Over the past decade, three major trends have profoundly transformed the way sales organizations engage with prospects throughout the buying cycle.
- CRM has emerged as a powerful business tool, enabling the tracking of massive amounts of transactional data on prospect and customer activity for sales and account management. For many organizations, however, CRM hasn’t delivered on its promise of significant sales productivity gains. The realization that it is primarily a sales management tool and not a sales tool has led to limited adoption and inconsistent usage by salespeople.
- Internet technology has evolved to enable a new way of interacting, collaborating and sharing information, which is often described as Web 2.0. With the Internet as the new business platform, all stakeholders — prospects, customers, salespeople and marketers — can connect, learn, plan, analyze, engage, collaborate and conduct business in ways that were not even imaginable a few years ago.
- The rich online data explosion — from traditional information sources, social networks and other user-generated content — offers salespeople and prospects the opportunity to gain unprecedented insights vital to buying and selling. The Internet accelerates and deepens access to companies, people and products.
The merging of these trends and technologies has transformed selling from a personal art into an interactive science. It has forever changed the process of how people buy and the way companies sell.
WHAT IS SALES 2.0?
During the last few months, Selling Power magazine has interviewed dozens of industry experts in an effort to create a universal definition of Sales 2.0. After extensive debates, the experts agreed on the following: “Sales 2.0 brings together customer-focused methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science. Sales 2.0 relies on a repeatable, collaborative and customer-enabled process that runs through the sales and marketing organization, resulting in improved productivity, predictable ROI and superior performance.”
Sales 2.0 is transforming how companies promote, market and run their sales organizations. It arms salespeople with better tools and improved processes so they can connect with the best prospects, pursue richer opportunities, collaborate more efficiently with customers and co-workers and close more sales faster. Sales 2.0 helps sales managers run a far more productive and predictive sales organization that achieves superior results based on optimized resources that create a highly motivated and highly professional sales team.
Sales 2.0 empowers sales and marketing to work together like a beehive. The sole purpose of the worker bees and the drones is to continually execute a set of compatible processes that have only one purpose: to keep the queen bee happy. If the queen is not happy, the future of the hive is in jeopardy. Likewise, if the processes and technologies of a sales and marketing organization are not optimized and synchronized in a way that keeps the customers happy, then the company is in trouble.
Sales 2.0 is transforming how companies promote, market and run their sales organizations. It arms salespeople with better tools and improved processes so they can connect with the best prospects, pursue richer opportunities, collaborate more efficiently with customers and co-workers and close more sales faster. Sales 2.0 helps sales managers run a far more productive and predictive sales organization that achieves superior results based on optimized resources that create a highly motivated and highly professional sales team.
Sales 2.0 empowers sales and marketing to work together like a beehive. The sole purpose of the worker bees and the drones is to continually execute a set of compatible processes that have only one purpose: to keep the queen bee happy. If the queen is not happy, the future of the hive is in jeopardy. Likewise, if the processes and technologies of a sales and marketing organization are not optimized and synchronized in a way that keeps the customers happy, then the company is in trouble.
HOW IS SALES 2.0 DIFFERENT FROM CRM?
When first created, CRM was based on the idea of collecting and harvesting data to form a 360-degree view of the customer. Many CRM initiatives, however, failed because of low user adoption, inaccurate data and a poor match between processes and technology. In essence, CRM is a top-down tool that works for managers who can get their salespeople to play the role of a data entry clerk in addition to selling and managing customer relationships. Sales 2.0 is about equality, empowerment, collaboration and speed.
Sales 2.0 creates an ecosystem that sustains all stakeholders: the customer, the company, the salesperson, the sales manager and the marketing manager. All members of the ecosystem are equal and interconnected partners. Sales 2.0 levels the playing field by turning sales into a science, salespeople into professionals and managers into more rational and motivated leaders. What’s best is that Sales 2.0 dramatically lowers the cost, reduces the risk of failure and increases the chances of successful deployment with positive short-term and long-term ROI (Return on Investment). Many of the end users of Sales 2.0 solutions also note that Sales 2.0 brings more fun back to selling.
