What is Sales 2.0? (And Why You Should Care)
Posted on Mon, Sep 12, 2011
Many business experts are saying that we have entered the Sales 2.0 era but that term means something different to everyone. To some it is about building a more efficient business, to others it may be leveraging the Internet to make more sales, and to yet others it may mean using a variety of tools and techniques to sell in a way that has never been possible before.
What Sales 2.0 means to your business may depend on what you sell. But the ideas of leading thinkers seem to coalesce around three characteristics: Sales 2.0 is technological, relational, and process-oriented. Let's take a look at these concepts, and how you can put them into action for your business.
Sales 2.0 is Technological
What it means: leveraging the power of technology to increase sales team productivity.
What it makes obsolete: inefficient and antiquated tasks that are time wasters for sales people, especially creating, shuffling, carrying, and filing paperwork.
Why you should care: the right technology, implemented correctly, will increase productivity and reduce costs.
How you can put it into action:
1. CRM platform - Salesforce
Salesforce.com is the world's leading cloud-based CRM. Salesforce allows you to communicate and collaborate with everyone in your organization, keep track of client accounts, schedule meetings, conference calls and tasks, and much more. You can also get the Salesforce Mobile app and run your business from anywhere in the world.
2. Online collaboration: Basecamp HQ
Basecamp is a very popular project management and collaboration tool for businesses and freelancers. You can keep all of your project files in one place, create trackable schedules and calendars, communicate with your entire team, and ensure that your project runs as smoothly as possible. The website is also designed for mobile devices so you can do the same with your iPad, iPhone, or Android device.
3. Interactive offline catalog app – Padalog
Padalog is an innovative selling tool that turns the sales world on its head. Now you can use the iPad to eliminate paper and printing costs and boring presentations. Padalog allows any business to create a beautiful interactive product catalog. Padalog will help you change the way your business sells.
Sales 2.0 is Relational
What it means: nurturing relationships with customers to build trust, by "meeting" them when and where they want you to be.
What it makes obsolete: interrupting prospects and customers with poorly timed sales messages.
Why you should care: customers are overwhelmed with information and tune out irrelevant messages and companies they don't care about.
How you can put it into action:
1. Inbound marketing: HubSpot.com
HubSpot is all about ending the inefficient advertising approach and helping you attract and engage customers instead. HubSpot allows you to create, manage, and measure SEO optimized content and social media marketing via a full suite of landing page tools, A/B split testing capabilities, web site analytics, and much more.
2. Social media: Tweetings HD
Like other popular iPad Twitter apps such as HootSuite and Twitterific, Tweetings HD allows you to join the conversation in a sleek and intuitive iPad-only way. Reach hundreds of millions of people, join the conversation or start your own, and build your brand and customer base.
3. Forums: Zoho Discussions
Zoho Discussions allows any business to create a web-based forum where your customers can interact with other users and your business. Zoho has a great set of tools to help you build and manage your forum easily, and offers different pricing packages based on the needs of your business.
Sales 2.0 is Process-oriented
What it means: developing sales techniques that are measurable, repeatable, and scalable, and which can be optimized over time.
What it makes obsolete: being beholden to the natural sales abilities of a few star performers, while everyone else on the team struggles to produce results.
Why you should care: it will take the mystery out of why some salespeople more successful than others, and make your revenue stream more predictable and manageable.
How you can put it into action:
1. Sales process model - simply put, determining what specific activities produce the best results at each phase of the sales cycle - pre-sales, sales call, and post-sales, and then defining exactly how they should be performed to generate the highest return on investment. Everyone in the organization should be selling the same way. High Probability Selling is a great resource for learning more about why and how to develop a structured sales process.
2. Sales funnel management
The sales funnel is a metaphor for understanding your sales pipeline, starting with the wide top which represents a large number of prospects entering your pipeline, and the narrow bottom from which a few customers exit. Tracking prospects through the funnel will help a business understand which steps are bottlenecks in the process, so improvement efforts can be targeted accordingly. Companies that are under-performing against sales goals often assume that generating more leads is the answer to their problem, but only by understanding the sales funnel can that assumption be validated. For more about sales funnel management check out Leaky Funnel and The Funnel Principle and for two different points of view on sales funnels.
Sales 2.0 Takeaway
Sales 2.0 is about evolving your business to reflect the needs and desires of your current and prospective customers. We live in a technology-based era where innovative start-up companies and information entrepreneurs are rapidly changing the way we work, play, and learn. Sales 2.0 is about having ready access to a world of tools and techniques that we could only imagine just a few short years ago – and utilizing those resources to evolve your company, and your bottom line.
How is Sales 2.0 changing the way you do business with your customers?
