A Sales 2.0 World

Since we launched the whole Sales 2.0 initiative with Geoff Moore last year one recurring question has been, “Isn’t Sales 2.0 really just CRM 2.0? ” In other words aren’t next gen CRM app platforms like force.com a complete Sales 2.0 solution?

After a year of exploring all the aspects of sales 2.0 the answer is clearly no. While CRM is certainly a strategic and fundamental component of sales 2.0 it is only one key element of a sales 2.0 platform.

If you look at the sales 2.0 tech funnel you’ll see that it’s a rich soup of sales and marketing technologies and systems that are distributed across a variety of platforms. You have CRM app platforms like Salesforce, of course. But you also have Web analytics platforms like Omniture and marketing systems like Genius.com. Google, of course, is critical to the lead gen funnel as are e-mail marketing solutions. So are collaboration platforms like WebEx.

In summary what we have discovered in a year is that Sales 2.0 encompasses a much bigger set of services that exceeds the limits of what existing platforms can provide. If Google and Salesforce and WebEx somehow merged into one huge platform we’d be pretty close. But in order to achieve all the key ingredients of live interaction with measurable processes Sales 2.0 today still requires some skillful integration by the customer.

At Genius we have laid the some of the groundwork for an integrated platform but as with the entire industry we have a long way to go before we achieve true Sales 2.0 nirvana from the technology perspective.

“Reading a person’s digital body language” was  a central theme at the sold-out Sales 2.0 Conference. 

For the last couple of years we at Genius.com have  been using the phrase “reading your prospect’s online body language” as a way of describing how much can be learned about your prospect’s interests and buying intentions by observing how they navigate your company website. Which pages a prospect looks at and what content they spend time on can tell you a lot about how and when to approach a prospective customer to offer assistance.

Recently there’s been more discussion in our industry of “digital” and “online” body language, because it powerfully describes how new Internet technologies are helping Sales and Marketing better qualify their prospects and better prioritize their time. 

Capturing online body language is pretty useless, though, if there’s no one there to observe and react.  That’s why practitioners of “Sales 2.0” put so much emphasis on empowering front line sales and marketing people with real time access to information about their prospective customers. In Sales 2.0 For Dummies, I wrote:

“Once you’ve attracted prospects to your website or marketing event, you need to interact with them to understand which visitors are seriously considering what you’re offering.  Sales 2.0 tools make for a richer interaction between you and your prospects, by helping you view and assess the online equivalents of body language and interest level.  With this added insight, your Sales 2.0 team can better prioritize their time with qualified and interested prospects, thus building a smarter pipeline.”

It looks like the Sales 2.0 is catching on.  Now we’re starting to see similar “online” and “digital body language” phrases show up as central themes in other company’s webinars, speeches and white papers. 

I, for one, welcome all the discussion.   The more that people know about the kind of success that can be had with Sales 2.0 technologies and techniques the more products everyone sells.

And, in challenging economic times, that’s good news for us all.

Check out enthusiastinc.com’s blog on Sales 2.0, “next generation of sales, support and integrated marketing technology on the web”.

Michael Bosworth is the author of Solution Selling, and he was a great note to end on for the Sales 2.0 conference. Much of Michael’s talk centered around the product marketing and sales disconnect, and how it can adversely effect customer experience.

Point made: “What if as a company, senior staff got into a room and came up with a statement on what potential customers should be. Time to rethink marketing speak.”
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Gerhardt ’s second panel was quite full with:

Jason Blessing, Group VP Taleo Business Edition; Scott Schnaars, Senior Manager, Yahoo; Mark Bagley, VP Technology British Telecom; Bill Ross, Director Sales & Marketing Position2

With the media landscape increasingly fragmented it is harder and harder to tell authenticity. This is true on both sides of the sales equation, and Gerhardt gave examples in the form of media to express the customer side, such as deceptive reality television, and made-for-web YouTube series with false perceptions.
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The boom, the bust…the Google IPO. If you were reading the business sheets and listening to the sound bites, you may have missed the fact that the infrastructure powering Sales 2.0 now was going on this whole time. Since David Thompson was CMO at WebEx during the collaborative software providers defining years, he has some interesting perspectives.

Some of the takeaways:
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Anthony Lye, VP Oracle On Demand, highlighted social CRM applications that the company will be showing at the upcoming OpenWorld, November 11-15, in San Francisco.

According to Anthony, the company is focused on allowing vendors to automate through open standards. A great pull quote: “CRM should not be an endless list of tabs. And social CRM should be more than a mashup with Google Maps.”

Oracle’s social app plan will be comparable to Google Tools, in that there will be a beta, time to reflect and change from feedback, then a full release.
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Barry and Jim at CSO Insights benchmark companies that are selling. Their presentation talk over lunch on the terrace of the St. Regis was a balanced third party perspective on the state of the industry.

Jim focused his time on the fact that a successful metrics-oriented philoshophy is about managing. So if you are a sucessful manager in a 1.0 world, you are not going to be any less.

As with the Selling Power breakout session, the importance of the marketing and sales relationship was stressed. For a more even balance and higher quota attainment, attention should be paid in parallel to the sales process, as well as the buying process.
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Gerhardt Gschwandtner, Publisher SellingPower, asked a question to Geoffrey Moore during the first keynote of Sales 2.0: “With over 19,000 technologies on the market for salespersons and their management to choose from, isn’t it time to start looking at the technologies through the lens of sales, instead of the other way around.”

We are addressing that now in his breakout session with Lisa Caswell, Director, Allianace Sales at Ariba; Umberto Milletti, Co-founder of e-learning company Digital Think. Now at Inside View, a web analytics company offering intelligence to sell effectively; and Clarence So Chief Marketing Officer, Salesforce.com.
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Stu Schmidt is Vice President, Worldwide Professional Services for Cisco WebEx, and he has stepped in for Dave Berman’s keynote. Dave was here last night, but feeling feverish. His conditioned worsened, and he was unable to present today.

Stu showed screen captures of the landslide CRM dashboard, which looks great. Clever UI. However, his main focus was on the sales process broken down into stages. Milestones and verifiable outcomes. A verifiable outcome is a transaction with your target where you engaged and got something back, and they are the most valuable transactions to track for sales reps.

Stu broke down the lead indicators and management process with these six pieces being tracked:
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