THE 5 BASIC TENETS OF SALES 2.0
As the world of selling organizes itself around the customer, five distinct characteristics arise consistently in conversations about Sales 2.0:
1. Sales 2.0 is about acceleration. Selling is moving from human speed to Internet speed. Salespeople spend less time on every phase of the sales call, from finding prospects to closing the sale. Since every phase of the sales funnel is optimized, salespeople will pursue better opportunities, waste less time chasing unprofitable business, find better solutions for their customers faster and move deals from the discovery phase to the close more quickly. Sales managers can rely on better technology to respond to the constant shifts in the marketplace with agility, precision and lightning speed.
A few examples illustrate this point. ConnectAndSell Inc.'s offering empowers salespeople to speak with seven to 10 prospects per hour instead of 10 prospects per day. InsideView Inc.'s solution gives salespeople clear insights into their prospects' business, as well as access to relevant social information about the prospect. Jigsaw allows salespeople to quickly target prospect companies, bypass gatekeepers and go straight to the decision makers.
2. Sales 2.0 is about collaboration. Selling is changing from collecting data to connecting ideas. While CRM tends to reduce salespeople to data collectors, Sales 2.0 turns salespeople into idea generators. The Internet has opened an infinite number of ways for people to collaborate and share ideas. Such innovations as Wikipedia, online conferencing, user ratings, blogs, Twitter and social networking have elevated the potential for human collaboration to a higher level. Sales 2.0 technologies help salespeople collaborate more and travel less. And sales managers can harness the collective intelligence of the sales organization.
Software solutions already exist to support this aspect of Sales 2.0. Citrix GoToMeeting allows salespeople to share their desktops over the Internet, deliver remote presentations and collaborate with remote experts in real time. SAVO allows the entire sales organization to share its best practices online. Salespeople can quickly download presentation material, rank its effectiveness and get instant access to expert advice.
3. Sales 2.0 is about professionalization. In a Sales 2.0 world, every lead gets linked to its source, every marketing campaign turns into a quest for improved ROI, every step of the sales process is measured, every sales initiative is analyzed and every method is tested. Selling is no longer the place for amateurs who are afraid of analytics and skeptical of Six Sigma quality initiatives. While amateurs may score an occasional win, professionals deliver predictable results. With the help of Sales 2.0 tools, they are able to replicate their best practices and share them across the organization. Sales 2.0 creates a new breed of professionals that deliver predictability.
A Sant Corp. solution, called ProposalMaster, helps salespeople create proposals and RFPs (Request for Proposals) in far less time while dramatically increasing win rates. Landslide Technologies' offering helps organizations build a world-class sales process that is adopted uniformly by all members of the sales team.
4. Sales 2.0 is about accountability. Selling is shifting from a freewheeling organization to a culture of accountability. Whether it is the optimization of sales pipelines, the resizing of a territory or performance monitoring to reward the right sales behavior at the right time, Sales 2.0 solutions increase accountability for all stakeholders while reducing costs. Armed with precise data, marketing managers can track the effectiveness of each campaign, and sales managers will no longer act on hunches but will manage by metrics and hold their salespeople’s feet to the fire.
Again, there are already several solutions available to support this characteristic of Sales 2.0. LucidEra helps sales managers quickly analyze the effectiveness of their sales organization. Easy-to-use analytics helps users understand what they need to do to improve their sales performance without increasing sales costs.Xactly Corp. has created an on-demand sales compensation solution that includes an online incentive program. The moment salespeople reach a certain performance level, they can instantly choose from an exciting selection of motivating rewards.
5. Sales 2.0 is about alignment. Selling and marketing are joining their separate silos into a seamless and completely aligned organization. The core character of the Sales 2.0 world is that it relies on sales and marketing alignment, with shared goals and new responsibilities throughout the sales cycle, from lead generation and qualification all the way to closed deals. In some companies, marketing is held accountable (and rewarded) for transactional business and sales for consultative business. New sales technologies allow salespeople to launch their own marketing campaigns, read a prospect’s “digital body language” and instantly see which prospect opened their emails. New customer engagement technologies help customers recognize and define their own problems and discover how to remove the barriers to the sale.
For example, Genius.com allows marketing to send out personalized emails on behalf of sales and instantly alerts reps of prospect activity. Sales can record the entire experience and contact those who have visited a Web page.
The world of Sales 2.0 is a rapidly expanding universe that institutionalizes a collaborative and repeatable sales and marketing process, enabling the adoption of best practices across the entire company. The result: dramatic improvements in performance. Today’s smarter and far better informed prospects demand more of companies. Sales 2.0 is a game-changing approach that will result in higher-volume sales, higher-value sales, and higher-velocity sales with significant improvements in overall profitability. The big question is not why should a company move up to Sales 2.0, but why not now?
