Sales has evolved from pure art and has emerged as a sophisticated and disciplined new science. This paper chronicles how sales has evolved and provides an overview of the many new technologies that are helping companies drive sales today and in the future.
![Sales 2.0- From Willy Loman to Road Warrior Champion: How sales has evolved through the 20th and 21st centuries.2010Bill HicksSales 2.06/23/2010190504420929<br />Table of Contents TOC quot;
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Sales: From Christopher Columbus and John Patterson to Marc Benioff PAGEREF _Toc239512403 3-7Then and Now PAGEREF _Toc239512404 7Coming Soon to a Dictionary Near You: Sales 2.0 PAGEREF _Toc239512405 8Introduction: The New Sales Frontier PAGEREF _Toc239512406 9Primary Benefits of Sales 2.0 PAGEREF _Toc239512407 10-12What in the World of Wild Wild Sales 2.0 is Happening? PAGEREF _Toc239512408 13Parting Thoughts PAGEREF _Toc239512409 14References PAGEREF _Toc239512410 15<br />Sales: From Christopher Columbus and John Patterson to Marc Benioff<br />Since the beginning of time and the Bible’s story about Adam and Eve, the snake (maybe the original salesman) and the apple ( the original product), selling and the sales process has played an important role in commerce and the role of government and politics in society. Empires have come and gone, fortunes have been made and lost and many companies have been built and destroyed based on economic cycles. But behind history are the stories of the power of men and women who risked their careers, fame and capital to build something. Driven by their own ambition, self sacrifice and desire to succeed, many of our ancestors and current industry builders and titans, of necessity became great negotiators and “salesmen”. <br />One of those historic figures was Christopher Columbus the Italian explorer who we celebrate as the primary discoverer of the Americas (West Indies) in 1492. What many do not know is that he spent the better part of eight years soliciting the Royal Court of Spain to win permission and be granted the funding to sail West with his three ships, La Nina, La Pinta and the Santa Maria. He was born into a wool merchant family, was a business merchant and trader but not unlike many men of his day sought fame and fortune on the seas. One of his first “jobs” Columbus operated as a pirate or “privateer” attacking ships of the Moors. (Today some would accuse current day salesman as “pirates,”, but I digress). Can you imagine the sales job that he had in front of him to convince Queen Isabella of Spain to fund his expedition to the new lands, when the conventional thinking and belief at the time was that the world was flat?! Literally! (Now we use the terminology, the world is flat due to Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat | Thomas L. Friedman book and observation that technology has driven ubiquitous global communication leveling the competitive marketplace which has allowed billions of new citizens to join the economic tsunami around the globe.) For eight years he made repeated attempts to solicit the Royal Court for funds and was repeatedly turned down. Persistence, adaptability, perseverance, drive, organization, planning, cunning and probably some luck all must have played a part in his ultimate success in winning permission and funds to sail to the New World. (Can you imagine if he had a Client Relationship Management system at the time? Could he have shortened the sales cycle from eight years to one?). <br />In the 19th century, John Patterson, an industrialist, businessman and salesman founded National Cash Register Corporation in 1884. Patterson was the first to establish a sales training school at NCR which began the institutionalization of sales. (An interesting fact- NCR announced in June,2009 that they were moving their corporate headquarters from Dayton, OH to Duluth, GA.) Patterson was also famous for hiring and training Tom Watson, who later went on to become CEO of IBM, another company that built a powerful brand and sales culture. Upon his death in 1956, he was called the world’s greatest salesman of his time. Both men helped institutionalize sales as a profession and created processes and training that could be scaled in large corporations. Thus began Sales 1.0.<br />Fast forward 50 years<br />Sales evolved as an art; primarily from trading, bartering and merchant activities. It has now emerged as a sophisticated and disciplined new science, merging the human skills and knowledge learned over many years of past experience leveraging multiple software platform technologies, the mass marketing capacity of the internet, Moore’s Law and broadband bandwidth. But probably one of the most singular events that changed the sales business forever was the emergence and frequent usage of search engines which enabled information mining and knowledge acquisition. First there was Yahoo, but then came Google and the rest is history. The information age has grown from a steam engine to a Ferrari and the drive train is the internet.