Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
0-Enabled Business By Gerhard Gschwandtner Founder and Publisher, Selling Power magazine
Table of Contents
Introduction The New Rules of Customer Engagement Salespeoples Changing Roles Working Smarter, Not Harder Conclusion 2 3 4 5 7
WebEx Communications Inc. 3979 Freedom Circle Santa Clara, CA 95054 U.S.A. Corp.: +1.408.435.7000 Sales: +1.877.509.3239
www.webex.com
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 Internets 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; theyve transformed the way they sell, start to finish. Theyve 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 salespeoples changing roles, technologies adopted to reshape sales processes, and steps to make the leap from Sales 1.0 to 2.0.
Then
Sales rep focus: Act as product specialist; engage with customers to provide product information and translate features into benefits. Sales management focus: Track sales teams activities, such as number of calls per days and sales per month. Success skills: Maintain likeability, persuasiveness and persistence through tasks such as cold calling.
Now
Sales rep focus: Act as business specialist, working in partnership with customers to diagnose business problems and help them win. Sales management focus: Align people, processes and technology with customer requirements. Success skills: Display likeability, persuasiveness, persistence and effective use of information technology, to co-create a solution with the prospect.
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 cyclea 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 e-mails and let reps know how individual prospects respondwhether they opened the e-mail, clicked to the website, or visited certain web pages. Instead of calling every prospect after a targeted e-mail blast, reps will call only those prospects that have read their e-mail, visited their website, or downloaded their white paper. Thats a huge time savings. A range of other toolssuch 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.
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 fasterco-creating more integrated, valuedriven solutionsand the sales process is a mirror image of the buying process. Transitioning from a Sales 1.0 model to a Sales 2.0 model doesnt 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 leaders 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.
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, weve 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 technologylike it or notaccelerates 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.
AmericasInfo@webex.com
Europe, Middle East & Africa Tel: + 31 (0)20.4108.700
AsiaPacInfo@webex.com
India Tel: 080.2228.6377/17030 9330
europe@webex.com
United Kingdom Tel: 0800.389.9772
sales@cyberbazaarindia.com
Japan Tel: + 81 3 5501 3272
europe@webex.com
Australia & New Zealand Tel: + 61 (0)3.9653.9581
JapanInfo@webex.com
AsiaPacInfo@webex.com
WP411 0807 US