I’m in Santa Monica today for a Sales 2.0, Social and Mobile conference. It kicked off last night with a VIP reception. The reception talked about the challenges and opportunities for todays sales managers. As you can imagine, much of the conversation evolved around social media and the changes sales leaders are facing today.
Frost and Sullivan was one of the panelists and provided some interesting stats outlining sales leadership challenges and opportunities.
Challenges:
- 73% see changes in customer buying behavior as a challenge
- 77% are feeling commoditization pressures
- 50% see identifying and qualifying high-potential prospects
- 22% find it difficult to respond to clients changing business environment
- 40% want to accelerate the close
- 22% looking to improve sales reps productivity
- 22% need to align the sales process with the customers’ purchasing
- 93% see product and service innovation as an opportunity
I know, only one opportunity came out of the research. I thought this was interesting too.
Social media and mobile provide and excellent opportunity for sales leaders should they chose to embrace it and learn how to use it. Unfortunately, too few sales organizations are using social media as a productive tool. For some reason, sales as an functional group are slow to adopt social media. I was at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco 3 weeks ago and only a small fraction of the attendees were actually tweeting.
Gerhard Gschwandter the moderator gave us a killer sound bite: “Sales organizations have adoption apathy!” I think Gerhard is right.
I’m looking forward to this conference. I’m curious to hear what the presenters have to say, but even more curious to see how the attendees respond — “adoption apathy” has to go.
