By Suaad Sait December 20, 2010
Last week we talked about Sales being a team sport. They are no longer the “sales team,” they are part of YOUR team. Sales is the driving force of company – it’s how we make money. Sales awareness and acquiring and sharing business information that helps spur new business is becoming and more a priority for more than just the sales department.
It’s not just about availability of information and increased collaboration, however. Sales 2.0 is also about the ability and authority to make actual decisions at the point of insight. It’s one thing to know, and it’s quite another to act.
As a recent Gartner report projected, by 2012, 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. That’s pretty bad – just having the right information puts you ahead of the class.
But on top of that, Gartner anticipates that by 2012, collaborative tools being deployed by savvy salesforces and companies will also have enabled a shift of traditional management decisions further down the chain as cross-communication and business information becomes more targeted, relevant and useful. I’m thinking salesforce.com might have read this same report….Chatter and now ChatterFree….
What Gartner is saying is that this is an evolve-or-die situation, in no uncertain terms. Non-hierarchical processes will win. You need to have the right information, and have the authority to wield it.
But that’s scary, right?
What makes such a paradigm shift less intimidating is, again, precise, useful and readily-available information and contextual awareness not only for sales professionals, but also, importantly, for the entire openly collaborative and communicating company — across departments and hierarchies.
Well-informed roles will make well-informed decisions. The reason the kinds hierarchies Gartner critiques have existed until now is because information had always been concentrated at the top.
Now, the right business information can be made available to everyone, democratically, with one-click tools that deliver up-to-date information at the point of a decision.
For example, a sales professional may be working on successfully closing a deal with a prospective customer, but accounting could have awareness of that customer’s problematic credit history, or a recent financial filing signaling distress. As sales professionals focus on moving the flood of productive leads through the funnel, that kind of information which may not be available to them directly is crucial in indentifying the deals that can most doggedly pursued, and it needs to be communicated across the company.
Likewise, a sales professional could be courting a customer that HR realizes a new employee used to work with, a connection that may valuable in closing the deal. An awareness of the activities across departments becomes essential, a shared business intelligence that isn’t confined to individuals but made useful throughout the company.
The right listening and business information platforms are key to establishing and effectively fostering a culture of sales as team sport, with informed and empowered roles that are authorized to make real decisions and thereby meaningfully move the needle on closing deals.
Do you know who is one the “HOT” deal list at your company right now? Are you sitting on information that could accelerate a WIN?