I’m going to need your help with this post. For me, one thing was clear about the Sales 2.0 Conference: to get better results, the Marketing & Sales teams need to operate like a single team. Nevertheless, “Sales 2.0” sounds like it’s still all about Sales, and not about Marketing (see my previous post). How can we make sure that both marketing and sales adopt Sales 2.0 as their own?
My take: it’s the name, so let’s replace Sales 2.0!
I first wanted to blame the inventors of the term “Sales 2.0”: Genius.com. But you can’t blame a thought leader for choosing a bad name when they’ve done such a great job advancing state-of-the-art selling techniques!
And even more important, they proposed a great alternative in a yesterday’s blog post: “Buying 2.0”. It reflects the current consensus that sales reps cannot control the sales process anymore. The buyer is in control.
I thought I found another alternative in “Smarketing”. Unfortunately the “S” is for smart, and not for sales (and I couldn’t find out who first coined this term).
Anna Talerico (ion interactive) calls it the great ’sales & marketing mashup’. Not bad, and we get rid of the omnipresent 2.0 suffix.
But maybe we – as marketers – just need to bite the bullet and accept that “everybody is in sales” and consider ourselves sales people. As Eloqua’s Steve Wood mentions in his book: “marketing must be involved until much later in the buying cycle, as most buyers will only want to engage with sales when they are much closer to being ready to purchase”. So maybe we should stick with the Sales 2.0 moniker.
The best alternative I could come up with was “Markesales 2.0”, not a great option either (I TM’ed it just in case).
So let’s make this a group project:
How do you think we should call the new Marketing & Sales mashup?
The problem in my mind of calling it overtly marketing OR sales or mashing it up is that these are functional ways of thinking about it … all that leave out the customer.
We need to be customer-centric … not only in our platforms but also in how we term things.
So let’s find a term that focuses not on a functional view of the world but on an outcome view of the world.
Happy Customer 2.0 = Profit
Adam, that’s very good point. That’s why my current favorite is “Buying 2.0” because it’s centered around the customer, not the vendor.
Jep,
the “2.0” is getting overused. Perhaps it is time to move to 3.0 instead.
Here’s another idea “C-Three” or “C3.O” for Customer Creation Conference?
Mac
M. H. McIntosh
mcintosh@sales-lead-experts.com
Jep, I’d have to agree that “everybody is in sales”. As marketers we’ve always participated in the overall sales/buying process – and it’s the entire process that is being reshaped by technology.
I kind of like Buying 2.0 (anybody know who that was in the crowd during the Wed AM session?), but I’m pretty sure the term Sales 2.0 is here to stay.
As for ‘smarketing’, I hadn’t previously heard the smart + marketing version. At InsideView we’ve been using it to describe the convergence of traditional sales & marketing roles, activities, etc. I’m not sure of the origin either, but this Destination CRM article from Jan 2000 is one of the earliest written mentions that I could find – http://tinyurl.com/axz2pb
At HubSpot one of our sales managers started calling it “smarketing” and it has stuck a bit here. We have all of our key meetings together and generally the teams function as one. We each have goals that we report on as a team, and we support each other to achieve goals in terms of leads and sales.
I’m not in love with any of the terms, but I am a believer that inbound marketing works best with a solid relationship between sales and marketing.
Jep,
I agree with your thoughts. It is about the customer. The mission of Sales 2.0 in my opinion is to come up with “new ways of selling”. These new ways have to encompass BOTH the customer and the marketing function.
I might actually be to blame for the name (hence my company name). When it came to choosing between “Sales 2.0” and “Smarketing” etc. (yes, I thought about combining) you know which seemed to be more memorable.
Interesting to see Mike from Hubspot commenting here. I feel the “Sales 2.0” movement and the “Inbound Marketing” movement will find some things to do together soon. I’m a bit fan of Hubspot and inbound marketing.
This is a great blog. Sorry, I was slothful in finding it. Thanks for coming to the conference. It was a lot of fun.
Nigel
Jep,
thanks for the callout, and I agree with your point on the name. We do tend to think in terms of names that reflect an outbound role (sales, marketing). We need to start thinking about facilitating a customer’s buying process rather than pushing a sales process. Whether the term will stick, I don’t know, but it’s a good discussion.
Steve
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