Selling Power Magazine Article

What has technology done for sales? Consider these basics: sped up the sales cycle, cut costs, broadened markets, deepened relationships, increased close rates, and a lot more. All these shifts exist under the revolutionary tech umbrella known as Sales 2.0. These new techniques continue to revolutionize sales at both famous corporate giants and lesser-known but fast-growing younger firms. In other words, Sales 2.0 is the pervasive force in professional selling today. Here’s how your company can benefit, too.

Customize and Choose
Each company uses the technologies that meet its most pressing needs, whether gathering leads, training reps and channel partners, or handling massive volumes of transactions when a new campaign is launched. But everyone we talked to reports that the new Sales 2.0 technologies are paying off big time, in many cases enabling sales initiatives that simply would not be possible without them.

For example, senior marketing manager Edward Linde manages 14 people in the Web marketing unit of IBM.com. Linde supports three sales groups: inside client reps who work over the telephone, product-oriented brand specialists, and lead-development reps. “The Web is the ultimate reference because when prospects come to your Website, they want to do business,” Linde says. “We harvest, validate, qualify, and pass these leads to the field.”

IBM uses social media in two major ways. First, it “listens” for leads. Lead-development reps mine social conversations for people who are looking for solutions or considering issuing a request for proposal (RFP). “We engage them to see if we can transform them from an inquiry to a validated, qualified lead,” Linde explains. “We have been doing this for several years with excellent success and have generated several million dollars.”

“Listening” poses challenges, such as having to separate fact from fiction and understanding how immediate an RFP will be. IBM uses trained staff to interpret social-media conversations. It would like to automate that process with artificial-intelligence tools.

IBM’s second social-media initiative: sales transformation through digital tools. “We want to use technology to extend the reach, frequency, and scope of contacts between sellers and customers and enhance collaboration,” Linde says. “Salespeople used to go to a customer’s office, roll up their sleeves, and build trust and solutions. Now customers’ time is more valuable, and they want to [conduct business] over the phone and electronically.”

So IBM is giving all its reps their own individual Web pages linked to Twitter and Facebook and equipped for live chat with Lotus Sametime, “a great tool for enterprises, scalable and secure,” Linde notes. And IBM is enabling reps with video cameras. “They will be able to share things like whiteboards to show ideas to a customer, who can say, ‘Not like that; redraw it.’” Marketing supports reps’ Web pages with content and email campaigns to bring in customers.

Broader Reach
The new approach is more efficient and becoming essential. “Salespeople with two hundred accounts in their territory cannot reach them all in a quarter, even by telephone, if customers are busy,” Linde says. And IBM uses digital tools to expand beyond existing markets. Digital sales transformation enables IBM to reach firms with fewer than 1,000 employees, traditionally an undertapped segment.      
Networking on the Web pays other dividends: “We are getting referrals when people register to dial in,” Linde says. “When reps called on a Fortune 100 company, they used to focus on the C-suite and IT department. There were potentially a thousand useful people they did not know. Now we are penetrating these organizations deeper.” IBM encourages its scientists and engineers to participate in Web exchanges, because these are the people customers really want to talk to.

Moreover, the more active IBM is on the Web and social media, the more prospects visit its Web pages, because search engines are programmed to prioritize sites according to frequency of use and reference. “And customer searches are the best sources of leads because they are self-selected,” Linde explains.

For the future, Linde sees more mobile devices and collaboration tools, such as file sharing. “We do that internally but must make sure proposals are private with customers,” he explains. Linde thinks 3-D video will eventually come when it is affordable and scalable.

IBM pushes the Sales 2.0 envelope, and Linde goes on sales calls to explain what his group is doing because IBM’s customers want to sell better, too. Linde ticks off the benefits: “We harvest more leads, we break into accounts we could not before, we speed the sales cycle, we talk to more customers more frequently on a lot more subjects, and we improve rep productivity. There has absolutely been a positive return.”

Leads and Storage
For new firms, leads are gold. NetApp provides data storage and management for companies around the word. Three years ago, it chose Jigsaw to enable systematic processes in sales and marketing, explains audience program manager Renee Gellatly. “We had Eloqua for marketing automation, and we wanted a broad-scale application for contacts, lead scoring, nurturing, and Web talks. First, we wanted something that could handle large volumes for marketing, but then we gave our inside salespeople and reps direct access to it for their immediate needs.” That produced a surprise. “It was an instant success. They (continued on page 2)

could get information on contacts, and that produced quick wins.”

NetApp began implementing Jigsaw by testing in small areas and sweet spots in markets to promote Web events and email campaigns. Then it went enterprise-wide, filling in data on existing accounts and contacts and adding new ones.

Marketing manages the system, scoring leads with Eloqua and providing qualified leads to sales. The application very effectively filters leads by location, company type, and size. Still, “there are lots of challenges to enabling a large-volume program,” Gellatly cautions. “You must have the same definition of a qualified lead, or sales will reject them.”

The benefits include large volumes of qualified leads with contact information. NetApp also uses Jigsaw’s data-cleansing functions for both old and new contacts. “That is very beneficial given volatility and movements and has produced huge cost savings,” Gellatly says.

