While every speaker should consider planning their remarks so as to be considered for an invitation next year, I chose a radically different approach. I decided to tell the truth. I focused my talk not of the romance of CRM systems but on the content they might carry that could better persuade customers and accelerate the selling process. I stated the simple truth that most internal company information, what most CRM systems of that time shared, was largely useless in the selling process, and that it was external information about the client, client company, client behavior, and client market that moved sales along.
My session was greeted with great enthusiasm by attendees, less so by the conference organizers who declined to invite me back the following year. Some vindication came a few weeks after the conference when "Inc." magazine wrote a review of the conference. Of the 100 speakers, they quoted only three; me, they guy who told the truth, was quoted first. Geoffrey Moore, the famous Silicon Valley marketing guru and featured conference speaker followed. But Sales 2.0 technologies look very different if you apply the same "what kind of persuasive content does it leverage" metric I used in 2001.Sales 2.0 systems gather and leverage external client centric information. This is a fundamental difference. But after at a program in New York last month moderated by Sales 2.0 CEO Nigel Edelshain, I approached one of the speakers, Razi Imam, CEO of Landslide Technologies a Sales 2.0 company, and asked how his system differed from CRM a system. His immediate reaction was to visibly shutter, as if he had just seen a ghost, and exclaim, "Oh, I hate CRM systems!"