The Art of Social Sales E-Book: Sales 2.0 Strategies in 5 Industries

I am honored to be included among the authors of this e-book, including Paul Greenberg, who spearheaded the project for The Customer Collective and asked me to contribute. As always, my content focuses on real sales and marketing people, generating measurable results using social media and networking. Do you have a “social sales” success story to share?

Here’s a summary of the book’s topics.  You can download a copy free with registration.

Sales are not often traditionally thought of as a social process. But the behavior of the modern customer is changing. Customers today, in many ways that we’ll explain, can increasingly be described as “social customers,” prompting the contemporary sales organization and even the individual salesperson to rethink how they sell. And that can be daunting for many reasons.

• Learn how high-tech, non-profits, retail, sports and telcos leverage new strategies to engage with customers.
• Develop strategies to use social networks to generate leads and cultivate relationships.
• Learn how companies like newScale and ConnectandSell are using LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Participate in the conversations that your newly empowered consumers are having.

Featuring input from:

	Paul Greenberg is a recognized CRM thought leader, the author of the best-selling CRM at the Speed of Light,  President of The 56 Group, LLC, a customer strategy consulting firm focused on cutting edge CRM strategic services, and a founding partner of the CRM training company BPT Partners, LLC.
	Anneke Seley is  CEO and founder of Phone Works, a sales strategy and implementation consultancy that helps businesses build and restructure sales teams to achieve measurable goals using Sales 2.0 principles. She was previously the twelfth employee at Oracle and the designer of OracleDirect, the company’s revolutionary inside sales operation.
	Jay Dunn is VP of Marketing for Lane Bryant, and Founder of Supergroup, the social network for marketing, social media, retail and design professionals. Jay combines his expertise in marketing, design, and branding with his passion for new media, social networking, and technology to reinterpret retail marketing for a variety of clients.
	Jouko Ahvenainen is a pioneer in social media marketing, and played a significant role in the development of the first social marketing intelligence solutions for mobile and media companies. He is co-founder of Xtract, the world’s first social network analytics company, and Grow VC, the first global peer-to-peer micro-funding service for startups.
	Brian Komar is the Director of Strategic Outreach, Activism and Alliances at the Center for American Progress, overseeing three portfolios focused on strategic marketing efforts to strengthen the capacity of progressive advocates and networks, amplify the progressive voice, and extend the reach of the Center’s policy work.
	Mark DiMaurizio is VP of Technology Solutions for Comcast- Spectacor, overseeing the company’s sales and marketing technologies for its Philadelphia sports properties (Philadelphia Flyers, Philadelphia 76ers) and all events at their two Philadelphia venues.

Tags: E-book, Paul Greenberg, Sales 2.0, social media, social networking

Oracle OpenWorld: A Sales 2.0 Perspective

Last Monday, I walked to Moscone Center to join 37,000 people attending Oracle’s annual conference.  This is the first time I’ve attended Oracle OpenWorld since organizing the company’s first ever users’ event  over twenty-five years ago as part of my job as an entry-level employee at Oracle.  You may ask: why should a sales person attend such a conference?   In the early days, it certainly would not have made sense, unless you sold for Oracle and your customers were attending.  In the ’80’s, Oracle’s products were only used by techies – not business users – and the conference attendees were largely programmers, CIOs, and other members of the MIS department, as we called it then.  These conference-goers – self-proclaimed nerds – looked forward to getting the latest information and  inside scoop from the guys (all men at the time) who wrote the code. I vividly remember hosting the late Ted Codd, the inventor of the relational model for database management, as the keynote speaker, who was universally known and revered by the technical audience.

But things have changed. Oracle’s conference not only fills up all of San Francisco’s major hotels and shuts down a city street to automotive traffic but also its product suite has expanded to include business applications including Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM).   Oracle has been working on some interesting additions and enhancements to its products in this area of late – ones that I would classify as Sales 2.0-enabling – under the direction of Anthony Lye.  As a representative of the Sales 2.0 community, I thought it was time to check out the conference again, this time as a member of the analyst/press/blogging community.  I was also curious to see whether the profile of conference attendees had changed with the company’s growth and expansion into new product areas, targeted to business users.

Well, it may have, but it wasn’t obvious.  Given Oracle’s entry into Social CRM, I first tried to connect with others like me by sending out this update on Twitter the week before the conference:

Looking to meet up with customer-focused sales/marketing/social media types at #oracleopenworld. Anyone going? Which sessions (or parties!)?

