Web 2.0 meets Enterprise 2.0 enables Sales 2.0!
Web 2.0 meets Enterprise 2.0 enables Sales 2.0!
If you’d like to get a quick explanation of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 – then Andrew McAfee from the Harvard Business School is your man! We all tend to throw around Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and Sales 2.0 like they all have some standard and defined meaning – but that’s just not the case. Andrew breaks down Web 2.0 user technologies as being simply;
- easy to use
- no imposed structure or rules for the user
- tend to be platforms where communities come to together and content accumulates
Cool. So what is Enterprise 2.0? According to Andrew, “It’s the process of using these same tools within the enterprise. It’s the use of free form social software platforms inside organizations.” Andrew also raises the point of actual software usage over deployment – and although he did not get into it in this short video – this is where things get really tricky for any enterprise to adopt social tools. The procedures and processes that are baked for traditional enterprise application deployments do lack some of the concerns one might be interested in protecting when using open community applications. Just what is standard operating protocol for commenting on product road maps or twitter feeds of an executive or recent layoffs is still quite murky waters for most enterprises. I don’t think Twitter updates or Facebook feeds are covered yet in most employees HR guides. It will be though…
Now that we’ve covered Enterprise 2.0, what is sales 2.0? Well for me, it is should be the application of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 (including both internal and external communities) and focusing these user technologies to better enable the corporate sales process. The focus should be to increase efficiency and velocity of the sales pipeline. Help sales people save time, make better decisions and most importantly, close deals more quickly. Sales 2.0 is about acceleration. It is measurable both by the cycle time of a deal and the size of the commission check! I’m going to be focusing more on metrics in another post. Numbers don’t lie.
Hope you enjoy the video.
Wow – it seems like all you need is a white board and some markers to get started! We thought you might want to see the early days of Connectize and see what was going through our heads as we began the planning stages. It’s really important to have a lot of different colors and a camera to keep track of everything!!
Sameer Patel 1:37 pm on April 21, 2009 Permalink |
Sales needs a lens into both internal and external intelligence as you correctly say. Enterprise 2.0 has the opportunity to shrink the distance between sales and prospects.
Here’s a post I wrote about this topic:
http://bit.ly/14UlOd
Tom Canning 5:08 pm on April 21, 2009 Permalink |
Sameer,
Thanks for the comment. Nice blog post. We run in the same pack!
-Tom