Whilst it’s been widely reported and commented that Sales 2.0 is an evolution of Sales 1.0; for Salesnet it’s really a move from Sales 1.8 to Sales 2.0. We’ve been pioneers in advancing Sales Effectiveness through CRM for over 6 years. Our first evolutional change from Sales 1.0 through the introduction of GPS for Sales (Guided Performance Selling) - the first process focused approach to CRM for sales organisations.
GPS for Sales attacked the core problems facing many companies. This approach matured into Salesnet’s Sales Blueprint. The Sales Blueprint incorporated knowledge and input from many of the world’s leading sales thought leaders including Jack Daly, Doyle Slayton, Jonathan Farrington, and Craig Henshaw amongst others.
Salesnet is working hard now to take the Sales Blueprint and evolve this into the Sales Blueprint 2.0. Details of this will be released in the second half of 2008.
What is Sales 2.0?
- Sales 2.0 is not about technology - CRM or Marketing Automation
- Sales 2.0 is about understanding and embracing the dominance of the customer's buying cycle. Their ability to be more informed, more knowledgeable, and influenced by a wider range of factors than ever before, and how that's forcing the rethinking of traditional sales cycle mentalities.
- Sales 2.0 is about increasing sales productivity, but what is sales productivity? The emergence of this role, or this function, or in many places it's a concept called sales readiness.
- Sales 2.0 is about addressing sales capacity. That is that salespeople have to be more than just knowledgeable and conversational about what they represent, they have to be fluent. And they have to be able to apply their business acumen capabilities to translate customer needs and requirements through the filter of the speeds and feeds of your product.
- In a Sales 2.0 world, sales people understand that at each phase of the buying cycle there are different entities. We're classically trained to find the decision maker. But more likely today, it's the decision coordinator, and it understands those different roles and where their importance comes in, and what the messages are that you need to deliver to them at that appropriate phase of the sales cycle.
The classic divides between sales and marketing have been driven based on marketing achieving marketing goals, and there not being an alignment of that to sales, and therefore sales proceeding in its own way.
Sales 2.0 is about the increasing role of specialization and the changing of roles, whether that's presales, post sales, lead qualification, lead management roles. And how those various roles in the product marketing, field marketing, field sales, how those roles have to function more collaboratively than ever before. And then finally, it is about realizing the dream of sales technology. It is about understanding that sales automation 2.0 has to be put in place to be able to power this more sophisticated, more complex environment.
Leveraging marketing and the importance of marketing to help sales achieve its goal has grown in importance. Sales leaders have recognised the fact that sales technology (aka Sales Force Automation – SFA or CRM) is a politically risky and highly unpopular endeavour that has to be done. Why? To satisfy the thirst of CFO/CEOs for data and visibility to that data, so they can discuss and understand the three to one pipeline dynamics. You talk to salespeople and they'll tell you that CRM is a necessary evil - This is a Sales 1.0 mindset
The realisation in a 1.0 world of just being able to do it right once was great success. In 2.0, it has to be about individualization, and customization, the concept of account based marketing, and how do I as a sales rep manage multiple opportunities into an individual account, with personalized, customized, marketing playbooks that allow me to do that.
Do you want more information about Sales 2.0?