Sales 2.0 technologies

Web 2.0 technologies, like our new website, blogs, wikis, tagging, etc. are more than just some AJAX and cool, simple apps. The better technology and platforms have begun to take shape and are currently powering Sales 2.0 and making people real money. I’m currently employing some of these technologies and platforms to sell my business: investment research and management.

First and foremost, Sales 2.0 has begun to redefine the traditional sales funnel. Because web technologies are involved, a certain level of new automation has crept into the sales process. For me and others competing in today’s marketplace,

Sales 2.0 has done a couple of things:

• Increase the circumference of the funnel
• shorten cycle times in terms of how long it takes to get through the funnel
• Increase conversions

Increasing the Circumference of the Funnel

What I mean by this is that given Web 2.0 technologies, I’m finding that I’m able to get a dramatically greater reach with my marketing efforts, effectively creating wider and more frequent ways to connect with potential clients. From there, given Sales 2.0 tech and platforms, I’m able to push more people through a wider funnel.

casting a wide-r net: Web 2.0 technologies are effectively being used by sales organizations to build brand over a wider reach. Companies like mine are using these technologies to build huge marketing machines in a much softer, gentler, and more precise way: via content. Oodles of it. I work in the financial advisory field and am using my blog to effectively reach folks around the world who are interested in what I have to say. Because my firm is small, I have a relatively shallow reach. I work with blog aggregation firms like SeekingAlpha to ramp up my exposure. SeekingAlpha, due to its content base of hundreds of blogs, has negotiated distribution deals with Yahoo Finance and E*Trade, deals I could never have negotiated on my own. Now, my content shows us exactly in front of the types of people who are my potential clients.

I’m using metrics tools like Google’s plug-and-play Analytics to track my efforts and in step, I add more marketing/content gas to those sites providing the best feeders to my core business. Enabling my content with RSS allows me to get my content out there. Sites like RSS hosting/tracking firm, Feedburner, allow me to position my content to become portabilized and allow users to read my content wherever they may be. As I’m building a Sales 2.0 organization, it’s more important for me to reach a larger audience as this point than it is to drive direct traffic to my own blog.

reputation building or becoming an expert: these technologies provide companies and individuals to build their own brands in increasingly narrow niches. I run my blog on the WordPress platform. WordPress has developed an app so that my blog posts also show up on Facebook. Not only does this further my reach beyond my blog and any aggregators to whom I’m submitting content, it also gets my content onto Facebook. My existence on Facebook is centered around groups and people who overlap my sphere of influence, specifically investing in Israeli technology companies. By putting this content directly into their news feeds, I’m continuing to build my reputation as an expert in public market investing in Israeli companies.

I’ve just begun to use Twitter to microblog some of my market commentary during the day. As more and more mainstream users adopt twitter-like apps, I am sure that this will compete for other media as a way to build reputation and distribute my expert opinion.

I’m using sites like Vestopia and Stockpickr to increase sales. Both sites allow me to create model portfolios and submit them to a community of like-minded investors. Vestopia tracks real trades I make in my investment account while Stockpickr tracks play money, but both allow me to put my best ideas forward to potential clients. Another step in building my repuation as an expert in my niche.

Previously, as head of business development and sales at SeekingAlpha, LinkedIn was an invaluable tool for opening up deals and closing them. Creating a well-thought out profile was essential when I used the LinkedIn messaging system to target potential partners for content syndication deals. I was able not only to target the appropriate person for the deal, but they were much more likely to respond from an internal LinkedIn message than they were to a cold email or phone call. Why? Because they could see and filter out why I was approaching them. By the time we connected, the relationship was already in context. I closed deals with Dow Jones, Reuters and Etrade from approaches made via LinkedIn. Additionally, I participate in LinkedIn’s Answers to answer questions posted by my network to show that I know what I’m talking about in my field.

Salesforce.com and other CRM solutions like 37 Signals’ Highrise and Zoho are building more than rudimentary APIs for me to hook in other office/business critical solutions that I’m using, like Google AdWords. I’m using Meetup to plan, manage, and communicate with numerous seminars that I’m holding as a way to garner new business.

