Web 2.0 Technologies Helping Create a Better Way of Selling

October 26, 2009

By Laurence Cruz

Two years ago, David Farmer of Ad Giants got a call from a high-level executive waylaid at LaGuardia Airport. The caller had twice canceled a sales presentation by Farmer, and now wanted to reschedule. Determined not to let such a promising prospect slip away a third time, Farmer played the Ace up his sleeve.

With a few mouse clicks, he invited the executive to join a live, interactive meeting using Cisco's WebEx technology that not only let Farmer demonstrate his company's innovative advertising management product, but even allowed the executive to try it for himself. The virtual demo sealed the deal.

It's a scenario that, even a few years ago, would have been unthinkable for small businesses like Ad Giants. How times have changed.

Today, the Internet is opening up a brave new world of possibilities for sales organizations – a world where video and audio conferencing, document sharing, and the ability to demonstrate applications and share a desktop are increasingly popular. Under this new sales model, dubbed Sales 2.0, cutting-edge Internet technologies are helping many businesses dramatically improve their selling operations – increasing sales, shrinking sales cycles, and reducing costs of travel and other overheads.

"It's hard for me to envision a company that wouldn't benefit in some way from adopting Sales 2.0 approaches – or at least from taking a very hard look at them," says Sharon Vipond, Ph.D., who recently co-wrote a white paper on the Sales 2.0 transition.

Sales 2.0: Revolution or Evolution?

A main driver of Sales 2.0 has been the rapid evolution of the Internet, says Vipond, a principal consultant with Seattle, Wash.-based Intrepid Learning Solutions.

Until a few years ago, the Web was essentially an online library, allowing one-way communication of pre-packaged content. Prospective customers used it, if at all, to access digital versions of brochures, press releases, and other types of traditional marketing material, Vipond says.

But the Web today – aka Web 2.0 – is a vastly different animal, born of the explosion of broadband access. Rife with user-generated wikis and blogs, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and video sharing sites like YouTube, it is characterized by two-way communication of collaborative content.

Add to that the major technology trend toward "software as a service," or SaaS, which allows customers to access Web-based services on demand as easily as logging in to a popular Web mail service. A huge appeal of such services for users and IT departments alike is that they eliminate the hassle and expense of downloading, installing, and maintaining "fat client" software on desktop or laptop computers.

It is against this backdrop that the Sales 2.0 model has come of age. Sales 2.0 can be defined as the blending of new selling techniques and new "on-demand" technologies in the context of the increasingly interactive and collaborative Web. "It's not a revolution but an evolution," Vipond says. "It mirrors the evolution of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0."

A Better Way of Selling

Since 2005, Dallas-based Ad Giants has grown its business using various SaaS products from Cisco's Collaboration Software Group. Specifically, Ad Giants uses Cisco WebEx Meeting Center to provide hands-on demos of its product – an online portal called ONE System that greatly simplifies how large companies manage and coordinate their national and local ads and marketing materials.

A particularly creative use of the WebEx service is Farmer's "Lunch and a WebEx" brainchild, which caters free lunches to busy executives in their offices in exchange for their participation in a 30-minute WebEx meeting. The program is a hit with customers, proving to Farmer that he can both reach and engage elusive C-level executives over the Web. To make his pitch more persuasive – and even more effective than an in-person presentation – Farmer can actually turn over control of the Ad Giants portal to customers for a test-drive.

"You can tell someone that something is easy, but if you show them by sharing a desktop and swapping the controls with them, that's much more powerful," says Farmer, Ad Giants' founder and CEO.

It's a typical Sales 2.0 scenario. The two-way communication inherent in Web 2.0 technologies encourages the seller to stay focused on customer needs rather than on a predetermined sales agenda, Vipond says. And the technology is only part of the equation. "The Sales 2.0 transition is not primarily about using new technology," she says. "It's about operating in different ways."

The approach seems to be working for Ad Giants. With WebEx, Farmer and his team can reach up to 25 prospects in a single day and more easily identify qualified candidates. Cisco's WebEx technology also saves Ad Giants about $50,000 a month in travel costs, has helped shrink the sales cycle from as much as 12 months to one month, and has helped boost the company's deal pipeline tenfold, Farmer says. "Instead of a team member working maybe five to 10 deals, they can now work 50 to 60 deals within a given time," he says.

