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We continue our series on the major tenets of Sales 2.0 by focusing on accountability. We are basing much of our content on the recent article “Sales 2.0: How soon will it improve your business?” by Pelin Wood Thorogood and Gerhard Gschwandtner. You can read the piece in its entirety at SellingPower.com, or in this recent article at InsideCRM.
Selling is shifting from a freewheeling organization to a culture of accountability. Whether it is the optimization of sales pipelines, the resizing of a territory or performance monitoring to reward the right sales behavior at the right time, Sales 2.0 solutions increase accountability for all stakeholders while reducing costs. Armed with precise data, marketing managers can track the effectiveness of each campaign, and sales managers will no longer act on hunches but will manage by metrics and hold their salespeople’s feet to the fire.
There are already several solutions available to support this characteristic of Sales 2.0: LucidEra helps sales managers quickly analyze the effectiveness of their sales organization. Easy-to-use analytics helps users understand what they need to do to improve their sales performance without increasing sales costs. Xactly Corp. has created an on-demand sales compensation solution that includes an online incentive program. The moment salespeople reach a certain performance level, they can instantly choose from an exciting selection of motivating rewards.
In a huge (and legitimizing) nod to the work of Sales and CRM 2.0 innovators, Forrester Research recently published the report CRM 2.0: Fantasy or Reality? Analyst Bill Band’s answer to the question posed in the title can be discerned from this great tidbit from the report: “Now is the time to take action to start gaining the practical experience you need to break out of old mindsets and grasp new opportunities.” In the report, Band showcases a number of CRM companies’ recent adoptions of Web 2.0 technologies, and gives an in-depth picture on what the different players are employing in their CRM 2.0 efforts.
We are delighted to be a part of the report’s highlight of our customer LucidEra in the “Energizing” section. According to Band, “next-generation CRM thinking acknowledges the importance of bread-and-butter selling actions, but it incorporates the idea that an organization can ‘energize’ its best customers to boost its business.” Band continues that companies “are doing this through fostering sales team collaboration and providing data and links for gaining introductions to influential customer network members by using business-oriented social networking and contact management solutions.”
Examples of such a strategy includes the exact socialprise work we do here at InsideView to bolster the sales force’s lead qualification through data harvested from the social Web. It is great that industry analysts are seeing not only the value, but vital strategic role that Sales 2.0 is playing in the CRM space of today and tomorrow, and we are proud to be a part of this first official wave of Sales 2.0 innovation.