I got one response.

In the hallway waiting for the CRM sessions to start, I looked around for people displaying the stereotypical signs of selling for a living: well-tailored suit, Rolex watch, leather briefcase in place of free Oracle OpenWorld logo, etc. Only the presenters fit the bill.

Don’t get me wrong; I liked the session content. In his presentation on Oracle’s CRM products, Anthony Lye did a great job describing how he is watching, listening, and learning from the transformation and innovation occurring in the sales landscape and presenting his “Three Game Changing Strategies for Transformation”:

1. Executing cross-channel customer experiences flawlessly

*buyers may use a mix and match of phone/Web, field, retail, and other channels in their selection process; sell in the way the customer wants to buy and give buyers a choice in ways to communicate with you

2. Tapping into the power of the Social Web

*social media can not only  enable the buying process but also support collaboration and best-practices sharing among members of the sales team

3. Delivering CRM data when, how, and where users need it

*this includes providing information on mobile devices as well as desktops and allowing user-selected User Interfaces, using Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes

These key business themes were continued in the following panel session, moderated by Anthony Lye, that featured Paul Greenberg and Denis Pombriant. I would have attended OpenWorld just to listen to what Paul and Denis had to say.  They are two of the greatest minds writing and speaking on the changes happening in the sales landscape today, due to the emergence of the “social customer”, their new communications preferences, and other market factors.  Paul and Denis backed their assertions with compelling success stories of companies like Proctor and Gamble and Nabisco that are using social networks and customer communities in their sales and marketing strategies.  Paul mentioned a Boston-based clothing company that is using “community retailing” and generating millions of dollars by engaging on-the-street teams of indie designers that buy and sell clothes and recruit additional young people into the community, now 800,000 strong. Anthony Lye reported that Oracle community customers’ sales cycles are 9 months shorter, they are the company’s best references, and they pay more for products than those outside the community.

All very interesting, but I’m still wondering, were any sales people there to hear these important messages?  And if so, what did they think? Could users’ conferences such as Oracle’s inspire not just technical innovation but also Sales 2.0 initiatives – sales strategy and process innovation, supported by technology?

Tags: Anthony Lye, Denis Pombriant, Oracle CRM, Oracle OpenWorld, Paul Greenberg, Sales 2.0, Social CRM

Can a Kinder, Gentler Sales 2.0 Rep Still Make Quota?

I was in New York last week, attending and speaking on “Tools and Strategies for the New Sales Era“at the CRM Evolution conference. Starting with Paul Greenberg’s opening keynote, “The Voice of the Customer” and continuing for three days with presentations including Thomas Cates’s  “Relationship Marketing: Client Retention & Loyalty as the New Sales Strategy,” and Brent Leary’s “CRM and the Socially Empowered Customer,“  the recurring message of the event was clear:  in order to be successful in the new sales era of Sales 2.0, we must recognize the emergence of the new “social customer” and change the way we sell to them.  For you Twitter afficionados, you can see my live tweets, along with those of some true thoughts leaders in social CRM by searching #CRMe09 and #SCRM. Today’s customer demands that we:

• do more listening, sharing, and participating
• embrace new ways of communicating (social media being a big topic)
• personalize and individualize the buying experience

But as I explained these key themes, which echo those I wrote about in Sales 2.0, to a sales executive at a multibillion dollar software company, he clearly wasn’t buying it.  In his company, known for its aggressive sales culture, he feels “hunters” – sales reps that one associates with a predatory, “bring in the deal whatever it takes” mentality -are typically more successful than “farmers” – sales reps that nurture customers and are relationship-oriented – at reaching competitive sales goals.  This explains why the company doesn’t split all its sales territories into different patches for new business and existing customers.

Cross-industry surveys of Chief Sales Officers, including CSO Insights’s annual Sales Performance Optimization report consistently show that the best-performing companies have a combination of the best, most flexible process and the strongest customer relationships.  But now I wonder:

• could there be exceptions in certain industries, some markets, or merely with certain individual buyers for whom a competitive “in your face” sales approach is tolerated or even appreciated?
• does a maniacal focus on making quota preclude being customer-focused?

What do you think? What are you experiencing?

Tags: Brent Leary, CRM Evolution, CSO Insights, Paul Greenberg, Sales 2.0, Social CRM, Thomas Cates