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"Collaboration" and "Community" are not just what we are doing here - they have quickly become a part of life in every function in every company. I hope that this blog will pose the question - how does this change our businesses and our relationships with customers and the market, and how does that improve what we do? Are there better, more effective ways of selling, marketing, communicating and engaging buy applying collaborative and community ideas and practices. Hosted by Jeff Weinberger, Product Marketing, WebEx, featuring YOU.

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Blogs Home: Sales: Breakthrough Collaboration

Archived Posts from June 2008

Losing Focus

6/10/2008 | posted by

	Name: Jeff Weinberger Location: CA, US Member Since: 4/12/2007

Professional Information Company: Webex Position: Hidden



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jeff.weinberger

I’ve been reading quite a bit about Sales 2.0 lately. This isn’t so much a surprise (the definition, as posted by Anneke Seley of PhoneWorks, originated here), but what I’ve been reading really is.

I think we’ve started to lose focus.

Whether it’s Sales 2.0, or the more general topic of how Web 2.0 is affecting the company-customer (seller-buyer) relationship, we’re still all talking about the technology and what you can do with this product or that one (yes, there is tremendous value in many technologies, including ours here at WebEx). But I want to put out a challenge to all of my colleagues talking about Sales 2.0:

Focus on the customer.

The core difference between the traditional world of process-focused sales and the new world of Sales 2.0 is that Sales 2.0 organizations (and processes) focus on the customer. The focus is to find ways to help your customer buy, to define your sales process in the way your customer buys, and make it easy for customers who are already knowledgeable and interested in what you have to offer to actually buy it from you.

Joe Galvin, in one of the better “beware the hype” posts on Sales 2.0 says “Sales 2.0 is – or should be – a focus on adapting customer engagement strategies to the rapidly changing environment…”

Well, yes, but it’s not about just the strategy we use to engage our customer, it’s about engaging our customers on their turf, in the way they want to be engaged. The alternative is to risk losing engagement, or worse, having a competitor engage our customer.

As I’ve spent more and more time talking with the sales leaders at our customers, I see that this is becoming more and more apparent to many industry leaders. But the obstacle they all face is how to change the mind-set of not just the leaders of the organization, but of everyone in the organization, and then to make sure the process follows.

How to experiment with re-focusing on a customer-centric approach is a complex topic that will take far more than this post alone.

But when you’re reading (or writing) about Sales 2.0 and considering the future of your sales organization, start with the customer. Let everything else flow from there.