much nothing. Oh, and it really shines when you use it inside MS Outlook or Salesforce.com (supported in our most recent beta release).

Sound cool?  Watch this video for a more detailed product tour by yours truly and drop a comment or email to me – robertcpease at gmail dot com if you want to try the beta.