It really is real, this "Sales 2.0"

With so much quality content already posted in this category, penning a new entry is a little intimidating. So this new boy on the block starts with an affirmation of what's been said before :-). In order to add some value, we can create some context for Sales 2.0 by looking at our case studies.

The author is old enough to know better, but nevertheless is involved in three independent, and different businesses. One, a Business 2.0 start up; another the relaunch of a desk top engineering package as an enterprise solution; and the third, a government funded research program targeted at predicting "adverse events" in intensive care environments.

"Sales" is a critical success factor in all three, but nothing like the selling we were doing just a few years ago. What happened? Yep, Web 2.0 and the leadership it offered to us all.

The "selling is a numbers game" guys are lost and gone for ever. Cold calling flat out doesn't work, and the spammers have ruined Email as a marketing tool. Customers now know at least as much about the product/service as the sales people, so they can't be fooled by fast talking and firm hand shakes.

So where's the sales people's value add if it's not door knocking or blind siding the customer?

As Evan Sohn of Salesconx suggests in his video, the value add is exactly where it's always been, for sales professionals - helping customers to make the right choices, and staying around to make sure they get what they bought.

The value add is in all the additional information, and communication, made possible by social media and the sales guy networking wider and deeper.

As Rich Baker of Glance.net describes it's in ensuring that positive customer experience gets happy customers marketing to their friends.

It's in recognizing the extent of the customers' control, and engaging them in being part of the brand.

So what does this have to do with the context of the three projects? And where are the parallels between the businesses?

In the Business 2.0 sector we have to understand the needs of small business owners, earn the right to be heard by creating real value with content, engage them in defining their solution, creating the brand, and virally marketing to their peers. Search helps them find us whereas blogs and forums help us find them. We need to build that 2+2=5 into the software so that the relationship between the users becomes as important as the software.

In the engineering software business we plan repositioning the solution in the Corporate Responsibility space, based on Sustainable business and creating wealth without costing the earth. Environmental forums and blogs are our path into this space. We just need to create enough quality content so the community takes us seriously. Then we'll use networking sites to make contact with the corporate buyers.

In the medical business the Internet does a similar job. But we're not after groups of people. We really want to influence just a small number of individuals, the senior clinicians who're struggling to meet government demands for evidence based medicine when they can't believe the evidence. We certainly can't fool these people - most of them really are brain surgeons :-) - but we can use networking to find them, blogs to engage them and forums to get them owning the brand and spreading the word.

Our job as the sales guys is recognizing the change in dynamics and, like the judo black belt, making it operate in our favor.

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