Jigsaw also has directly helped sales reps. Gellatly explains, “When reps are physically on site but their contacts are wrong, they can get into Jigsaw, find the right people, and get the appointment.”

Attach and Conquer
Jigsaw has enabled NetApp to expand both marketing automation and its inside sales force. With salesforce.com’s acquisition of Jigsaw, NetApp reps will access Jigsaw from their Salesforce screens. Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Radian6 will aggregate social-media intelligence that can be attached to Jigsaw account data.

“We won’t have to follow Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn,” says Gellatly. “We’ll have a one-stop shop for social media. We will be able to build out relationships and know how prospects present themselves and what they are talking about.”

Jigsaw’s data team helps NetApp analyze the history of marketing efforts to determine which are most successful. And Gellatly plans to build more automation into Eloqua to replace manual processes. She says, “There are too many cost savings and benefits to count them all, but we have gotten an incredible return on investment.”

Autodesk, the leader in automated engineering and design software, sells nearly 200 highly complex products – a catalogue that is growing each year – mostly to manufacturers, architects, engineers, construction firms, media, and entertainment companies. It sells 85 percent of its business through partners.

Autodesk must constantly communicate with and train three audiences: internal staff, including sales reps; distribution partners; and end users of products. Sales 2.0 is just right for efficient communication. “Formerly, we did this online with GoToMeeting and other tools,” remembers Bill Griffin, vice president for channel sales. But with 10 million users in 185 countries, Griffin usually had to do at least three Webinars to reach everyone. And the interaction possible in online meetings was useless: “It works with seven people on a call, but with thousands you cannot open it up for questions.”

So Autodesk chose Brainshark, software that puts together effective video-on-demand presentations easily and quickly. “I’m not tech savvy, and I did not need training,” Griffin says. “Yet I did three just this week.”

Users just assemble a set of PowerPoint slides and, using an ordinary phone, dial in and record the voice text that goes with each slide. If users want to make changes, they can tweak just the slide that needs a different message.

Griffin keeps his Brainshark videos from 5 to 15 minutes long and sends them as a clickable link in an email to his audience. He footnotes their length so recipients can decide when it is most convenient to view them. The videos are viewable on mobile devices, as well as on PCs and laptops.

Track Like a Bloodhound
Brainshark tracks who opens the links, how many slides they view, how many times they view them, and whether they forward the videos and to whom. Tracking viewings helps to qualify leads for transmittal to reps or partners, and the addresses of forwarded emails gives Autodesk more contacts, either deeper in existing accounts or beyond them.

“The biggest benefit is that we get a consistent message across all channels, so we can sell aggressively,” Griffin says. But the software also trains and tests reps inexpensively, qualifies leads, finds new leads, and reveals which marketing campaigns are working.

Handling high volume is another challenge Sales 2.0 easily meets. Box.net provides cloud-content management, allowing customers to share and collaborate over the Web. It started selling to consumers but now has 60,000 business users, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

Box.net chose Zuora software to manage subscription-based sales two years ago. Zuora does everything: tracks customers’ subscription types and payment plans, invoices, handles check and credit card payments, and provides management and individual reps with clear reports on what is going on both company-wide and for each account. Best of all, it all came out of the box with no customization necessary, says business analyst Sebastien LeMenager.

Timed to Succeed
The benefits include economies in sales support, improved sales, and better and faster collection of revenues earned. “It’s all done online; there is no billing desk, just a browser,” LeMenager says. “Instead of invoicing manually after a delay, Zuora does it automatically.” The software also tracks all payments received, so reps know immediately when their accounts are behind and can speed things up. Reps access Zuora data conveniently through saleforce.com.

“The biggest benefit is cutting down on time costs,” LeMenager says. “It has decreased the cost of doing business and increased the speed of closing deals.” Billing operations (continued on page 3)

manager Kathleen Lim adds, “We are collecting revenue faster and have increased the collection rate.” Box.net is looking at using Zuora’s quote engine to further speed up sales and make more use of its report functions.

DenMat has been selling supplies and equipment to dentists for 30 years and built up to $80 million in annual revenue. In June 2010, the company decided to sell to its customers’ customers, offering a new product, Snap-On Smile, to consumers and then setting them up with dentists who would install the snappy new teeth, which cost from $1,000 to $3,000 and fit over the patient’s own teeth.

Snap-On Smile “took off like a rocket,” says vice president for information technology Jonathan Green. DenMat advertised on TV, giving viewers a telephone number to call or a Website to visit in order to purchase Snap-On Smile. Call centers received 200,000 calls in the first four months, and 6,200 people bought the product. Schedules had to be checked and appointments made with 4,000 dentists.

Fortunately, Green knew ahead of time he would need to purchase new software to handle the sheer volume of consumer calls and credit card payments, coordinate between 500 call-center staff and 105 inside reps, and set up appointments with 4,000 dentists. He chose Financial Force to help with those tasks.

Financial Force, which is embedded in saleforce.com and hosted in the cloud, handled all this quickly and efficiently. “It was up and running in sixty-five days,” Green says. “I cannot overstate it: you turn it on and it works.” It works so well for Green, in fact, he says he’s not sure he had any practical alternative to Financial Force to enable the new product launch.