Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Dave Fitzgerald, EVP Of Sales And Marketing, Brainshark (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada

SM: Enterprise sales cycles tended to be pretty long, especially when there was a complex sale involved. What you are saying is today, you may have figured out a way to use these sales 2.0 techniques to shorten that sales cycle. Is that a fair statement? >>>

Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Dave Fitzgerald, EVP Of Sales And Marketing, Brainshark (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada

SM: Let’s talk a bit more about touching prospects. Let’s say it’s not sales or marketing touching the prospect, but inside sales. In your experience, what does touching the prospect look like? >>>

Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Dave Fitzgerald, EVP Of Sales And Marketing, Brainshark (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada

SM: With that context, define sales 2.0 for me. There are a lot of definitions floating around; what is yours?

DF: I honestly don’t have a definition. I have been in sales and marketing in the software industry for thirty years, and I believe if you lined up ten VPs of sales, you would get ten different definitions. My view of sales 2.0 – I think a friend who is the editor for Selling Power magazine, Gerhard Gschwandtner, is in agreement with this – I think it is marketing and sales 2.0. It is intersecting the sales and marketing processes embellished by a number of different technologies. It is where sales and marketing processes intersect with newer technologies, a lot of which are SaaS based. >>>

Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Dave Fitzgerald, EVP Of Sales And Marketing, Brainshark (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada

A New Series on Sales 2.0

This is the first interview in a new series on sales 2.0, a topic that I have addressed regularly over the past several years. With the growth of SaaS and the rise of companies such as Salesforce.com and appssavvy, it’s time to explore this topic in more depth. Readers may also be interested in a guest miniseries, Anneke Seley on Sales 2.0, for more on what sales 2.0 is.

As enterprises across the globe are adopting sales 2.0 as part of their Web 2.0/3.0 journey, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform providers such as Brainshark are a unique case study. They have not only built successful sales 2.0 processes from the ground up and reaped huge benefits in their business, they have also identified the best practices in sales 2.0 implementation. How is Brainshark managing sales 2.0? Are there any challenges in implementing it? What does contacting and interacting with prospective customers look like at Brainshark? Has the relationship between sales and marketing changed at the company with the advent of sales 2.0? In this series, we uncover great insights by taking an early adopter’s perspective. >>>