Defining the Sales 2.0-Enabled Business By Gerhard Gschwandtner Founder and Publisher, Selling Power magazine

Transcription

1 Defining the Sales 2.0-Enabled Business By Gerhard Gschwandtner Founder and Publisher, Selling Power magazine Table of Contents Introduction 2 The New Rules of Customer Engagement 3 Salespeople s Changing Roles 4 Working Smarter, Not Harder 5 Conclusion 7 WebEx Communications Inc Freedom Circle Santa Clara, CA U.S.A. Corp.: Sales:

2 Introduction Web 2.0 technology dramatically impacts selling, as a growing number of companies have discovered. Businesses reach more prospects, accelerate sales cycles, and enhance customer relationships by utilizing everything from social networking sites to interactive webinars. The Internet s new level of collaboration and connection has ushered in the era of Sales 2.0. Companies investigating the Sales 2.0 model frequently ask two questions: What does a Sales 2.0-enabled business look like, and how can we make the transition from traditional sales to Sales 2.0? The answers may surprise you. These businesses have moved beyond simply adding new tools to make their existing sales processes more efficient; they ve transformed the way they sell, start to finish. They ve also readjusted their sales strategies, aligning them with the new realities of a Web 2.0 world, in which customers expect personal engagement and collaborative solutions. Businesses embracing Sales 2.0 discover dramatic outcomes: more closed deals, happier customers, and a new confidence among sales reps that they will meet or exceed their quotas. Below, we outline the new rules of customer engagement that businesses encounter when they transition to Sales 2.0, including salespeople s changing roles, technologies adopted to reshape sales processes, and steps to make the leap from Sales 1.0 to 2.0.

3 The New Rules of Customer Engagement In an information-saturated, hyper-connected world, the rules of selling have changed. Engaging prospects, building relationships, and closing deals demand new skills and techniques to accommodate the evolving needs and expectations of customers. A Sales 2.0-enabled organization, first and foremost, understands the new rules of customer engagement, and adapts its sales process accordingly. Prospective customers are more knowledgeable than ever before. These professionals utilize Web 2.0 resources to research products and services, as well as the selling companies track records. Sales reps used to assume prospects needed a thorough education on their products and services; today, they find that prospects come to the table well informed and armed with tougher questions that inevitably involve ROI. What s more, the customer s buying cycle starts long before salespeople are aware that an opportunity exists. Customers control how they want to buy. Empowered prospects decide quicker whether they truly need what s being pitched to them and whether a given company s product surpasses its competitors products. Today, customers don t want to hear sales reps talk about their companies solution they want to hear about the business results it can achieve when tailored to their needs. Since the customer s needs are always connected to a larger business issue, salespeople need to spend more time on business diagnostics than on the traditional needs analysis. And sales managers must create a sales process that mirrors how customers buy, not just one that follows how their companies wish to sell. Collaboration defines the sales relationship. Rather than push-selling a one-size-fits-all product, today s sales reps must engage customers in co-creating solutions. As the Sales 2.0 model evolves, collaboration will become an increasingly critical aspect. Consider how Wikipedia has revolutionized the sharing and co-creation of knowledge. The wiki way of co-creation has led companies to shift customer communication from monologue to dialogue. Selling has shifted from a rigid, fixedformula approach to a flexible, best-practice-driven dialogue in which companies build their futures around the voice of their customers. Web 2.0 technologies such as web conferencing are all about extending customer dialogues around the globe. In the Sales 2.0 model, sales teams collaborate online with prospect teams, exchanging information to co-create the best business solution.

4 Salespeople s Changing Roles The changing needs and expectations of customers have, in turn, altered the necessary skill sets and roles of sales reps and managers. In a Sales 2.0-enabled business, salespeople must possess higher-level selling skills and stronger business acumen. Then Sales rep focus: Act as product specialist; engage with customers to provide product information and translate features into benefits. Now Sales rep focus: Act as business specialist, working in partnership with customers to diagnose business problems and help them win. Sales management focus: Track sales team s activities, such as number of calls per days and sales per month. Sales management focus: Align people, processes and technology with customer requirements. Success skills: Maintain likeability, persuasiveness and persistence through tasks such as cold calling. Success skills: Display likeability, persuasiveness, persistence and effective use of information technology, to co-create a solution with the prospect.

5 Working Smarter, Not Harder With new rules for selling and more demanding roles for salespeople, closing deals appears more challenging. But it isn t: Technology has risen to the task, enabling a higher level of customer engagement, as well as a speedier and more efficient sales cycle. Today, sales reps must understand how to best utilize information technology, automating once-tedious tasks to free up more time for customer collaboration. In the past, many sales reps and managers viewed information technology as a headache that complicated their sales processes. Today, savvy sales reps shudder to think of the days when their customer relationship management (CRM) system consisted of a shoebox full of 3x5 index cards, and prospect research involved a trip to the public library. Desktop and web-based CRM systems abound, and advanced prospect research tools can eliminate cold calling. Sales and marketing teams increasingly generate leads through Web-based and marketing to supplement or replace direct marketing. But the most progressive organizations delve deeper into technology s possibilities. WebEx Communications Inc. estimates that 15,000 organizations employ a web-based sales model, utilizing next-generation technologies to overcome long-standing weaknesses in their sales processes and create powerful new capabilities. A Sales 2.0-enabled business unflinchingly places its sales process under a microscope to identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement with Web 2.0 technology. The following technologies significantly impact sales success: Social networking: In the past, salespeople found it difficult to locate the appropriate contact at a target company. But many now use sites such as LinkedIn, Visible Path and Xeequa to find the right people to talk to while building strong webs of connections. Sales Leads: According to industry research, one-third of all salespeople are still stuck in the Sales 1.0 model, dialing hard for dollars, cold calling to generate leads. Smart companies have moved upstream and given their salespeople the opportunity to download their own sales leads into their CRM system from sites like SalesGenie, IdExec, Hoovers, or OneSource. Next, they collect the latest intelligence about their prospects from Sales 2.0 sites like Generate.com or InsideView.com. Sales reps can set specific triggers that will alert them of any changes in the prospect s status, a tool that allow salespeople to time their prospecting calls when the window of opportunity is wide open.