As for in-person meetings, Farmer says they absolutely still have a place in the Sales 2.0 world, but their meaning has changed. Ad Giants' strategy is to first have two or three WebEx meetings, then meet the client in person, with contract in hand. By that stage, there's no real "selling" left to do. "We just use the meeting in person as the close," Farmer says. "It's the exclamation point on the business relationship."

Going Wide and Deep

You don't have to be a new-fangled sales organization to take advantage of Cisco's WebEx services. The venerable Washington, D.C.-based law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP has provided counsel and representation in a wide range of legal fields for more than 60 years. Since 2007, the firm has used Cisco WebEx Event Center to educate its clients on a host of thorny issues, from changes in environmental and labor law to the ramifications of the current credit crisis.

Another such issue is the import, export, and use of international data encryption, which many governments regulate in order to stay ahead of illegal activities. To help multinational companies that rely on encryption stay in compliance with this patchwork of regulations, Steptoe developed an online database detailing regulations in more than 100 countries.

Before 2007, Steptoe relied on high-billing partners to demonstrate the database in face-to-face meetings with Steptoe's clients, most of which are Fortune 500 companies spread around the world. But the firm wanted a more cost- and time-efficient way of doing the job while minimizing the time required by partners.

After researching other options, Steptoe settled on Event Center to demonstrate the database in a webcast to about 40 prospects, resulting in the immediate sale of one $30,000 subscription and a number of strong leads. Spurred by this initial success, more WebEx events followed, including a webcast by the firm's Brussels office to sell the encryption database to a largely European audience.

While sales of the database subscriptions are important, Steptoe's core business is the wide array of legal services offered by its 550 attorneys. Here, too, Cisco's WebEx technology is proving extremely effective in its impact on the bottom line. When legal issues with broad implications loom on the horizon, Steptoe schedules a webcast to help get interested clients up to speed on the matter – without putting partners on planes.

"The better our clients understand the issues, the more likely they are to engage us for the more detailed legal and legislative work that often follows," says John Neidecker, Steptoe's chief marketing officer.

These days, at the request of partners and clients alike, WebEx meetings have become a fixture at Steptoe. Several are typically scheduled each month, and many are recorded and posted on the firm's Web site to reach an even broader audience, Neidecker says.

A Cultural Shift

As with any new trend, there's plenty of hype surrounding Sales 2.0 and how companies should respond to it. But Vipond is clear about one thing: spending money on technology without first making the needed cultural shift is not the answer. Sometimes, as Mary Sacksteder found out, making that shift can be as simple as giving users a gentle jump-start.

Sacksteder, a sales manager for Spectrum Essentials, began using Cisco WebEx Training Center in 2007. Her goal: train a national network of brokers that sells Spectrum's products to retail stores. But getting the independent sales agents on board took some coaxing. "Many of our brokers are not very computer literate so this stuff just scares them," she says.

But even the holdouts came around soon enough, won over by the service's ease of use, such as single-click access to WebEx meetings. These days, Spectrum holds two WebEx training sessions per month, attended by 20 to 80 brokers. The service's rich interactive features help keep brokers engaged, including chat, "hand raising," and tools for highlighting product details on Microsoft PowerPoint slides or Adobe Acrobat PDF files.

Sacksteder still has to use her training savvy to drill brokers on key product details, but Cisco's WebEx technology has made it quicker, easier, and less expensive to keep Spectrum products top of brokers' minds when they are selling. "We hope that every time they're in a store they're thinking of Spectrum," Sacksteder says. "It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease."

As for Sacksteder herself, WebEx has freed her to concentrate on higher-level issues. "I can focus more on sales meetings that might cover other business issues, or on concerns I might have in a given market area," she says.

Despite these dramatic improvements in sales operations, Vipond recommends companies make a careful assessment of how – and whether – they should transition to the Sales 2.0 model. Some organizations are more naturally suited to the new model than others, she says. However, she cautions, those that ignore Web 2.0 sales strategies risk falling behind their competitors.

"After all," she says, "your customers are getting smarter and more sophisticated in putting the power of the Internet to work for them, so why shouldn't you?"

Laurence Cruz is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.