Call me old fashioned, but back in the year 2002 when I first started having our Sales Pipeline Methodology developed into a piece of software I was adamant that the application had to reside on the sales professional’s laptop. They had to be in control of their own data… this was not a corporate system that anyone can see what they are doing… this was a personal tool… and the sales professional would choose what they wanted others to see… they could sandbag if that’s what they wanted to do. Focus was to replace the personal spreadsheets, not the corporate CRM system.

However, even back then I was being advised by some of the team to consider having the application web based… how crazy were those guys… running an application like Focus on the web!!! It would never work… it would probably have been difficult in 2002 to have the app that I wanted… to look good, to drag and drop, dynamic refresh, to have pop-up windows, to be fast… etc, etc… but now it would be easy.

Now everyone is developing for the web… there’s an avalanche of new sites coming out all the time… and I know of one sterling sales enthusiast who is right on top form when finding these sites… my friend Karl Goldfield… the startup sales mentor has just written about one such site – Web2.0 and Sales 2.0 – Salesconx wants to help small businesses and startups.

With this avalanche of Web2.0 applications that are available I’m not saying that I made the wrong decision back in 2002 because we have a great application and Focus – to coin a phrase – does exactly what it says on the tin… which has to be good… but hindsight is a wonderful thing and as none of us are blessed with it the best piece of advice I have found in lieu of hindsight can be found in another friend’s blog… Skip Anderson’s latest post… it’s not too long, so you should be able to weed our the message from the padding!

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