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From Sales 1.0 to Sales 2.0

The Internet has changed the way customers buy. Are you still clinging to the old ways of selling? Have you tied your salespeoples hands behind their backs, forcing them to win battles with obsolete tools? It is time to take a closer look at the latest Sales 2.0 tools that can help you run your sales operation at far greater levels of productivity and efficiency. Sales 2.0 combines customer-focused processes with Web 2.0 technologies to enhance the art and science of selling while creating customer value. On the following pages, we share the most important and most effective Sales 2.0 solutions. We also describe the potential impact of these solutions on your sales organization.

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Dow Jones Turns Information into Business Intelligence

Lets face it: Selling has never been more difficult. The tight economy keeps doors closed and budgets small. According to industry research, more than 40 percent of sales representatives are under quota, while year-to-year revenues from existing customers are down sharply across a broad swath of industries. At the same time, the sales process is getting longer and more vices, keywords. In addition, you can set up trigger events that complex. Industry analysis shows that more than half of all com- ensure your leads are dynamic and reflect timely opportunities. panies report that it takes six or more calls to close a deal! In fact, Dow Jones helps you unearth, explore, and connect to people, more than a quarter of all B2B sales cycles take seven months or companies, and opportunities. more to close. Thats 25 percent 2. Qualifying. Dow Jones helps you Easily find opportunities with news events longer than just six years ago. take advantage of the social netimpacting your prospects and clients To make matters worse, the numworks across your organization and ber of deals that actually close is beyond. You can discover multiple declining year over year, with nearly ways to connect to your target, find a third of all forecasted deals lost colleagues who know the prospect, and nearly a fourth ending in no plus access biographical informadecision. More and more sales tion and news coverage on your cycles are being completely wasttarget. As a result, you can better ed, resulting in dead deals and no position your offering to meet that revenue coming in. targets needs. And if that werent enough, rapid 3. Selling. Dow Jones automatically shifts in the business landscape, finds and can deliver via email or with mergers, reorganization, layCRM key events that signal that a offs, etc., make it ever harder for prospect is ready to make a decisales representatives to keep track sion. It can provide early warning of whats going on in their sales of management moves, product territory. Decision makers are laid launches, real-estate purchases, or off. Projects are put on hold. New any other event that might influence managers bring different priorities. a sale. This helps ensure that you Its tough out there. So how do time your sales activities to match The boxes indicate the volume of news, and you can click you find the companies that will the customers buying process. to drill down to view headlines. invest now? How do you build the 4. Retaining. Dow Jones helps you breadth of relationship that protects your deal? The answer is stay on top of your existing accounts. It identifies new contacts Dow Jones. to extend your network and discovers up-sell opportunities so Some sales professionals may regard Dow Jones as simply a that you continually strengthen your customer relationships by way of measuring stock-market performance. However, Dow responding to their changing business needs. Jones is also a company that provides information about busiDow Jones provides solid business intelligence throughout ness and companies and the executives who run them. In the sales cycle, providing the right information in the right forfact, Dow Jones provides the worlds most complete collection mat at the right time to the right people. With Dow Jones, sales of news and data about global companies, industries, and representatives can flush out new opportunities, target the executives, featuring more than 28 million executives and 17 right companies, and make connections to key executives. million companies worldwide in a comprehensive database. Most importantly, sales representatives spend their valuable More importantly, Dow Jones has figured out how to make that time developing the best opportunities prioritized around the information useful during all stages of the sales cycle: companies that are prepared to buy. And that means more rev1. Prospecting. Dow Jones lets you build rich, targeted lists of enue and profit, even during difficult times. prospects based on more than 35 criteria, including locaFor more information, please visit www.solutions.dowjones. tion, industry, revenue, news, and, unlike other such ser- com/sales.

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GoldMines Configurability Transforms Data into Actionable Knowledge

Competitors nipping at your heels? Planning to introduce new products or services? Including new markets, geographies, and/or channels in your growth plan? If so, youll need a CRM system that can grow and evolve as you reinvent your business. Whether thats easy or difficult will depend greatly on whether your CRM implementation can reflect the nuances of your business without requiring expensive recoding. Such customization can be long and complicated, causing your CRM implementation costs to spiral out of control. Customization, with the difficult coding involved, calls for a skilled programmer. The coding alone is time-consuming, and the evant system. The solution should be intelligent enough to present only information relevant to the role or function the sales rep is currently performing, rather than display a horde of irrelevant fields and screens. For example, when a sales rep and a sales manager access the account screen, they should see information tailored to their specific roles. The sales reps screen should have quick actions such as create a contact or create an opportunity pinned to his or her personalized navigation bar. By contrast, the sales manager, who needs a higher understanding of the accounts overall revenue potential, should have export forecast or export opportunities over a certain revenue value as quick actions pinned to his or her personalized navigation bar. The trick, then, is to use configuration to transform data into information and, more importantly, to transform information into action-oriented knowledge. Unfortunately, very few CRM systems are easily customized in this way. One CRM product that definitely has this capability is GoldMine from FrontRange Solutions. For example, suppose a sales manager wants to expand his or her foothold in the Northeast and plans to host a seminar for a vertical market in Boston. With GoldMines configuration capabilities, that sales manager can quickly generate a view of all the accounts in Boston, by industry, to determine which vertical market has the deepest penetration of existing customers and which new vertical may be ripe for the picking. The ability to transform data into action-oriented knowledge is one of the most powerful potentials of CRM but is often the most overlooked criterion in CRM selection. Making the extra effort to scrutinize CRM configuration capabilities during your selection process will be richly rewarding when your system is up and running. For more information, please call 1-800-443-5457 or visit www.goldmine.com.

