With Sales 2.0, Businesses Want an Even More Complete Picture of the Customer Than Ever Before

Remember how a couple of years ago, you couldn't go anywhere without having people bring up Web 2.0? You knew what it was, but if anyone were to ask you for an explanation, you'd struggle - because there are so many parts to it. It's kind of that way now, for sales 2.0.

To people in sales, the whole 2.0 thing makes them quite uncomfortable. Sure, anyone who comes in trying to promote it has wonderful stories to tell about how you can expect better sales and commissions and less work. But often, they just roll their eyes at it - they suspect that the person talking is just spouting some spiel the way they do when they need to sell something to someone who doesn't need it. At the end of it all, they suspect that if management seems this interested in having them buy sales 2.0, it must be because it gives them a way to keep them a short leash. And you know salespeople - they love their independence.

As well, perhaps they think this way, because face it - salespeople tend to be cynical about how honest people can be when they try to sell something. In truth, sales 2.0 isn't a management tool. It's something that salespeople can use to get better results. The thing is, there is so much hype and buzz surrounding it, that it's hard to see it for what it really is.

Let's try to define it now - with no buzz or hype. With sales, the  way it's always been done, it's always been about data harvesting. That's how sales departments get to know about where to head for the next the lead. With sales 2.0 though, it's mostly about customer engagement. This isn't as difficult or new as it might sound.

Customer engagement is about keeping all the information you need about a customer in one place so that you have everything you need to pursue the sale successfully. It's about creating a digital breadcrumb trail of everything one knows about a customer, and using that to establish contact with him at all times.

But even this doesn't adequately explain what sales 2.0 does. This is only superficial engagement - as when you use your registered number to call company, the number right away puts your name on the call-center person's screen and they address you by name. Everyone knows that this is just phony. Sales 2.0 is about going deeper with the customer engagement thing then just this.

Traditionally, the data harvesting sales techniques have just been about keeping a record of everything the customer has done with the company in the past and assuming that it's relevant information. If a customer comes in once to buy four bottles of Chivas for a boss who is retiring, they'll keep sending e-mails about new more whiskey. That's not the way sales 2.0 works.

In this system, you try to build a complete picture of what the the customer's life really is like. They'll try to learn why exactly of customers buying something.

One way to do this is, they use software to track every single move a customer makes when he arrives at the website. It's all about speed, it's all about taking advantage of the moment, and it's about the complete picture.