By Jep Castelein, Lead Sloth, via Genius.com

Sales 2.0 is about breaking down the walls between Sales and Marketing and defining a new set of strategic processes to create value for both buyer and seller. Web 2.0 technology is an important enabler for Sales 2.0, and Marketing Automation is one of those technologies. The Sales 2.0 Conference just took place, which made me think: how exactly does Marketing Automation enable Sales 2.0?

What is Sales 2.0?

The concept of Sales 2.0 has been around for a while, just take a look at this 2007 Sales 2.0 presentation by David Thompson, CEO of Genius.com. People have written books about it and created businesses around it [ed - yes, this does mean THIS site]. But how is Sales 2.0 different from the old Sales and Marketing approach? Sales 2.0 for Dummies gives a great overview in this table:

Sounds familiar? That’s because many of these themes come up when discussing Marketing Automation best practices. The buyer doesn’t care whether she’s dealing with Sales or Marketing, she just wants to have a great buying experience. And Marketing Automation is a great tool to help improve this experience. Let’s explore some of these Sales 2.0 topics in more detail.

Buyer Education

The automated email campaigns in Marketing Automation systems are a great tool for buyer education. Based on a lead’s profile, interests and responses you can engage in a dialog focused on knowledge transfer. Once the lead is ready to talk to a sales person, the conversation will be much more efficient, because the lead already knows a lot about the products that you’re selling. More on getting started with Lead Nurturing.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Marketing Automation lets Sales and Marketing work together more efficiently in several ways. Lead scoring provides a mechanism to indicate when leads are ready to talk to a sales person. Rather than calling every new lead and facing a high rejection rate, a sales person can now call prospects who actually want to take the call. Lead tracking gives notifications of prospect activity. And the prospect’s activity history is available, so there is more background information to prepare for the first call. More about this in my post on Sales and Marketing Collaboration.

High-Efficiency AND High-Touch

Sales 2.0 is all about productivity: how can you find and develop as many qualified leads as possible. The only way to do this is to automate. And that’s where Marketing Automation comes in. It provides Marketing with the tools to have lots of one-to-many conversations at the same time, and Sales with in-depth information on the lead’s background and activities. You can read more about this in my post on Lead Management.

Measurement of All Activities That Count

Marketing Automation linking together your email campaigns, website activity and CRM system, there is an immense amount of data available to measure marketing performance. The challenge is not data collection anymore, but figuring out which reports give you the insights that you need to further optimize your Sales and Marketing processes. In Demand Generation Metrics 101 I give an introduction to metrics-driven marketing.

Conclusion

Sales 2.0 sounds as if it’s only for Sales. Instead, it’s about improving the buying experience by transforming both Sales and Marketing. Marketing Automation is a key tool to make both Marketing and Sales more effective. If you’d like to learn more about Sales 2.0, I recommend reading Sales 2.0 for Dummies: it’s a quick read, but it covers all important aspects of Sales 2.0.