By Trish Bertuzzi, The Bridge Group

There is much buzz around the Sales 2.0 movement and many different definitions afloat. Our definition is that Sales 2.0 is the effective convergence of people, process and technology. Regardless of the variations in verbiage, what remains consistent in is the impact technology can have on the buying and selling process.

So, to take a look at this issue, we surveyed 97 Sales & Marketing Directors, VPs and C-Level Executives on the Impact of Sales 2.0 Tools within their organizations.

We focused on tools/services in four core areas:

• CRM
• Sales & prospect data sources
• Lead tracking & marketing automation
• Sales enablement & productivity

Adoption Rates

We thought the most interesting way to present adoption rates would be to overlay the data to the technology adoption lifecycle (as made famous by Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm).

These levels of adoption are interesting. Based on the data, all four categories have crossed Moore's chasm. Executive leadership in B2B companies would do well to consider how these tools can be used to automate, scale and repeat solid underlying Sales and Marketing processes.

Deployment Rates

We've also broken out deployment rate data by company revenue size. You can download a the Sales 2.0 Tools Deployment Matrix with no registration required. To highlight a few interesting points:

• CRM is at 100% deployment across all company sizes
• Sales/prospect data averages 73% deployment with minimal variation across company sizes
• Lead tracking & marketing automation averages 53% deployment, but what is interesting to note is that the $50M-$499M category reported only 48% deployment.
• Sales enablement & productivity averages 30% deployment. Interestingly, only 19% of the under $50M category has deployed. Also, 43% of the $500M+ category have deployed, but with homegrown systems as opposed to vendors.

Please note that this report is a snapshot of market perception and is not intended to review or recommend specific solutions.

We would love to hear from you so....

• If you have metrics to share on how Sales 2.0 tools have increased your productivity and yield PLEASE share a comment.
• If you are a vendor in any of these categories and you have data to share, PLEASE feel free to post a comment. If you would like to make a special offer to our readers, feel free to send it to me.

Let's get a conversation going! Hope to hear from you!