Random Musings – The Inside Sales Revolution, SaaS, and Self-Service
5 August 2010 — Ken Krogue
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The Harvard Business Review says our customers don’t want to talk to us.
While a sobering thought, I’m also wondering if this doesn’t in part explain the move to “cloud computing” and SaaS over the last ten years.
SaaS takes away some of the most frustrating customer “touch points” of software—maintaining hardware compatibility, the frequent need for updates/patches, as well as having to completely relearn a new interface for every application. Web apps use concepts we’re already familiar with—clicks, links, embedded content—and puts it in front of the user.
Though the occasional unreliability of Internet service can be a problem, to me SaaS represents a trend in this idea that “self-service” often trumps “customer interaction.”
Another quick point:
We’ve been saying it for a while now, but it’s nice to see someone else is taking up the mantra:
Selling Power recently posted an outstanding article describing what we’ve known was coming for sales teams—that technology is going to replace some jobs, and only the most qualified sales reps that are willing to adapt are going to survive.
Inside sales is replacing “outside” sales because it’s faster, more cost effective, and provides more […]
@TrishBertuzzi The AA-ISP Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professionals in America http://ow.ly/1M2ls #ls10 #in about 23 hours ago via LinkedIn
3 more cool videos from Steve Richards of Vorsight about prospecting – http://bit.ly/cun8OO – these guys are great for inside sales 11:16 AM May 15th via API
Mark Roberge from Hubspot taught about running an Inside Sales team at AA-ISP – pretty awesome – http://bit.ly/9fxMtG (he’s from MIT!) 10:33 AM May 15th via API
Steve Richards from Vorsight – best presentation on using cold calling to get to decision makers – http://bit.ly/9AOtFx 10:00 AM May 15th via API
David Sills from PCHelps gave a great presentation at AA-ISP conference about Best Practices – great speaker 3:24 PM May 14th via API
Congrats to Trish Bertuzzi for lifetime achievement award at AA-ISP conference – she deserves it! – http://bit.ly/cZjSEN 2:49 PM May 14th via API
RT @hubspot SEO Is Evolving: But Relevant Content Is Still King http://bit.ly/dzw5hv 1:45 PM May 14th via TweetMeme
Just added myself to the http://wefollow.com twitter directory under: #provo_ut #salesforce #b2b #leadgeneration #insidesales #leadmanagem 10:27 AM May 14th via WeFollow
One of the best presentations at the AA-ISP show was the Keynote by Mike Damphousse on […]
I first heard of ‘Web 2.0’ from Chris Knudsen and Dave Beisinger, at a vidcast company called 10SpeedMedia. They were helping us make micromercials to test web video as a new lead generation media. They told me enough to get me very interested.
As my research about Web 2.0 began on Google in the summer of 2006, I started with Tim O’Reilly’s landmark article ‘What Is Web 2.0’ and expanded from there. I read Paul Graham and Andrew Keen and dozens of others and was enthralled and amazed at the point and counterpoints surrounding the Web 2.0 buzz.
I wanted to see how all of this related to sales. I immediately wondered what ‘Sales 2.0’ would look like. I knew someone espousing Sales 2.0 would be close behind.
Sure enough. I soon found that everybody out there had come up with their version of ‘Something 2.0’: Call Center 2.0, Business 2.0, Marketing 2.0 and Small Business 2.0 to name a few. The common thread was that they all linked back to the disruptive change brought about by the Internet.
It was August of 2006, I couldn’t find a thing on the web about Sales 2.0. I bought the domain Sales2-0.com to have a way to communicate our thoughts.
I didn’t […]