6 Webinars: By hosting web events, sales and marketing professionals reach many more prospects at a fraction of the cost of traditional events and in-person meetings. Such technology also enables them to determine the strongest leads by tracking attendees interest and participation. Sales pros can fill the sales funnel with high-quality leads and eliminate poor prospects far earlier in the sales cycle a major advantage of the Sales 2.0 model. Live collaboration: Technologies such as WebEx allow sales reps to make engaging, interactive sales presentations over the Internet, rather than traveling long distances for face-to-face meetings. By cutting out travel time and expense, sales reps boost productivity and greatly lower selling costs. Salespeople use collaborative web meetings to more effectively manage and strengthen ongoing customer relationships. Through live collaboration, sales reps combine the efficiency and reach of low-touch selling with the relationship nurturing of high-touch selling resulting in a new hybrid called web-touch selling. Personalized contact and tracking: Web 2.0 revolutionized lead generation. Sales 2.0 tools such as Genius.com personalize direct-contact s and let reps know how individual prospects respond whether they opened the , clicked to the website, or visited certain web pages. Instead of calling every prospect after a targeted blast, reps will call only those prospects that have read their , visited their website, or downloaded their white paper. That s a huge time savings. A range of other tools such as Eloqua and Vertical Response also produce higher-quality leads through targeted e-marketing campaigns. These technologies create tighter integration between sales and marketing teams. More intelligent CRM: Organizations can incorporate many of the Sales 2.0 tools and applications with on-demand CRM systems such as Salesforce.com. Marketing and prospect data can be smoothly imported, making CRM more powerful and indispensable than ever. Management analytic tools such as Cloud9Analytics.com allow sales managers to create meaningful dashboards in Salesforce.com that help them diagnose sales performance issues before they turn into real problems. The Cloud9 Pipeline Accelerator monitors changes in the current opportunity pipeline and allows sales managers to quickly transfer best practices from their A players to assist B players in closing more sales.

7 Conclusion Sales 2.0-enabled businesses leverage technology to connect with prospects and enhance relationships, thereby increasing sales and profits and distancing themselves from their competition. The new world of Sales 2.0 offers greater opportunities to the technology-savvy sales executive, where cold calls are a thing of the past. Now, salespeople pursue real opportunities and connect with prospects faster co-creating more integrated, valuedriven solutions and the sales process is a mirror image of the buying process. Transitioning from a Sales 1.0 model to a Sales 2.0 model doesn t happen overnight. Like any change, the initiative combines business fundamentals with new ideas. Overall, the transition to Sales 2.0 involves the alignment of seven fundamental ideas: 1. The purpose of any business is to create a customer. 2. To create a customer, salespeople need to help their customer win. 3. Customers are won through a dialogue that begins with building relationships; these relationships grow through the ability to diagnose and mature through the process of co-creating the value-driven solution. 4. To help salespeople win more customers at a lower cost, management needs to empower salespeople with a Sales 2.0 technology set of tools. Technology is the intelligent accelerator of the sales process. 5. Technology is the change driver, but to drive technological change in any company requires progressive leadership. 6. The role of the leader is to harness the collective intelligence of people and to deploy the productive potential of Sales 2.0 technology. It is the sales leader s role to identify where and how Sales 2.0 technologies can make a mission-critical difference. 7. Sales 2.0 technology is not a finite or rigid universe; it is part of an ever-evolving mind set. The future will test this model even further. The amount of information produced in one year in the United States alone exceeds the information contained in the Library of Congress by a factor of 30,000. Scientists predict that Web 3.0 will push the need for collaboration to a much higher level. In the future, we will no longer navigate and search for information in a rapidly growing ocean of content, but explore concepts in pre-populated beehives filled with rich knowledge.

8 Selling has always been always about relationships. The adage nothing takes the place of face-to-face will survive for decades, but the balance of art and science in selling will rapidly change. In the age of Sales 1.0, selling was 60 percent art and 40 percent science. With Sales 2.0, we ve moved to the opposite ratio: 40 percent art and 60 percent science. In the age of Sales 3.0, we predict a further shift to 30 percent art and 70 percent science. The future of selling belongs to those who understand that technology like it or not accelerates change faster than ever, and we can either embrace it and grow with it, or fall behind and lose the ability to stay in the game. Worldwide Sales Offices: Americas & Canada Tel: AmericasInfo@webex.com Europe, Middle East & Africa Tel: + 31 (0) europe@webex.com United Kingdom Tel: europe@webex.com China (HK) Tel: AsiaPacInfo@webex.com India Tel: / sales@cyberbazaarindia.com Japan Tel: JapanInfo@webex.com Australia & New Zealand Tel: + 61 (0) AsiaPacInfo@webex.com WP US