I had coffee the other day with Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa, a hot new SaaS company in the spend management space. An interesting question that Rob mused about is whether it’s really possible to find the right sales relationships during a complex consultative sale using a sales 2.0 (supplanting most face to face sales calls with phone, email, social networking and web conferencing) style. This question has been on my mind lately too, and I’ve heard it echoed by many other CEO’s and executives as well. So I decided to pull it apart on this blog to see if I could get comfortable taking a position on it.
To get there, the first thing I need to do is drop back and take a look at what it means to be selling. What is “sales”, and what is selling? If you Google the word you will find an interesting Old English version: “sellan” which meant to “betray in exchange for money”. Ouch! The more contemporary definitions all center around verbs like: give, take and exchange. The root of the concept is the transaction — exchanging product or services for money. For many types of businesses — that’s it — no further discussion is necessary.
But not so for most technology business, especially complex software applications, and information technology solutions. To get to the transaction end of a complex product or services sale — a lot more has to happen. All of THE STUFF, from the finding of prospects that might be interested, to establishing meaningful communication, making a connection, demonstrating value, negotiating a deal, completing a delivery, and following up to make sure it’s working well — all of THAT STUFF is SALES. I can’t help but point out, though it should be obvious, that this process assumes effective marketing at the top of the funnel, and terrific customer support at the bottom where the customers are — but it’s still sales. More about that later — this post is about the middle part of the sales funnel — trying to build sales relationships effectively using sales 2.0.
Can high-powered sales professionals really be effective at this intensive connection and communication oriented challenge using Web-Ex or Go-To-Meeting, and never darken the door of the prospect’s office? Well — maybe. I’ve seen it happen many times. A key part of selling is communication and connection, so if this can be effectively established remotely — save the air-fare and the fossil fuels — I am a believer! OTOH — maybe not, or at least maybe not always. So my advice would be that it probably makes sense to build the sales organization with some degree of flexibility, and allow for focused, considerate, professionals to make the judgment call close to the action.
I have worked with many so called high-powered sales executives who actually warm to the idea of using a sales 2.0 based process to the extent that it saves them time and money and leverages getting more prospect coverage. Many of these folks work in SaaS companies and feel sales 2.0 matches up well with the need to be efficient, and they say that sometimes sales 2.0 is even better than face to face. For instance consider the situation where the buyer’s decision team is geographically dispersed — and this happens quite frequently these days — so the Account Executive and Solutions Consultant and maybe other members of the sales team need to present an in-depth solution overview and demo to the whole buy side team — where do they go to do that face to face? Likely as not they will get less than TWO of the critical decision makers in any ONE room. And, they don’t want to make the mistake of playing favorite to the wrong people and run afoul of a bad politic. Because of situations like this, its tempting to believe the industry is changing and creating new types of sales professionals that embrace sales 2.0 in their professional and personal lifestyles — and match that up with similar changes on the buyer’s side of the table as well.
I’m starting to feel like it is more and more sensible to integrate the sales 2.0 process approach into relationship based, consultative selling organizations in the digital age — and since I have personally experienced it working well over a range of product types from complex hardware and software database solutions to enterprise SaaS applications, I’m also comfortable that sales 2.0 is more than hype — it’s simply hitting on a process change made possible by the new technologies we now have at hand.
Sales 2.0 makes a lot of sense — it uses the power of the internet for communication and flavors it with a spice of social networking that may help establish and deepen the connection with prospective buyers — and it has lots of benefits regarding cost, time and travel. Some important caveats are that it doesn’t work all the time, and like so many other facets of building an effective revenue generation function, it should be monitored and managed to get the best results. That said, having been a road warrior for many, many years, — I welcome the notion. We could even market it as “green selling”.
