The Metrics-Driven part of "Sales 2.0"

DreamFactory had the opportunity to participate in the Sales 2.0 conference held yesterday at the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco. Considering it was the inaugural event, I was surprised at the strong attendance and some of the great companies that were represented. Geoffrey Moore kicked off the event with a great discussion where he laid out the basic enterprise / solution sale model compared with the traditional mass market brand and demand driven sales model. Although he briefly disparaged the traditional enterprise rep (it wasn’t that long ago that I was one of those, but fortunately I have thick skin) I found myself agreeing with his assertion that the middle of these two models was basically a no-mans land. He then went on to lay out how the Sales 2.0 model enables companies to sell profitably in this zone by leveraging web technology to touch many more customers than possible with the old enterprise sales model. This is something we’ve been practicing for a while here at DreamFactory, so this wasn’t news. What was new and very encouraging to me is that he said the only way to really achieve success using the Web 2.0 sales model was to become a metrics-driven sales organization.

Stu Schmidt from Webex then went on to describe the metrics and methodology for what Webex calls “web touch” selling in great detail. His presentation included several graphic depictions of the Webex pipeline that help Stu and others figure out the pipeline health and velocity of deals moving through the pipeline. I was ecstatic! We have a visual component in our Carousel analytics product that actually draws a graphic depiction of your funnel in salesforce, calculates your velocity at each stage, and enables you to drill down to see individual deals that are moving or are stuck. Most people react with bewilderment or boredom when we show this graph. When we show it to people like Stu who care about these metrics, they usually flip out and become a customer within an hour or two!

Our mission with Carousel is to make it much easier for sales organizations to become metrics driven, and to manage the leading indicators that provide the statistical confidence that the month, quarter or year are on track. Carousel has enabled it here in our sales organization in a very big way, but I feel the need to stand up and shout it in an audience like we had yesterday. I told Eric I’m having t-shirts printed up that say “Ask me about sales pipeline velocity” for the next show!