Can sales 2.0 help your sales strategy?

The biggest buzz going around at the moment in the Sales Community is “Sales 2.0?

I will be publishing more articles on Sales 2.0 as I continue to learn the best sales strategies using the latest technology. As an introduction to Sales 2.0, I have included the following article by Brad Trnavsky from Sales Management 2.0. Make sure you send me your feedback on this article and if you’d like to know more about Selling Expensive Products using Sales 2.0

WHAT IS SALES 2.0?

First and most importantly, I think it is important to remember that a concept like Sales 2.0 does not come about in one day as an epiphany by one person that leads to a industry wide paradigm shift. It is in fact a slow evolution of concept that leads over time to a radical departure from the old and points the way for future development.  It’s my opinion that we are not yet to a “mature” Sales 2.0.

One might say we are at Sales 1.8 or maybe 2.0 Beta. Thats both good and bad news for sales organizations though. Good because the vast majority of organizations are still operating in a Sales 1.0 environment, but bad because your competitor ships are pulling out from the dock and organizations that fail to react will be left tied to the pier to rust and eventually sink into the deep with other has been organizations that failed to move forward in the last evolution.

If you read this definition of Web 2.0 and look back to what the web was in the late 90’s you can clearly see a progression from static pages that were difficult to update and had low bandwidth requirements to the dynamic, easy to update, media rich Web we experience today.

SALES 2.0 IS FLEXIBLE

Sales 1.0 was regimented, scripted and inflexible. In the dynamic world of Sales 2.0 we will need to ditch the pitch, loose the scripts, and learn to adjust our sales process to the needs of the customer. Organizations that are focused on forcing customers to modify their buying habits to match our sales process will loose sales. The most successful organizations will embrace change and do their best to balance budgetary needs, client needs, and the leading edge of technology to have consistent high quality customer experiences.

SALES 2.0 ORGANIZATIONS DEMONSTRATE TRANSPARENCY

In Sales 1.0 sales organizations tried there level best to hide as much information from the customer as possible. They had hidden agendas and viewed transactions as a series of wins and losses. In Sales 2.0 our focus needs to be on cooperation and sharing as much information as possible, presenting ourselves as experts, and assisting clients in solving problems through open agenda free dialogue.

SALES 2.0 ORGANIZATIONS CELEBRATE DIALOGUE

In Sales 1.0 sales people did all the talking. In Sales 2.0 we need to learn to listen. What’s different from the listening we learned to do in the past is that we need to learn to not only listen with our ears, but to leverage technology to uncover hidden wants and needs. We can do this by utilizing tools like genius to monitor customer interactions within our web sites, on our e-newsletters, and via social media. We then need to use this information to adjust our presentation and potentially even our product offerings to better suit our customer needs.

SALES 2.0 ORGANIZATIONS COLLABORATE.

In sales 1.0 every organization was an island. We were fiercely competitive, held our cards close to our vest, and in general did not play nicely with others even if it was a different division of our own company. Sales 2.0 organizations will actively seek out opportunities for collaboration, and seek to share information that will allow both organizations to prosper while providing a higher degree of customer service and support than either organization could on it’s own. In the sales 1.0 world we hoarded resources and insight preferring to offer our highest level of engagement to only our best customers. In sales 2.0 we understand that we can leverage technology to assist us in educating our clients, and strategic partners and allow us to get away from the zero sum game we used to play and share generously without depleting our own resources.