process becomes even lengthier because, before the changes can be rolled out to users, the new code must be tested. If your IT staff is overburdened by other projects, youll have to wait in line for your changes. By the time theyre ready, your business requirements or the market conditions may have changed, rendering the coded modification obsolete. Instead, what you want is a CRM system that has built-in reconfiguration. Ideally, a sales professional or sales manager should be able to quickly implement and tune changes. For example, if customer feedback indicates that your sales process workflow needs an addition, a sales professional should be able to make the change without IT assistance. At the most rudimentary level, a CRM solution should allow you to add or edit fields with a point-and-click, drag-and-drop interface, so they reflect your specific business model. The CRM solution should also enable you to create a personally rel-

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Marketo Turns a Prospect Database into a Social Network

B2B selling used to mean sending a road warrior to call upon customers face-to-face. Thats no longer true, though. According to a recent study by James Oldroyd of the Kellogg School of Management, corporate hiring of outside sales reps has leveled off at 0.5 percent annual growth, while hiring of inside sales reps is growing at a lively 7.5 percent clip annually. By 2012, nearly 800,000 more companies will host inside sales teams and theyll be using the telephone and the Internet to nurture, develop, and close sales opportunities. Even the remaining field sales teams wont be spending as much time meeting face-to-face. Oldroyds study discovered that more than two-fifths of all activities conducted by customer-facing teams were actually handled over the phone. Selling has moved online and over the phone because customers prefer it that way. Never before have customers been better informed and more likely to understand a vendor, its products, and its competitors. As research and buying have moved online, the process of selling has grown less personal, more mechanical, and ultimately driven by the customers agenda. Thats not necessarily a bad thing certainly customers are happy about it but it does put sales reps at a bit of a disadvantage. With the prospective buyer now in control of the process, its hard for a sales rep to use body language and gut instinct to decide when to pursue a deal or when to back off. Because so much of the interaction is online, even a seasoned, savvy rep may end up in the dark when it comes to knowing which leads and opportunities would appreciate a follow-up call. Thats where Marketo Sales Insight comes in. It allows sales reps to define a social network of leads and contacts that they are interested in following. It then presents the rep with Facebook-style status updates from the leads and contacts they follow, highlighting the key moments and events that might indicate buying interest.

Unlike Twitter or Facebook, where the user has to post status updates, Marketo Sales Insight uses the collective intelligence of marketing and sales to identify key moments from an otherwise overwhelming amount of activity data derived from Web analytics, email tracking, and other measures of buying behavior. For example, suppose that in response to a monthly newsletter, a prospective customer visits your Websites product page to learn more about a new offering, watches a demo, views a case study, then visits the pricing page all within a four-hour period of time. With Marketo Sales Insight, sales and marketing teams can jointly decide, make your system understand, and give you a heads-up: This behavior means that the customer in question is probably looking to buy a service contract. As such, it might be a good idea to give that customer a call. Because Marketo analyzes and distills behavioral data from the Web, sales professionals can focus on selling, rather than on analyzing and interpreting Web-activity behavior. Marketo Sales Insight helps the entire team focus its sales efforts on the right people at the right time with the right response. ServiceSource, a provider of service-performance management, is a case in point, according to Katie Efstratis, the companys sales manager. Marketo Sales Insight helps us closely monitor our clients, send trackable emails, and receive instant notifications so we can better respond to our clients needs and earn their renewal business, she explains. To learn more about Marketo Sales Insight and Marketos solutions for marketing and sales teams, please visit www.marketo.com/demo.

