Yesterday afternoon, we formally launched Inquisix private Beta. Many of you already received your invitations and are now members. It’s been a long time coming, but it is exciting to see so many people sign up so fast. The more members and contacts in the system, the better it is for everyone, so keep those invitation requests and contact uploads coming.

We have a lot of features and enhancements in the pipeline, but we can’t do this without you. Everything we do will be based on customer feedback, so please let us know what you think. Very soon, we will have Customer Forums up and running- you can have a real impact on making your product better suited to your needs!

If you are not a member, and you would like to participate in the Beta program, request an invitation. At this stage, we will not be open to everyone because the salespeople that join the beta not only need to share but also must have something in common – in this case an overlapping rolodex. If you sell into companies, industries or titles that no one in Inquisix does, then there won’t be anyone to trade with. So as we get a critical mass of salespeople that sell into the same industry or job title, then we will invite them all to join at once. You can help this process by inviting your sales buddies to join Inquisix too.

Happy Selling!

I recently attended a dinner event hosted by the Pioneer Institute where the main speaker was selling his dream to us - to bootstrap entire industries. He has a great vision to get entrepreneurs and companies to build amazing things - but with no government funding or oversight. Even the big companies aren’t interested in participating but he certainly has captured the imagination of millions. So who is this gentleman and how is he achieving this? Dr. Peter Diamandis took his inspiration from Lindbergh’s first flight over the Atlantic. Lindberg was 26 years old who no one thought would be the first one to cross the Atlantic. Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize, “…a $25,000 purse offered by hotel magnate Raymond Orteig to the first person to fly non-stop between New York and Paris…” and proved that entrepreneurs could outperform large corporations and governments. Lindbergh’s success helped launch the commercial aviation industry.

Dr. Diamandis created the Xprize as a way to foster the drive to achieve great things. He partnered with the Ansari family to offer a $10M prize to the first organization to reach space without government funding. That prize was awarded in 2004 to the builders of SpaceShipOne. Dr. Diamandis believes that prizes are a great way to bring a whole industry forward, not just a single company. He sets the prize money low enough for the big guys to ignore about but big enough for entrepreneurs to care. He commented that the day before a breakthrough happens, it’s considered a crazy idea that only entrepreneurs are willing to risk it all to achieve.  Change is brought from the outside, not from the current group in charge.

He now has Google offering a $30M Xprize for the first organization to reach the Moon and send back video. Again, no government funding is permitted. They’re calling this Moon 2.0.

More prizes are coming - prizes for the first 100mpg car, for mapping the entire human genome and more. The foundation that Dr. Diamandis chairs is looking at prizes to focus on improving education, on renewable energy sources and on reducing poverty. This blog does not do justice to what he’s accomplished and how he’s inspired so many people to do wonderful things.

Please go to his website to learn more, to be inspired and to build something great yourselves.

Thank you to Erik Britt-Webb for inviting me to the event and to Pete Peters, Founding Chairman of the Pioneer Institute for inviting such a wonderful and inspirational person as Dr. Diamandis to speak to us.

I recently attended a luncheon meeting with Mike Ford of TownConnect and about 150 other sales and corporate executives hosted by Dave Kurlan of Baseline Selling fame. Dave spent two hours with us discussing his philosophies on sales management best practices and sales rep hiring & success factors. The audience had the opportunity to choose the agenda based on our biggest concerns - sales management, forecasting, hiring & planned turnover were the most requested topics.

In reviewing my notes from the meeting, the things that I underlined as most interesting and thought provoking were:

- Hire sales managers for accountability, coaching, motivating, growing and recruiting. NOT for closing deals.
- Sales managers should motivate reps to get deals into the funnel and the coach them on moving deals through the funnel.

If you attended the event, what did you find as most interesting? (other than the tour of Gillette Stadium!)

I attended the first-ever Corporate Social Network Design Council hosted by Visible Path on October 29th in San Francisco. The concept of social networking was explored. There are some interesting challenges, but the emergence of thousands of social networking sites proves again that people want to talk to other people. Whether they decide to share their personal contacts with their business contacts is another story.

Check out Jeremiah Owyang’s post here.

Social networks can help identify specific contacts, but once that is done, we need to build the relationship and earn the right for the referral. At the end of the day, it’s all about a referred introduction. When we get the introduction, we get the meeting. And that’s what we want.

Now it’s going to be easier and easier to develop social networks. As of November 1st, Google announced OpenSocial. In non-techie parlance, developers can now use OpenSocial to create applications that work on any social network.

Get ready for the ride!

