How to Make Sales 2.0 Work For You

In my last blog article I introduced the Sales 2.0 concept and how it is now common practice to establish the lead generation and prospecting aspect of sales into a separate business process. You do this because sales people and business owners either don’t have the time to do enough prospecting and lead generation, or they are not very good at it.

If you accept the business logic of Sales 2.0 then you need to begin understanding the elements that make Sales 2.0 effective.

These elements are:

• Systems
• Content

Systems and Content when properly coordinated with People, give you the complete system. You could say that fundamentally you solve any sales & marketing business process by coordinating People, Systems and Content.

Systems:

When I refer to Systems I am talking about CRM or Sales Force Automation technology and Lead Nurturing solutions. Probably the best known system is Salesforce.com, but there are many others in this market that may be good fit for you.

What you do with your System is set it up to maintain your prospecting database, track calls and conversations and establish an automated Sales Leads Nurturing Campaign. You are also using your system to track results and you do that by setting up reporting to track a Contact/Lead through the sales pipeline.

A lead may start out as just a name and phone number and is someone that has never heard of you and your Sales 2.0 System is going to take them from that undeveloped state to knowing your Unique Selling Proposition and Story, then on to fully engaged in a real sales conversation and finally a completed sales.

The Sales Lead Nurturing part of your system is used to communicate regularly with prospects via email and will track which prospects are actually paying attention to what you have to say by opening the emails and visiting your web site. You use Lead Nurturing to optimize calling time by being sure to focus calling efforts on the prospects that are paying attention. This is an approach that is proven to work.

Content:

The Content element of Sales 2.0 is what you say via call scripts, emails and online media like videos. The foundation of your content is your Value Proposition. The Value Proposition is the unique reason why someone would do business with you. Your Sales 2.0 System is designed to get your Value Proposition in front your prospect audience and keep it there. You will also need to provide proof and supporting data in your Content

When you begin to establish a Sales 2.0 system, the first thing you work on is the Content. You will develop calling scripts that callers use to begin the conversation and persuade a decision maker to provide an email address so you can send them additional information.

You will then develop a series of emails that will be used by the callers and incorporated into your Sales Lead Nurturing Campaign. Email templates always contain your Value Proposition and then different variations of Proof and Supporting data. You should also have plenty of links in the emails so that someone in your prospect audience and easily learn more about you.

Remember to establish a Sales 2.0 methodology you coordinate Systems, People & Content. In future posts I will share more information on how you deal with each of these elements.

Until then, happy selling.

– Matt