All in Sales Management

I’m optimistic. I’m beginning to think that second-nature use of collaborative technologies by non-technologists, both for social engagement as well as for work, could reach a tipping point much sooner than I had thought. It’s not going to be completely smooth sailing, though.

McKinney Interviews Cochran about First HP Pocket Scientific Calculator

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the podcast of Phil McKinney’s interview with David Cochran about Cochran’s involvement on the team at Hewlett-Packard (HP) that designed the first pocket scientific calculator. The situation was interesting from the standpoint of innovation management and luck.
I haven’t really decided how “revolutionary” web 2.0 applications are. One school of thought is that web 2.0 applications like blogs, podcasts, and wikis are “just another set of channels” to be considered in the overall mix of ways to manage communications with one’s target markets and customers. There’s another school of thought, though, that suggests that the interactivity and social networking aspects of Web 2.0 are finamentally changing the balance of power and influence in the marketplace in a profound way. I come down somewhere in the middle.
I’ve used Salesmetric (www.salesmetric.com), a hosted, web based sales lead tracking system, for a couple of years. (The provider calls it a “sales force automation” tool.) In this report I describe my experiences using it and some of the things that I have learned. Overall I’m very pleased with the system. I have learned a lot about this type of tool and what that might say about using other hosted, web based tools with groups of users spread around the country.