Category Archives: Sales 2.0

Sales 2.0: Opening the Dialog

At our first Social Media Breakfast in San Francisco, we spent time talking with Anneke Seley, author of Sales 2.0. One of our objectives with the SMB in San Francisco is to meet business authors, get to know a bit about their background experience and perspectives, and then extend the conversation online to discuss their ideas and their work. So we’re going to kick this off with Anneke Seley and Sales 2.0.

If you missed the Social Media Breakfast, you can catch some of the outtakes in the video below, filmed by my partners at MinerPro. John did a great job boiling over an hour of dialog down to less than 10 minutes of outtakes to capture some of the depth of conversation.

To kick the discussion off, I want to start by addressing the concept of what “Sales 2.0” actually means. We’re hearing “2.0” applied to all manor of things (Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, CRM 2.0, PR 2.0), and many people assume the moniker is synonymous with the social media technology that enables Web 2.0. But it runs a bit deeper than that. For some, this may be a penetrating glimpse into the obvious, but “2.0” signifies a fundamental advance in an underlying system–a “major revision” in software terms, which is where the concept comes from.

It’s fascinating that we’ve boiled the meme of “fundamental change” down to a simple suffix, because it suggests we’ve arrived at a need to more simply indicate major transformations in systems that are fundamental to our daily life. It says that change is accelerating in its sweep through our institutions, and it establishes a clear line between the old and the new. The “new” certainly includes social media technology, and in fact, social media technology has been the major catalyst that set much of this change in motion. But to pin the meaning of the change on technology alone misses a much deeper reality: that these changes in technology are driving a fundamental transformation in the way humans interact, and in the way organizations function.

You can adopt all the Web 2.0 technology you want for your sales team, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get Sales 2.0. It’s not the technology, it’s how that technology changes the way we interact that people need to understand in order to get Sales 2.0. And that’s the opening question for this discussion.

How do you see technology changing sales processes and organizations, and how does that define what you understand as Sales 2.0?