Evolve. Learn how Sales 2.0 is radically reshaping every facet in today's sales process.

See how this new phenomenon in collaborative selling is helping salespeople do a better job of identifying leads, of turning leads into opportunities, and of converting those leads into customer wins.

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Introduction
A new set of business practices are slowly but steadily starting to creep into the way companies sell their wares to customers. This new trend in selling is being called “Sales 2.0” by some. It’s an unsophisticated, yet appropriate, moniker for this phenomenon, since many of the tools and methods that are fueling the Sales 2.0 trend have their roots in the Web 2.0 movement.

Before we focus on Sales 2.0, it is instructive to examine and to try to define Web 2.0, which we do later in this paper. Indeed, the definitions of Web 2.0 and Sales 2.0 are problematic since both are relatively new phenomena. They are also hard to define because they are grass roots or bottom-up movements, and as such, have very hazy boundaries. It’s very difficult to determine where Web 1.0 ends and where Web 2.0 begins and the same can be said for Sales 1.0 and Sales 2.0.

Web 2.0 is a movement fostered by incremental improvements in technology and greater adoption of the Internet which fundamentally is altering how we live today. It’s changing how we gather information, how we shop, how we interact with friends and colleagues and touching innumerable other facets of our daily lives. ...

The Impact of Web 2.0 tools in the Work Place
“Our project is very new, and we do not have measures of improved efficiency yet. Anecdotal evidence strongly indicates that teams and workgroups that transition some portion of their processes to the Enterprise 2.0 portal see reductions in the volume of status e-mails and reductions in the number and/or time spent in standing meetings. This suggests to us that some of the lowest-hanging fruit in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 is the maintenance of situational awareness.”

August Jackson
Insight Community Expert

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Visit Oracle’s Social CRM Initiative Website

One company leveraging Web 2.0 technologies and concepts in an effort to improve its products is Oracle (a sponsor of this paper and TheCustomerCollective Web site). Rank and file sales people feel CRM has made them less productive because time consuming data entry takes them away from customer-focused activities. By infusing their products with Web 2.0 functionality, Oracle hopes to take the emphasis away from reporting and to put it back on selling.

With this in mind, Oracle is developing a new breed of social sales applications designed:

To be more intuitive,

To model common tasks sales representatives execute every day

And to leverage the knowledge and wisdom of collaborative sales communities.

While traditional CRM offerings will continue to be a critical application for organizations to automate and optimize their sales operations, Oracle Social CRM Applications are intended specifically for sales users, rather than sales executives, and are designed to provide immediate benefits while eliminating some of the time-consuming elements associated with CRM, such as data entry.

Ultimately these tools are seen as a key to help sales users increase their sales effectiveness, or more simply stated, to sell more. This is accomplished through single-focused applications that are designed to be easy to use, mash up and present data from disparate sources in visually compelling forms in order to solve business challenges, and harness collective intelligence across companies or business networks comprising multiple organizations. The company is developing a family of what it calls Oracle Social CRM Applications.

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