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SellingEdge.com Turns Knowledge into a Sales Tool

Most everybody acknowledges that people buy from people. To that end, the competency, knowledge, and responsiveness of each of your sales reps is a critical differentiator. Unfortunately, study after study suggests that buyers are unhappy with sales reps lack of knowledge and slow response. Its a serious problem. According to a recent Cahners survey, 58 percent of buyers report that sales reps are unable to answer their questions effectively. And 40 percent of sale professionals time is spent finding the information and knowledge required to do their jobs. Fortunately, according to CSO Insights, addressing this issue can boost the number of sales reps making quota by 23 percent and improve the win rates of forecasted deals by 13 percent. And it also improves morale and retention, cutting sales rep turnover by nearly a third. A large part of the issue is sales reps inability to find and access the individual(s) with the know-how, experience, and ideas needed. And even if they do, the conversation isnt captured and made available to others who may benefit from the same information. The challenge begins the instant an organization grows beyond a small team and can no longer easily gather in person to collaborate, share experiences, and exchange knowhow. As a company expands, people become separated by time and distance, expertise is scattered, people no longer know everyone else, and the opportunity to readily converse and collaborate is lost. Sales reps are left making frantic phone calls, sending out Hail Mary emails to broad groups of people, and trolling through a variety of information sources. How to meet this challenge? Sales managers might consider using a new SaaS service, SellingEdge.com. SellingEdge.com acts like the ultimate virtual watercooler: It is accessible from anywhere and at any time; It allows you to collaborate asynchronously with others who have registered; It organically remembers and shares all conversations current and past. If you still dont have all the crucial information you need, it can automatically identify and connect you to the right people to the get the expertise you need. And it uses and ties together traditional communication venues such as email and IM with new Web 2.0 facilities, such as wikis, blogs, and communities. SellingEdge.com is readily accessible via the Web, is integrated with Salesforce.com, and for the onthe-go sales rep through email and mobile devices. To support wide and easy participation, experts dont need to sign on to the system; they merely respond to an email, and their response is sent back to the sales rep while it is organically captured, tagged and stored in Selling Edge.com. Next time a similar situation arises, the system can answer it immediately, without bothering the expert or forcing the sales rep to embark on an expedition mission. SellingEdge.com readily opens the lines of communication across your company connecting sales reps to ALL the expertise, experience, ideas, insight and creativity they need to enable them to be more effective in todays hyper-charged selling environment. According to Julie Thomas, president and CEO of the sales training firm ValueVision, We find the application particularly helpful for identifying experts and encouraging collaboration and are very excited to roll out the solution to all of our sales professionals. For more information, please visit www.SellingEdge.com.

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Xactly Creates the Perfect Lens into Sales Performance with Analytics
In this age of widespread business visibility, its ironic that sales performance remains a dangerous blind spot for most companies. This is particularly alarming given todays macroeconomic conditions, where anything that can maximize the value of your sales spend should be eagerly embraced. But there is a way to eliminate that blind spot and increase your sales organizations performance by gathering and analyzing the valuable data created from each sales transaction. The starting point: knowing where to look. The value of data is well recognized by sales. CRM applications have revolutionized selling by helping organize pre-sales data (e.g., contacts and opportunities) needed to manage the sales pipeline. But what about post-sales data? There is an enormous amount of potentially useful data produced at the time of sale information about who bought what from whom, where, at what price, with what discount, and at what commission level. When collected and analyzed, this data can be leveraged for insights into selling patterns, individual and team effectiveness, and product performance. It can be used to gain visibility into commissions spend and sales-plan effectiveness. And it can be combined with pre-sales CRM data for the fullest possible picture of what is going on in the field and to drive strategic sales behaviors in real time. The proverbial sweet spot of sales analytics the place where you can meld pre- and post-sales data to find useful, actionable patterns is your compensation system. The why and where of how you pay your sales professionals is the perfect lens through which you can best understand the entire sales cycle. Whats more, this kind of post-sales data is more accurate because it has been filtered through the strict rules and financial controls of your compensation system. The resulting insight into whats happening in your sales funnel can help you tune and transform your sales teams performance, ensuring accuracy, consistency, visibility, and compliance throughout the sales process. Combine that with the ability to easily use compensation to modify and alter sales behaviors, and youre talking about a true sales performance management (SPM) system. Thats why its not surprising that Xactly, a pioneer in ondemand SPM systems, recently added extensive analytics capabilities. Through a set of dashboards and interactive reports, Xactly Analytics delivers insight into whats going on and what to expect to those who need it most finance departments, sales teams, and sales management. Xactly Analytics provides a unified view of your firms sales metrics, bringing together all the data necessary for ongoing visibility and analysis of your selling performance. The combination of an ad hoc analysis capability, custom reports, and prebuilt analytic content makes it easier to manage sales performance. The software lets decision makers more closely examine and better understand sales performance, product performance, and sales compensation to ensure that the incentives in place are driving the appropriate behavior in the field. For example, you can track the performance of your best contributors and understand whats driving their success. You can discover how commission spending is changing as a percentage of total revenue, thus allowing you to quickly spot anomalies and issues and avoid costly mistakes. You can even highlight the highest-margin deals versus those that have been heavily discounted, understand whats really different about those deals, and then take specific action to avoid discounts and encourage higher-margin selling. As a result, its never been easier to align your firms sales behavior with your firms strategic business objectives. For more information, please visit www.xactlycorp.com.

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