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 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.
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?