<br />But Wait… There’s More<br />We emerged from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s as a culture primarily utilizing TV, radio and print as our dominant medium to receive information. We were reminded recently that although the internet is still growing in importance as a technology, cable TV has been a dominant force in mass marketing of products for a decade or more. One of the most recent icons to have mastered the cable TV infomercial medium was Billy Mays, In Memory of Billy Mays who recently passed away. He may be remembered as one of the best infomercial salesman of our time, leveraging cable TV in a way that reached millions of people, created great wealth for him and the multiple product manufacturers that he sold. (Ron Popeil, Inventor Ron Popeil Biography came before Billy, as did many others, and blazed the direct response sales trail that led to his success.) He and other “pitchmen” may also be compared colloquially to Willy Loman, the protagonist, melancholy and down on his luck salesman with a singular purpose, as portrayed in the play Death of a Salesman. But the difference is that Billy and others built a brand and created wealth utilizing their entrepreneurial talent, drive, experience and the great medium of cable TV. But there was a new technology medium bubbling up that had been exploding and would change the world as we know it forever; the internet.<br /> Willy Loman- Death of a Salesman<br />Billy’s name may now be ubiquitous and tied to infomercials because of the medium that he used, but the man who may go down as the “father” of Sales 2.0 will probably be Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com CRM - salesforce.com whose corporate tag line is Success. Not Software. Salesforce.com has become the market leader in cloud CRM services and continues to launch new innovative products that extend across sales and services.<br />According to Gerhard Gschwandtner, Publisher of Selling Power magazine, who interviewed Benioff in 2000, and asked him about his vision for his new company, he said, “This is a tremendous market: this year we’ll do $5 million, and in ten years we’ll be a $1 billion company.” “For a moment I thought he'd had too much to drink, but he spoke with such a confident passion that I wanted to believe him. In 2001, sales quadrupled to $22 million. In 2002, he more than doubled his sales to $52 million. A year later, sales topped $100 million, and in early 2009 he reached his goal of more than $1 billion in sales.” He beat his prediction by a year! Clearly he had it right and I would bet Salesforce.com will grow exponentially in the future.<br />Then and Now<br /> As we move deeper into the 21st century, the sales process has become a much more sophisticated blend of science and individual salespersons’ learned experience and art. The increasing pressures of the global marketplace, competition and the need for companies to grow, creates an environment for change and an evolutionary process that fosters new ways of acquiring customers. <br />We have been through multiple economic cycles and managed through the “dot-com” bust in 2001-2002, but the downturn that we are currently experiencing which began in late 2007 has placed even greater pressure on the sales function. Sales leaders must increase sales effectiveness while at the same time external forces reduce the number of real opportunities and threaten top-line growth. Business leaders need actionable data to align sales behavior with business objectives and rapidly adapt to changes in the market. Aligning and automating sales execution with organizational goals requires a holistic approach that includes all functional areas of companies, including sales, marketing, operations, human resources and finance. Business intelligence and information technology platforms are an increasingly important interface requirement for world class selling organizations.<br />Another important trend and “best in class” practice for companies is aligning sales and marketing. It is a key strategy employed by successful companies determined to increase top-line revenue growth. When sales and marketing are aligned, deals close quicker and customer value increases as both teams are working with the same set of prospect, customer and product information. Marketing will benefit from timely feedback on effective content and lead qualification, which also leads to reduced cost of sales. Sales will benefit with better quality leads and readily accessible proposal content, leading to shorter time to close and higher bid-to-win ratios.<br />The traditional sales pressures of lengthening sales cycles and low quota achievement have only been exasperated by the recent economic downturn. Many businesses have been forced to cut costs, eliminate waste, and often freeze spending. The hardened reality for sales representatives is that the time-tested practice of quot;
putting the right message in front of the right person at the right timequot;
is becoming more of a challenge. In order to meet the demands of this new selling environment, top companies are implementing sales intelligence initiatives as a way to improve the effectiveness of the sales force and enrich the quality leads in the sales pipeline. <br />In November 2008, the Aberdeen Group surveyed over 300 companies to understand how organizations leverage sales intelligence information to improve the effectiveness of the sales force and enrich the quality of leads in the sales pipeline. The report examined how top performing companies are implementing sales intelligence initiatives to increase the quality of leads in the pipeline and contextualize opportunities with relevant industry or account information. This is an important new trend that is driving many new customer facing technologies. The report further indicated that in order for a company to truly impact sales effectiveness, there must be an organizational focus on sales structure and compensation management, lead management, and the use of sales force automation solutions. By aligning these components, best-in-class companies are able to improve key sales metrics.