Friday, March 06, 2009

Sales 2.0 Conference 2009

Yesterday I attended day 1of the Sales 2.0 Conference 2009 in San Francisco hosted by Gerhard Gschwandtner: Founder and CEO of Selling Power Inc and David Thompson: Founder and CEO of Genius.com Inc.

The focus of the conference was, "How to Accelerate Sales in a Slow Economy." Most of the speakers stressed that the most successful companies in a down economy are the companies that are deploying the right strategy and using the right tools to win more deals.

Though at times I felt like I was sitting through sales pitches, the point was to demonstrate companies that are moving forward are those that invested in Web 2.0 applications which provided visibility, data analytics, improve lead management and sales effectiveness while decreasing costs and enhancing the customer experience. A list of some of the companies covered are listed below.

Featured Sponsors and Web 2.0 Technologies:

  • ConnectandSell: call management and automated appointment setting for sales prospecting
  • Genius.com: email marketing and marketing automation
  • InsideView: sales intelligence application
  • SalesGenie: sales list and email list management
  • Xactly: sales performance management and analytics
  • Hoovers: contact, company, prospecting database
  • Miller Heiman: sales training: strategic selling
  • Ribbitt: voice to text conversion, integrated with Salesforce.com
  • LucidEra: on-demand sales analysis and reports
  • JigSaw: contact management database
  • Holden International: sales training: power base selling
  • Xobni: Outlook plug-in for email management. One of my personal favorite applications out there today.
  • Selling Power: publication
  • Birst: business intelligence and reporting
  • Marketo: email marketing and marketing automation

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert