My head is still spinning after two days at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. It was great to see all the new ideas the various players in the Sales 2.0 market are constantly creating. The spirit of innovation is there, and it will help customers to address the Sales Effectiveness and Productivity challenges ahead of them.
Gerhard Geschwandtner put it well in his opening remarks: The Internet is changing the world. It has already changed end customers’ purchasing behaviors significantly, but changes in the B2B world are and will be equally dramatic.
Also, the changes span the entire range from Lead Generation, where social media tools like LinkedIn or Facebook are playing bigger roles from day to day, to Sales Enablement, where sellers need to be enabled to have better informed and more relevant conversations with their clients despite the challenges of information overload. However, there’s more: Think about how Sales Compensation or Pipeline Management need to change in a more dynamic, flatter world. Or how (social) Marketing Automation methods could improve Lead Nurturing…
As exciting as all of these things are, as overwhelming they may appear to customers in the first place. However, waiting and observing is not an option. Companies have started to try out and adopt one or the other Sales 2.0 technology/methodology and they are seeing the benefits – as we could hear in the various panel discussions during the conference. Yes, the holistic picture of how the different pieces of the Sales 2.0 ecosystem are playing together still needs to be drawn – but you’ve got to start somewhere, if you don’t want to be left behind.
The next challenge, to quote Gerhard again, is moving from reactive to proactive in using the tools.
We will also be visiting the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco, March 8-9, 2010. We would love to meet you there and discuss your views on Sales Enablement and the needs of today’s sales people. Contact us at @BizSphere and in case you won’t be at the conference yourself, follow the Twitter hashtag #s20c
On March 7, 2010 Peter O’Neill from Forrester Research, Inc. wrote about us in his blog post ‘Spotted – 2 interesting European marketing automation vendors’, calling us one of the European companies with some very innovative ideas:
“[...] BizSphere positions itself as providing sales enablement solutions (my colleague Scott Santucci also knows them well) but they are actually filling a gap between a marketing asset management system and satisfying the needs of both sales people and field marketers. While central marketing people need an asset management system to maintain content integrity and oversight; their colleagues in the field also need a tool to help them collate the right collateral package matching every potential sales situation, most relevant to that target customer and status in the sales cycle. [...]“
For a quick view of our approach to Sales Enablement have a look at our presentation on slideshare.net or check out our YouTube videos.
One of the key factors for Sales Enablement systems to be of value to salespeople is to provide them with knowledge structured in the context of how a B2B salesperson works. How can this context be characterized? Is it the sales process? To what extend does the customer buying process have to be taken into consideration? How does the customers’ use of the internet influence the selling world? Let us work backwards through these questions to find the answer to the question: What context is to be considered to structure knowledge so it is of most help to salespeople?
The selling world in the web 2.0 era
Depending on the studies you consult, you will find that around 70 to 90 % of purchases today start with an internet search. Search engine optimized (SEO) websites and well written blogs are the primary tools to generate anonymous attraction from these searches.
Addressed attraction can be generated with lead generation systems usually including functions such as lead scoring and lead nurturing. Social media are another category of systems for addressed attraction generation.
All these systems are usually owned by marketing. As a consequence salespeople become involved later in the customers buying process. Their ability to guide prospective customers through the early stages in the buying process is thus drastically diminished.
In consequence, Sales Enablement systems will have to hold primarily content helping salespeople with the later stages of the process. Given the increased knowledge of the prospective customer, this content must be very sophisticated and detailed in order to enable salespeople to provide value to the customer interaction at this late stage in the process.
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