I attended the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on October 30. The speakers had very little to say that was “new news.” I heard statements such as: cold calling is dead—because it doesn’t scale, it’s all about relationships, it’s not about what’s in the funnel, it’s about what’s moving in the funnel, you need to have a sales process, salespeople need to ask good questions, etc. And, when will speakers learn that reading your slides word-for-word is not particularly engaging and does little to enhance learning?

Top salespeople have always built relationships, had a reliable process, and learned and listened from their customers. Successful salespeople build an active referral network and regularly win high profile deals. They don’t cold call.

What is new is the technology—which can speed up lead identification and qualification. Interesting sites are www.visiblepath.com and www.insideview.com. Then it’s up to us to pick up the phone and build a relationship. Technology will save time and thus increase productivity, but people do business with people. Period.

Well, I’m back from the Sales 2.0 conference held earlier this week in San Francisco. And now I can say that I survived an earthquake, albeit a minor one and certainly not on my to-do list. As I mentioned previously, the definition of Sales 2.0, as quoted from the website, is “…Sales 2.0 means integrating the power of Web 2.0 technologies with proven sales techniques to increase sales velocity and volume.” Conceived by genius.com, there were plenty of vendors talking the Sales 2.0 hype, from Oracle and Webex to JigSaw, Brainshark, Spoke and ZoomInfo. Some of the big names of the speaker circuit, including Moira Gunn, Geoffrey Moore and Michael Bosworth, presented their thoughts on Sales 2.0. And the turnout was quite successful as over 400 people attended the event.

So why do I call it version 0.5? Although it was well attended, the ratio of sponsors + vendors vs attendees seemed very high. I spoke with lots of people attending to learn more about the hype and to see if they’d sponsor a future event. But actual attendees? Rather few, I believe. So there’s work and socializing to see if “Sales 2.0” is a buzzword worth hyping. My opinion – yes, it is.

Interesting people I enjoyed meeting at the conference:

- Joanne Black, author of “No More Cold Calling” and fellow attendee. The ideal book to complement the Inquisix solution and vice versa.
- Katie Bruno, VP of Sales at Visible Path – we worked together at Sybase over 10 years ago and she has the same enthusiasm and energy as ever. Great to see you again!
- Jim Burns, President of Avitage – a fellow Boston entrepreneur/blogger and yet we had to meet for the first time (but surely not the last) in San Francisco.
- Razi Imam, CEO of Landslide, a sales solution designed for the sales person first and the VP second. He was genuinely surprised when the Webex keynote speaker mentioned his company’s use of Landslide to prove a point.
- Steve Burrows of Quantum, who spoke in length about the challenges of integrating two sales teams with differing cultures.

More about Sales 2.0 and my thoughts on the presentations in a future blog.

I attended a speed networking event held by a local chamber of commerce in Central Mass. They had a great turnout for a 7.30am breakfast event the morning after a late World Series game! I’d say over 200 people attended and participated in this well run event. For those of you not familiar with speed networking, it’s similar to speed dating. You sit down at a table for 10 and each of you spends a minute on a “commercial” about yourself. You exchange business cards with each other and then move to another table to sit down with a new set of people. You go to 3 tables so you’ve met a minimum of 27 new people to network with. It was a great event and I met a bunch of really nice people.

So where do we go from here? I will touch base with the people I met to trade information and maybe help each other out. But I wonder if there was any person in the 150+ group that I did not meet that would have been the perfect person for me to network with? I would have to attend 8 of these events and always sit with new people so that I could meet all the people in that room.

Inquisix is a great compliment to speed networking. What if we all put our speed-networking commercials online and let Inquisix set the seating chart? That way, we’d meet the people in the room most able to help us and vice-versa. And then Inquisix would continually monitor our commercials as new members came or current members met new people so we’d be informed of new networking opportunities. Even as we sleep.

Rick Roberge, a Sales Consultant with Dave Kurlan & Associates, spoke at this week’s New England Expo and invited me to join the audience. His topic was about “…how effective networking can begin the sales process with a warm prospect and avoid cold sales calls.” A very engaging speaker, Rick spoke for about an hour about networking, how to do it and why to do it. He provided numerous examples on the power of networking by encouraging the audience to network amongst themselves.

The most important idea that I brought away from his talk is the theory of the Giver’s Gain - you network to introduce new services to your customer so that your customer will remember and value you. You don’t network to help the person you just met!

By providing new and valuable services to your customer, you move from a transaction-based sales rep to consultant to trusted advisor and finally to the go-to resource. As Rick joked, you network to become the second speed-dial on your customer’s phone after their spouse.

Rick then walked-the-talk as he and I strolled the exhibit floor together for an hour while he introduced me to his customers and colleagues. And when I left, I had 20 business cards in my pocket of people he introduced me to that wanted follow up.

And so I’ll close with the second most important idea from Rick’s talk – follow up with those introductions you just made! So I’m getting on the phone….