Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

Sales 2.0 has been lauded as giving the customer control of the sales process since they can now research their options and make purchase decisions long before ever speaking to a salesperson—IF they ever speak to a salesperson.

Much has been written about how this new buyer controlled process will destroy the sales industry since more and more purchasing decisions will be made without ever consulting a salesperson; how buyers will continue to demand access to more and more free, objective information; and how all of this information will make the purchasing process quicker, easier, and more efficient for buyers.

I suspect that all of the predictions will prove to be absolutely, totally, unquestioningly incorrect.

I’m willing to bet that there will be a huge increase in the number of professional, highly specialized sellers as a result of the avalanche of information made available to buyers..

I’m also willing to bet that the sheer amount of information available at one’s fingertips will increase the complexity of the purchasing process for most goods—even relatively simple purchases.

Just two very quick examples:

My wife and I are in the process of a major home improvement project. We have ripped up perfectly good carpet from two rooms and perfectly good ceramic tile from three other rooms in order to put down a stone floor so we can cover it with more carpet in the form of rugs (what humans do sometimes makes no sense from a logical standpoint). In years past the selection of rugs for the foyer, den, dining room and kitchen would have been easy—we have a few stores in town that sell rugs and we’d make a selection from their inventory. In reality we’d select from maybe a few hundred rugs with a couple dozen being actual contenders.

More of the Sales and Management blog post from Paul McCord

My wife feels like I’ve shacked up with another woman–I’m that in love with Siri. But my wife isn’t too upset, because Apple’s iOS personal digital assistant has given me more time to spend with my family. I’ve been able to get work done during times when I normally could not. And that’s the part that tickles my CIO spider sense, which tells me: Feldman, this is going to change the way that IT delivers service.
I had upgraded to an iPhone 4S mainly because my 3G had run out of steam. I wasn’t too excited by the prospect of Siri. Many of us have used Dragon Dictation and voice dialing. So what, right?

That’s like saying AltaVista was all the Web ever needed with search. That’s how big I think Siri is–Google search big.

Siri, unlike segmented voice recognition, integrates lots of services. In other words, instead of having to mess around with buttons to take a note with Dragon Dictate, and then copy it, then paste it into my notebook, I can just say: “Siri, write a note.” Response: “OK, boss, what do you want it to say?” Then it pops it into my notebook. Done.

More of the InformationWeek article by Jonathan Feldman

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings must be feeling a little bit like a team that ended up on the cover of Sports Illustrated and then started losing games. Last year, Hastings was on the cover of Fortune as its Business Person of the Year. This year, he’s getting slammed for what he acknowledges are a series of poor decisions and mishandled customer communications. It’s kind of like the dreaded SI cover jinx.

After raising the price for the Netflix DVD and movie streaming package over the summer, Hastings publicly apologized but didn’t change the terms of the deal. Then a few months later, he announced that Netflix was going to be just for streaming movies and a spin off company, Qwikster, would handle DVD rentals. Customers would no longer have a master movie queue online at one site. They’d have to go back and forth between the sites if they wanted both streaming movies and DVD rentals. Customers hated that idea and Netflix killed Qwikster a few weeks later. A lot of customers decided to just bail out. Netflix announced a few days ago that they lost 800,000 customers in the last quarter. The company’s stock has declined by around 35% in each of the past two days.

More of the Next Level blog post from Scott Eblin