What's More Important To A Company's Success?

My favorite quote from Sales 2.0

" While creating an innovative business process is less visable than developing a new product or investing in factories, our research shows it is actually more important to a company's success." - Dr. Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, and Dr. Eric Brynjolfsson, Professor of Managementat MIT's Sloan School of Management "Dog Eat Dog." Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2007

My question is how do you get team members to buy in to this philosophy?

Building Collaboration & Reducing Friction

Sales 2.0 talks about creating a more collaborative relationship between marketing and sales departments throughout the early chapters. On page 37, the authors discuss a very simple way to reduce friction between teams surrounding the definitions of a target customer and qualified lead. The process of creating a grading system together along with the actions to take on each type of lead produces transparency and accountability.

How many times has the language and definitions we use to communicate caused misunderstandings between sales, marketing and new business development?

Customer Always Chooses

I have been enjoying reading the book "sales 2.0" by Anneke Seley and Brent Holloway.

One passage that jumped out to me was a quote from Nancy Schoendorf on page 24. She says"Traditional boundaries between work and home have blurred due to the Internet. Customers determine what technologies get adopted during the selling process."

As marketers we focus on customers needs and take their lead on what they want to learn more about. We also know that our brand is not in our control rather in the hands of our customers. So why is it hard to understand that just like the transition from the phone to fax to web, customers are asking us to use the tools such as twitter, blogs and other social media to communicate our message?