<br />Coming Soon to a Dictionary Near You: Sales 2.0<br />To illustrate the difference between Sales 1.0 and 2.0 let’s first review the transition from Web 1.0 to 2.0 because that progression is further along in its development process.<br />Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as, “… as a second generation of web development and web design. It is characterized as facilitating communication, information sharing, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. It has led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and web applications. Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, vlogs, mashups and folksonomies.<br />If you read this definition of Web 2.0 and look back to what the web was in the late 90’s you can clearly see a progression from static pages that were difficult to update and had low bandwidth requirements to the dynamic, easy to update, media rich Web we experience today.<br />One definition of Sales 2.0 is “the use of innovative sales practices, focused on creating value for both buyer and seller and enabled by Web 2.0 and next-generation technology. Sales 2.0 practices combine the science of process-driven operations with the art of collaborative relationships, using the most profitable and most expedient sales resources required to meet customers’ needs. This approach produces superior, predictable, repeatable business results, including increased revenue, decreased sales costs, and a sustained competitive advantage.”<br />Gerhard Gschwandtner, Publisher of Selling Power magazine defines Sales 2.0 as, “ …bringing together customer focused methodologies and productivity enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science. Sales 2.0 relies on repeatable, collaborative, and customer enabled processes that run through the sales and marketing organization, resulting in improved productivity, a more predictable ROI and superior performance.”<br />I think that the nucleus of the Sales 2.0 opportunity, regardless of the definition, is that these new sales tools provide a superior, predictable, collaborative and repeatable sales process that provides the ability to scale growth in an intelligent architecture, with a highly correlated ROI. Ultimately Sales 2.0 is about aligning your entire enterprise to target and serve your buyers more effectively, which brings in more business at a lower cost. The bottom line is that Sales 2.0 is about using social media and Web 2.0 tools to sell more and to sell faster.<br />Introduction: The New Sales Frontier<br />When first created, CRM was based on the idea of collecting and harvesting data to form a 360-degree view of the customer. Many CRM initiatives, however, failed because of low user adoption, inaccurate data and a poor match between processes and technology. In essence, CRM is a top-down tool that works for managers who can get their salespeople to play the role of a data entry clerk in addition to selling and managing customer relationships. Sales 2.0 technology adoption is about equality, empowerment, collaboration and speed.<br />Sales 2.0 technologies help to create an ecosystem that sustains all stakeholders: the customer, the company, the salesperson, the sales manager and the marketing manager. All members of the ecosystem are equal and interconnected partners. Sales 2.0 solutions levels the playing field by turning sales into a science, salespeople into professionals and managers into more rational and motivated leaders. What’s best is that Sales 2.0 dramatically lowers the cost, reduces the risk of failure and increases the chances of successful deployment with positive short-term and long-term ROI. <br />As the popularity of social media sites continues to change the way online customers interact with their peers, top companies are leveraging external-facing Web 2.0 technologies as a means of providing additional touch points for customer interaction. In March through May 2008, Aberdeen surveyed over 360 companies to identify the challenges, tactics, and strategies companies face when implementing customer-facing Web 2.0 applications. The research reveals that top performing organizations are not only positively affecting their performance in key metrics, such as customer satisfaction, through a combination of organizational processes and technology implementation, but they are also fueling product development and marketing decisions with consumer generated insights. <br />Leveraging enterprise collaboration solutions to achieve corporate sales goals requires a combination of strategic actions, organizational capabilities and enabling technologies. Any technology interfaced with field sales reps must also help improve product knowledge, customer needs and competitive offerings as well as identify key influencers, thought leaders and subject matter experts.<br />Sales 2.0 technology platforms provide opportunities to further enhance customer relationships through the effective and timely exchange of information. These new technologies effectively enable marketers to target greater numbers of potentially interested customers in a personalized and relevant way and then instantly get the sales department in the loop when a prospect shows interest.<br />All this means that the traditional sales and marketing methodologies, where customers are informed of certain value propositions over a regimented series of steps, have been thrown out the window. Customers are dynamically engaging with companies, ad-hoc and on the fly. Sales 2.0 technologies provides better adoption rates to customer’s buying behaviors and provides point of sale help where and when they need it. The new way of selling today isn’t about selling so much as it’s about helping customers buy.