Build Your Custom Sales 2.0 ToolKit to Fight Declining Sales Effectiveness

Sales pros are realizing the traditional way they sell to their customers isn't working anymore. Golf matches and expensive dinners have given way to online knowledge building, real-time prospecting and brief, pragmatic conversations. If you stay stuck in the old-school methods of relationship-building, you face extinction. 

The good news is that a slew of “Sales 2.0” tools have emerged to help you improve and accelerate the sales process. “Sales 2.0” encompasses a range of web and social technologies that offer new ways to interact, collaborate and share information between sales pros and their customers. It’s all about accelerating sales cycles, gathering more business intelligence, and engaging prospects more effectively.

The bad news is that the flood of new Sales 2.0 tools hitting the market is perhaps too much of a good thing. Despite the all the new innovations, the effectiveness of sales pros is on the decline nationwide, according to the CSO Insights 2009 Sales Performance Optimization Report.

A key reason: Sales 2.0 tools are not a replacement for good old-fashion selling skills and talent. Their technological wizardry doesn’t magically fill sales funnels. Instead, you need both the right skill set and the right tools to excel. But which tools make sense? Sales 2.0 technologies permeate all layers of sales management today, including tools for:

•    CRM
•    Email marketing
•    Customer & business intelligence
•    Screen-sharing
•    Outsourced selling
•    Sales workflow management
•    Expense reporting
•    Incentive/compensation management   
•    Partner program management
•    Sales enablement
•    Sales training & motivation
•    Territory management
•    Inbound sales
•    Sales leads and prospecting

You might find yourself a slave to a growing roster of sales software and services! For example, almost 70% of a salesperson’s time is spent on non-selling activities these days, according to the CSO Insights Report. What top sales pros need to do is to cut through the bull and pull out a core suite of best-of-breed Sales 2.0 tools that will help them prospect, demo, close and support customer relationships through the web.

If we can get a bit technical for a moment, the IT world has a good model to emulate: they call it “the software stack.”

A stack is a collection of complementary software that serves a single purpose. Think, for example, of the popular LAMP software stack that powers a majority of the today’s web servers, which is comprised of four pieces of complimentary software:

• Linux (for the operating system)
• Apache (for the web server)
• MySQL (for the database) and
• PHP, Python or Perl (for running the web applications).

Using the stack model, you should assess which Sales 2.0 technologies are most useful to your unique sales environment and customize a Sales 2.0 stack (or toolkit, if you want to call it) that collectively serves the purpose of enhancing, rather than hindering, your selling effectiveness.

Your goal, then, is to create a custom “stack” that gets the job done using the least number of tools. A good rule of thumb is to start with solutions that serve the 4 key steps of the sales process: prospecting, demoing, closing and supporting. And each tool in the stack should be weighed against whether it helps achieves any of the key criteria:

•    Get more customer interactions
•    Close more deals
•    Increase selling speed
•    Do real-time prospecting
•    Show unplanned demos
•    Enhance phone conversations
•    Sell face-to-face without flying
•    Gain competitive advantage

Using this formula, a typical Sales 2.0 stack might consist of the following components:
Glance is a good stack component example. It fits in elegantly into most Sales 2.0 stacks as a screen sharing tool that lets you show your stuff on-the-fly via a lightweight, lightning-fast web application. This kind of tool is essential because customers' information gathering preferences are changing. Prospects and buyers today reach for the phone and their computers when they want information rather than wanting face-to-face meetings.

And according to the CSO Insights Report, enhancing the sales call experience is key to reversing the trend of poor sales performance:

“We do not believe that success will be achieved by making more sales calls. The number of calls—face-to-face meetings or on the phone—has already been increasing over the past few years with minimal impact on sales results. The real objective is going to be how to make great calls: motivating stakeholders to meet with you; creating a sense of urgency that moves evaluating your solutions to the top of their priority list; differentiating yourself from the competition; selling value (so you can avoid discounting); creating a compelling business case to get the project approved now.”

As a Sales 2.0 stack component, Glance makes you more effective through all steps of the sales process, including:

• Prospecting – Glance helps you open doors and qualify prospects in an instant. It’s the fastest, easiest way to warm a cold call.
• Demonstrating – Glance is the fastest, easiest way to share your information on the fly. It’s the ideal tool for delivering a convincing demo whenever opportunity strikes.
• Closing – Glance helps you negotiate with confidence, overcome roadblocks and close the deal. It removes the friction and anxiety from tough negotiations.
• Supporting – Glance helps you train, support and deliver great customer service after the deal is done.

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