Sales 2.0

 

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed three major trends that have profoundly transformed the way sales organizations engage with prospects throughout the sales cycle.

• Customer relationship management (CRM) has emerged as a powerful business trend, 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 information sharing, aka Web 2.0. With the Internet as the new business platform, now 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. 

• Rich data explosion on the Internet – 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 has interviewed dozens of industry experts in an effort to create a universal definition of what Sales 2.0 means and what it doesn’t. 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 sell, 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 members of their team, 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 synergistically, 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?

CRM was created based on the idea of collecting and harvesting data to create a 360-degree view of the customer, but many CRM initiatives fail because of low user adoption, significant amounts of 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 more 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. Many of the end users of Sales 2.0 solutions also note that Sales 2.0 brings more fun back to selling.

The five basic tenets of Sales 2.0

As we watch the world of selling organize itself around the customer, and as we monitor the evolution of well over 1,000 technology solutions in that space, we’ve noted five distinct characteristics that come up consistently in conversations around 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, accelerate the creation of better solutions for their customers, and move deals faster from the discovery phase to the close. Sales managers can rely on better technology to respond to the constant shifts in the marketplace with agility, precision, and lightening speed. 

Examples: ConnectAndSell empowers salespeople to speak with 7 to 10 prospects per hour instead of 10 prospects per day. InsideView gives salespeople clear insights into their prospect’s 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 connectors. The Internet has opened an infinite number of ways for people to collaborate, share ideas, and cocreate a better world. Such innovations as Wikipedia, online conferencing, i-reports, 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.

Examples: GoToMeeting allows salespeople to share their desktop 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.

Examples: A Santcorp.com solution, called ProposalMaster, helps salespeople create proposals and RFPs in far less time while dramatically increasing win rates. Landslide.com helps sales 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; sales managers will no longer act on hunches, but manage by metrics and hold their salespeople’s feet to the fire.

Examples: Lucidera.com helps sales managers quickly analyze the effectiveness of their sales organization. Easy-to-use analytics helps them understand what they need to do to improve their sales performance without increasing sales costs. XactlyCorp.com 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.

Example: Genius.com allows marketing to send out personalized emails on behalf of sales and instantly alerts reps of prospect activity. Sales can “TiVO” 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 our 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 I move up to Sales 2.0, but why not now? •