All these things are providing mechanisms for me to connect with as many warm leads as possible and bring them into a process that I can begin to close a proportion of them.

one-to-one sales: Sales 2.0 technologies essentially allow one to widen the mouth of the traditional sales funnel by creating a cheap and wide-reaching distribution network and given the ability to build brand/reputation along very narrow borders, companies are able to cast their message to the appropriate audience in a way that was never possible previously. The result is that I’m consistently marketing to my existing and future customers.

Sales 2.0 is all about relationship marketing. My future clients are reading my content on my blog, on SeekingAlpha and on Yahoo Finance. The next step in the process is to make the relationship a little more intimate by soliciting an email address. I accomplish this by using a email services company, like Contstant Contact or StreamSend. These service providers provide hosted email services including easy-to-use auto responders. So, when a prospect comes to my website after I’ve caught their attention on SeekingAlpha, I offer a quick, easy — and free — giveaway. A whitepaper. The user inserts his email address in the javascript email capture box I’ve embedded on my website and they’ve now entered my sales cycle. They get personalized emails from me with important information regarding markets, picks, etc. All these emails have a call to action to buy my product. I continue to convert my blog traffic to paying subs via this method — using all Web 2.0 type tools.

making customers into distributors: Sales 2.0, given its integration into the tangle of relationships that is Web 2.0, has some interesting outcomes. Satisfied customers actually become value-added distributors for my business. The more users I have tracking my portfolios on Vestopia or Stockpickr (see above), the more legs my sales and marketing efforts have. In turn, users who track or follow my followers are also exposed to my content. In turn, what’s occurred, is that my customers or soon-to-be customers reinforce my positioning as an expert in my field and in turn, act as quasi-distributors lending approbation to my efforts.

Shorten Cycle Time

Automation

I spend most of my time creating content and allow the hooks into various Sales 2.0 platforms to work their magic. Every article I write shows up on my Facebook profile because I’ve integrated Wordpress and

Facebook (see above). My email auto-responders treat every new trial subscription to my research the same way. A series of personalized, automated messages go out, creating a conversion channel for my readers. RSS feeds are pushed out automatically via Feedburner. Feedburner even has an automated RSS-to-email plugin that allows me to offer email subs to my web content and continue the sales conversation that way as well.

Something worth noting is that many of these apps have taken software and turned it into a hosted, web service. This means I just pay for usage, implementation is really simple, and the service company takes care of updating the service, not me.

Increase Conversions

The Sales 2.0 funnel is inherently more stickier than its predecessors. Potential clients enter my wide-mouth funnel and have access to my research, my blog, my real-time market commentary. It’s not hit or miss advertising. Instead, potential clients who don’t buy right away continue to hear, see, and feel my messages. They stay connected to me longer and instead of just slipping through the funnel, they hang out for a while. While cycle times are sped up, more conversions actually take place.
Integrating Sales 2.0 apps into existing apps

I think we’re still in the early stages of using Sales 2.0 apps and platforms and just beginning to integrate them into existing business critical platforms that we use to conduct business.

In the chart to the right, I’ve tried to describe the process of integrating these services. As they become

more integrated, not only are sales activities more and more automated, the ability to market directly 1-to-1 becomes greater as well.

1st Stage: Sales 2.0 in the Sales Process

We and many like us are currently using Sales 2.0 platforms and most of the time, these are standalone activities. Meaning, while I blog, use email services firms, facebook, twitter, most of these activities are accomplished individually. I blog on Wordpress, send email via StreamSend, and use Facebook and Meetup to get the word out there about my services using content as the marketing message.

The point is that while some of the apps are integrated in a minimal sense (the wordpress blog app allows me to blog on Wordpress and it shows up on Facebook) , essentially all these activities are distinct from one another.

2nd Stage: Integrating into other sales apps

As APIs get better and easier to work with for small businesses, more and more of these Sales 2.0 technologies mentioned above will get integrated in existing workforce management apps. By this I mean that the division between *new* sales apps (salesforce, email services, meetup) and *old* sales apps (ACT, Outlook, Excel) gets blurred.