<br /> Primary Benefits of Sales 2.0<br />After much research on CRM and Sales 2.0 technologies the primary trends seem to be organizing technologies around the customer and interfacing with sales, marketing and customer service. There seem to be five distinct characteristics that are discussed the most in the majority of articles and white papers.<br />,[object Object],What in the World of Wild Wild Sales 2.0 is Happening?<br />The New World of selling is already here, and companies like WebEx, Oracle, and <br />Salesforce.com have already “cracked the code” of using the Web to sell more and increase their sales velocity. The funnel example below provides an illustration of the many additional companies that are deploying Sales and Web 2.0 technologies and the various sales stage spaces they compete in.<br />From Sales 2.0 for Dummies, Executive Edition, ©2009 Wiley Publishing, Inc.<br />In Sales 2.0: How Businesses are using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales, research indicates that Sales 2.0 technologies are still in their infancies and have a long way to go before they permeate corporate America. Of those companies surveyed, 30% said they do not use any collaborative tools such as blogs, wikis or social media applications inside or outside the company. Clearly, there is great potential and upside for the current and future technologies to be deployed and to be developed.<br />Parting Thoughts<br />The transition to a sales 2.0 world will involve not only a radical change in attitude, but also some investment in technology, the creation of some positions that may not currently exist in many organizations and a level of integration and interaction between sales and marketing few organizations have achieved to this point. These Internet-based tools really help sales people sell. They are not CRM systems set up as management reporting systems. They are tools that make a sales person’s job easier and more efficient. Using these tools to improve your sales process is what Sales 2.0 is all about.<br />Over the past decade, three major trends have profoundly transformed the way sales organizations engage with prospects throughout the buying cycle.<br /> * CRM has emerged as a powerful business tool, enabling the tracking of massive amounts of transactional data on prospect and customer activity for sales and account management. <br /> * Internet technology has evolved to enable a new way of interacting, collaborating and sharing information, which is often described as Web 2.0. With the Internet as the new business platform, all stakeholders — prospects, customers, salespeople and marketers — can connect, learn, plan, analyze, engage, collaborate and conduct business in ways that were not even imaginable a few years ago. <br /> * The rich online data explosion — from traditional information sources, social networks and other user-generated content — offers salespeople and prospects the opportunity to gain unprecedented insights vital to buying and selling. The Internet accelerates and deepens access to companies, people and products.<br />The merging of these trends and technologies has transformed selling from a personal art into an interactive science and has connected salespeople like never before, earning them the well deserved moniker, Road Warrior. Sales 2.0 and web technologies have forever changed the process of how people buy and the way companies sell and will be an exciting technology space to watch develop. Salespeople of the future will look back on this nascent period of developing sales and marketing collaborative technologies and wonder how in the world they ever sold anything in the past. We will always be moving onward and upward into the “wild blue technology yonder” and our future and it will be fun to be along for the ride.<br />References and Technologies<br />Sales 2.0: How Will It Improve Your Business? - Inside CRM<br />The World Is Flat | Thomas L. Friedman <br />CRM System- Customer relationship management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<br />Inventor Ron Popeil Biography<br />In Memory of Billy Mays<br />Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales<br />Moore’s Law- Moore's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<br />Marc Benioff bio-http://www.salesforce.com/company/leadership/executive-team/#benioff<br />On-Demand Sales Performance Management, On-Demand Sales Compensation Management - Xactly<br />10 Questions for LucidEra’s Ken Rudin - Inside CRM<br />CRM - salesforce.com <br />Aberdeen- Aberdeen Group Complimentary Research<br />Mashup - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<br />Folksonomy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<br />How Marketing Automation Increases Leads - Inside CRM<br />Bury the CRM Hatchet - Inside CRM<br />111 Successful Plays That Led Salesforce.com from an Idea to $1 Billion in 10 Years - SellingPower<br />Sales_2.0_For_Dummies_Exec.pdf (application/pdf Object)<br />Genius.com® Inc.<br />What is Sales 2.0? | Sales Management 2.0 Podcast<br />Sales 2.0: Next Generation sales tips, sales strategies, sales process and sales training<br />Landslide Technologies<br />ConnectAndSell Inc.<br />InsideView Inc.<br />Jigsaw<br />ProposalMaster<br />](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/sales20fromwillylomantoroadwarriorchampionhowsaleshasevolvedthroughthe20thand21stcenturies-12773912341283-phpapp02/85/sales-20-from-willy-loman-to-road-warrior-champion-how-sales-has-evolved-through-the-20th-and-21st-centuries-1-320.jpg)
