Transcript: Sales 2.0

Description: David Thompson, CEO of Genius.com, discusses the advantages of combining Web 2.0 technologies with new selling techniques. The concept is called "Sales 2.0."

David Thompson: Hi, my name is David Thompson. I'm the CEO of genius.com and I'm here to talk to you today about a new concept called "Sales 2.0," which basically means combining the power of Web 2.0 technologies with new selling techniques to be able to sell a lot more product a lot faster to small and medium businesses.

Let's talk about Sales 1.0 versus Sales 2.0.

In the "old world" of Sales 1.0, you had a very expensive sales rep who would hop on a very expensive flight to target a very expensive product at a large enterprise halfway across the globe. Naturally, this process tended to be very time consuming, rather expensive, and certainly risky in terms of whether the client was going to buy.

This whole situation with Sales 1.0 led to a lot of pent up demand to be able target smaller business and target them faster. The web lets you do that very cheaply and efficiently.

So, how does this Sales 2.0 process work? It's actually quite simple. You start by getting customer's to your website with inexpensive media such as search engine marketing, email marketing, and PR to get, say, a blog hit to get a click thru to your website. What that does, is it drives a mass of customers, a high volume of potential customers, to your website.

What does this Sales 2.0 rep supposed to do in that case? Instead of hopping on a plane, he's hopping on the website with Sales 2.0 technologies.

For example: We've got what we'd call a vacation product, which tells that rep who's interested and exactly what they're interested in while they're visiting the website. Then you want to interact and give that prospective customer a personalized offer thru, say, a chat session, or a full fledged web conferencing.

The net effect of all of that social interaction on the website is a much faster and smarter way of targeting SMBs.

In summary, as we've seen, Sales 1.0 is all about hopping on a plane and targeting the enterprise; a rather expensive proposition. You're spending that extra money, a lot of extra time, and unfortunately, because of the few opportunities, it's high risk.

With Sales 2.0, it's all about targeting SMB thru your corporate website, spending less money to generate that traffic, spending less time closing the deals, and decreasing your risk by closing a lot more customers a lot faster on your corporate website.

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