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.

Did you mean: Connective?

No, you idiot, I meant Connectize!

OK, we haven’t spent any time on SEO. That is now changing.

Ever try to think of a bunch of words that describe yourself?  Not a pretty thought eh?   Well, try to do that for your company and you start to see how much fun it can be.  We started our SEO efforts last week.  Here are some of our keywords, let me know if you think I missed any obvious ones…

Social collaboration  Sales 2.0   Enterprise 2.0   Social networking   Collaboration   Sales process   Sales pipeline   Sales experts   Business Experts   Industry Experts   Sales Prospecting   Sales Mentoring   Sales Methodology   Sales Acceleration   Lead Generation   Sales Partnering   Sales Training   Sales Leads   Sales Marketplace   Knowledge Management   Knowledge Discovery   Business Intelligence   Business Knowledge    Business Development   Business Networking   Social Networking   Sales   Sales Management   Channel Sales

It will take a little time for these to kick in – but we’ve set the initial groundwork so that the next time you Google Connectize or Enterprise 2.0 – you should see Connectize popping up in proper form and fashion.

We added a few more users this week. Thanks to our new users for joining and sharing your thoughts on the site. As we open up the site to more users,  IE6 support became more apparent.  So we added it to this weeks release;

• SEO optimization
• IE6 support

IE6 just won’t die.  It’s a seven year old browser that still lives locked and loaded on many corporate desktop environments.  Unbelievable.  IE6-corporate-pc-locked-down users – welcome to Connectize!

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!!

I really appreciate the support of the person that loaned us this whiteboard. When we first started we used to huddle at Starbucks or hotel lobbys near SFO and OAK airports (like we were “guests” with a $10, 18″ square whiteboard and tried to look like we belonged there!!)

We had fun with this whiteboard and it was the main anchor point for us to visualize and map out where we were headed back in the early days.