A few examples illustrate this point. ConnectAndSell Inc.'s offering empowers salespeople to speak with seven to 10 prospects per hour instead of 10 prospects per day. InsideView Inc.'s solution gives salespeople clear insights into their prospects' business, as well as access to relevant social information about the prospect. Jigsaw allows salespeople to quickly target prospect companies, bypass gatekeepers and go straight to the decision makers.
2. Sales 2.0 is about collaboration. Selling is changing from collecting data to connecting ideas. While CRM tends to reduce salespeople to data collectors, Sales 2.0 turns salespeople into idea generators. The Internet has opened an infinite number of ways for people to collaborate and share ideas. Such innovations as Wikipedia, online conferencing, user ratings, blogs, Twitter and social networking have elevated the potential for human collaboration to a higher level. Sales 2.0 technologies help salespeople collaborate more and travel less. And sales managers can harness the collective intelligence of the sales organization.
Software solutions already exist to support this aspect of Sales 2.0. Citrix GoToMeeting allows salespeople to share their desktops over the Internet, deliver remote presentations and collaborate with remote experts in real time. SAVO allows the entire sales organization to share its best practices online. Salespeople can quickly download presentation material, rank its effectiveness and get instant access to expert advice.
3. Sales 2.0 is about professionalization. In a Sales 2.0 world, every lead gets linked to its source, every marketing campaign turns into a quest for improved ROI, every step of the sales process is measured, every sales initiative is analyzed and every method is tested. Selling is no longer the place for amateurs who are afraid of analytics and skeptical of Six Sigma quality initiatives. While amateurs may score an occasional win, professionals deliver predictable results. With the help of Sales 2.0 tools, they are able to replicate their best practices and share them across the organization. Sales 2.0 creates a new breed of professionals that deliver predictability.
A Sant Corp. solution, called ProposalMaster, helps salespeople create proposals and RFPs (Request for Proposals) in far less time while dramatically increasing win rates. Landslide Technologies' offering helps organizations build a world-class sales process that is adopted uniformly by all members of the sales team.
4. Sales 2.0 is about accountability. Selling is shifting from a freewheeling organization to a culture of accountability. Whether it is the optimization of sales pipelines, the resizing of a territory or performance monitoring to reward the right sales behavior at the right time, Sales 2.0 solutions increase accountability for all stakeholders while reducing costs. Armed with precise data, marketing managers can track the effectiveness of each campaign, and sales managers will no longer act on hunches but will manage by metrics and hold their salespeople’s feet to the fire.
Again, there are already several solutions available to support this characteristic of Sales 2.0. LucidEra helps sales managers quickly analyze the effectiveness of their sales organization. Easy-to-use analytics helps users understand what they need to do to improve their sales performance without increasing sales costs.Xactly Corp. has created an on-demand sales compensation solution that includes an online incentive program. The moment salespeople reach a certain performance level, they can instantly choose from an exciting selection of motivating rewards.
5. Sales 2.0 is about alignment. Selling and marketing are joining their separate silos into a seamless and completely aligned organization. The core character of the Sales 2.0 world is that it relies on sales and marketing alignment, with shared goals and new responsibilities throughout the sales cycle, from lead generation and qualification all the way to closed deals. In some companies, marketing is held accountable (and rewarded) for transactional business and sales for consultative business. New sales technologies allow salespeople to launch their own marketing campaigns, read a prospect’s “digital body language” and instantly see which prospect opened their emails. New customer engagement technologies help customers recognize and define their own problems and discover how to remove the barriers to the sale.
For example, Genius.com allows marketing to send out personalized emails on behalf of sales and instantly alerts reps of prospect activity. Sales can record the entire experience and contact those who have visited a Web page.
The world of Sales 2.0 is a rapidly expanding universe that institutionalizes a collaborative and repeatable sales and marketing process, enabling the adoption of best practices across the entire company. The result: dramatic improvements in performance. Today’s smarter and far better informed prospects demand more of companies. Sales 2.0 is a game-changing approach that will result in higher-volume sales, higher-value sales, and higher-velocity sales with significant improvements in overall profitability. The big question is not why should a company move up to Sales 2.0, but why not now?
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Thanks for including InsideView to this post.
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