Selling is far more complicated than that and the real pros know and respect this. They also know how to help a buyer make the decision that is most appropriate for them. If it happens to be the product that person is offering, great! If not, that’s OK too because a good sales person will run as fast as they can from a bad fit. Their job is to find the right fit, the right time and the process to make it happen. In order to do that, they are likely working on 3-4 times their overall sales reponsibility to narrow opportunities down to those that are best suited to the products / services they are representing. Furthermore, the sales / buying process is a team effort that is comprised of experts from both the buyer and the vendor. A good sales person is the “quarterback” in that effort.

For those of you who actually believe products “sell themselves”, good luck. The ditch is full of excellent products and technologies that never found their markets, were discarded because real business value was never uncovered, or generally poor business execution.

But, I’m so tired of hearing everybody blame the sales person. If you want to know where all of those pressure tactics, psycological manouvers and games came from, look to your business leaders who force companies to do whatever is necessary at any cost to make the numbers. Even with this, a good sales person will still figure out how to it the right way for them, their company and most importantly their customers. And, just for the record, there are many Sales / Web 2.0 vendors out there using these same old tactics online, without “Sales People”.

Sales 2.0 is nothing new in process and methodolgy. It’s only a new set of tools that when used correctly leverages new capabilities to deliver value. The fundamentals have not changed. Why, because human nature has not, nor ever will change. And, people, not processes or corporations, are still the ultimate decision factor.
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Don’t get sucked into the Sales 2.0 hype OR inbound marketing mania. Not all buyers are out there looking for a solution. If that were the case we wouldn’t need sales at all. What about innovators and early adopters – what about situations where your competitors have set the agenda and the buyer doesn’t even know you exist – what about good old fashioned taking latent pain to recognized pain? Not all markets or solutions are created equally so to assume a one size sales model fits all is a recipe for disaster.

There is a middle ground that we are all racing over to get from Sales 1.0 to 2.0. It combines knowledge of the market with intelligent approaches to inbound and outbound selling. Before you throw the baby out with the bathwater look at what you can fix now…read our “Have You Mastered Sales 1.5?” article to see what I am talking about http://blog.bridgegroupinc.com/blog/tabid/47760/bid/9747/Have-You-Mastered-Sales-1-5.aspx.

Thanks for listening – now I have to go sell something.
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Interesting that you chose Darmesh from Hubspot as your example. Hubspot has been championing the Inbound Marketing movement for a while and we’ve been championing the Sales 2.0 movement. We now all realize that sales and marketing departments are coming together in a “Sales 2.0 world”. So I believe you will see a lot of commonality between the Inbound Marketing and Sales 2.0 movements going forward – maybe even a joint conference one day.

Times are certainly a-changin’ in sales (good thing too “Sales 1.0″ was invented in the 1890’s – by John Patterson of NCR).

Nigel

Are we setting up a paradox, here? Social Media are killing people’s attention span, and there are several examples of places using social media such as video to get a message across. But in my social media ADHD way, I can’t be bothered to wait for the video, so the the message doesn’t get across to me. So are social media ultimately self-defeating?
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