Anneke Seley on Sales 2.0 (Part 2)

From Chapter 2 of ‘Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology’ by guest authors Anneke Seley and Brent Holloway.

WHY IS SALES 2.0 IMPERATIVE FOR YOUR BUSINESS? Continued 

Marketing and sales professionals in every industry need to reexamine their markets, potential new customers, and how new and current customers evaluate and select products. They need to adapt their marketing strategies and sales processes to match the way that all their customers want to buy, while maintaining the flexibility to allow different customers to buy in different ways. For many companies with complex, business-to-business (B2B) sales models—where competition has increased and technology advances have changed customer preferences—the traditional sales approaches that have yielded success in the past will not work for much longer.  

KEY FACTORS DRIVING SALES 2.0

ADOPTION
There are seven significant factors that make it imperative for your business to implement Sales 2.0 practices to create sustainable advantage over your competition and create value for you and your customer, ensuring that when the dust settles, your company comes out on top. These factors are: 

1. Customers’ changing communications preferences.
2. Shifting power from sales reps to customers.
3. Rising cost of sales.
4. Customer demand for corporate social responsibility.
5. Different markets, different economics.
6. Decreasing sales effectiveness.
7. Increased customer demand for trust, responsiveness, and authenticity. ? ? 

IS TECHNOLOGY THE ANSWER?
Not by itself. 
Technology vendors have embraced the term Sales 2.0 to address sales challenges and describe a new and improved way of selling. Sales 2.0 technologies are so named because many incorporate Web 2.0 functionality, which emphasizes interaction, collaboration, and open sharing of information over the Internet. This rapidly growing category of products addresses age-old challenges that are associated with sales performance. These range from tracking, measuring, and analyzing sales
activities and results, to improving or enabling certain parts of the sales cycle, to providing rich online communications vehicles for customers to research companies and interact with sales professionals. Given the multitude of challenges facing sales professionals today, technology
companies are responding with products that can produce increased effectiveness and efficiency—both of which lead to improved sales performance.

While technology is a key component and major enabler of the Sales 2.0 phenomenon, it is not a universal panacea that automatically leads companies into sales nirvana. Technology vendors supply the tools that enable solutions; they do not provide the solutions in and of themselves. And unfortunately, many companies don’t focus on the right things—sales rep and customer productivity and engagement—when implementing this technology. Gerhard Gschwandtner, Publisher of
Selling Power magazine, claims that “sales leaders need to think harder about the effects of technology. Technology is like medicine; it has side effects that show up only after you’ve purchased and taken the medicine. We can’t look at sales through the lens of technology; we need to look at technology through the lens of the customer.” You cannot simply implement technology and expect it to work on its own; rather, you begin by identifying your customers’ buying processes and align your sales process accordingly. You must shift your point of view to that of your customers in order to integrate technology that works for everybody. Implementing the appropriate technology is required to achieve the sales productivity gains associated with the Sales 2.0 practices of sales process measurement, customer relationship management, and online customer engagement.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Anneke Seley on Sales 2.0
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