3rd Stage: Integration with Company-wide apps

After integration between old and new sales apps takes place, the next step in the Sales 2.0 movement is to integrate these apps into mission-critical business apps like Office, Outlook, Finance/Payroll etc. We currently use ACT as our contact manager, Outlook as an email handler, and an in-house financial app/process. As our software gets better and more tightly integrated. APIs and platform-agnostic hosted services will eventually allow me to tie everything together and manage sales together with all the other functions

Summing Up

Sales 2.0 is not merely Sales 1.0 with some cheap and easy software. It’s a game changer. Given cheap and easy to deploy tools, I use content to market myself to millions of potential clients, effectively enlarging the circumference of the traditional sales funnel. Sales 2.0 then allows me to cycle through more leads in shorter times and convert more than I would through traditional, expensive methodologies.

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As we wrote about President Bush’s address yesterday, IOI is spending two days at the President of Israel Shimon Peres’s Facing Tomorrow conference.

While yesterday’s events centered around political issues, today’s festivities focused more on the business environment in Israel. Google (GOOG) founder, Sergey Brin kicked off a panel focused on the future of the Internet and new media. In a somewhat disappointing and disjointed rambling, Brin said that he was amazed at the corporate growth he’s seen in Israel in just a few years since his last trip. The search giant has two operating research centers in Haifa and Tel Aviv. (see our coverage of what’s going on here in Israel for Google).

Brin said that the evolution in both web and cellular technology augers for a future in which we’re even more connected, that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg so far. This evolution of technology, according to Brin, is just an extension of the human spirit working toward quality of life improvements.

Next up was Sue Decker, president of Yahoo (YHOO). In an engaging talk, Decker looked at where we’ve come from and where were headed. Her thesis was that the more things change, the more they really stay the same — amidst all the enabling going on, the more consumers just want to simplify and connect to those people who are important to them. She said while 1.3 billion people currently use the Internet monthly, it leaves a lot of growth ahead of us. Technology according to Decker is helping to bring borders down.

Decker quoted some figures:

• Did you know that 12% of recent newlyweds in the US last year met online? I didn’t. That’s an amazing, staggering figure.
• We send 9 trillion emails per year
• Yahoo has 10 billion reviews on Yahoo Music.

As to the future of media, Yahoo’s president said we’re moving from mass media to my media to our media while individual consumers are becoming their own content monarchs. Transparency is becoming more important to publishing agendas. In an interesting aside, Decker said that with 500m users per month, Yahoo is the largest social network although not nearly the most useful. Because of this, Yahoo is focusing on bringing all their disparate properties, content and activities and trying to bring them all together with one button. Yahoo will be focused on 3 things going forward: 1) creating open platforms where consumers define how, when and where they consume content, 2) really personalized content filters, and 3) establishing a stronger linkage between online and offline worlds.

News Corp (NWS) CEO and media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, spoke to the crowd about freedoms. He believes tech destroys obsolete business models. Murdoch really feels that we are on the cusp of a golden age of information with the human element becoming more and more important.  He spoke about the importance of building strong human capital, part of his motivation for investing in NDS (NNDS), previously News Data Systems.  He said it was started by four guys in a Jerusalem apartment and now NDS employs over 1,000 in Jerusalem along and is the largest R&D center in Jerusalem.

Terry Semel, previous CEO of Yahoo, closed the session.  He described the differences in Silicon Valley work culture to the boardrooms of Warner Bros. boardrooms which he resided over during his 20 year career in the media industry.  “Facilities of the past” were nowhere to be found in a more equal work environment in the Valley.  On his first day at Yahoo, he had no reserved parking space and no private dining room and chef.  He cited a famous memo sent in the 1950s by Jack Warner who advised his employees to steer clear from the nascent television guys.  9 months later another memo went out explaining Warner’s desire to be the biggest in TV.  Semel praised his ability to see the bigger picture and not fight change.  He too thought we were entering the best years for both premium content as well as for user-generate content (UGC).

Disclosure: Author’s fund has no position in any stock mentioned as of 5/14/08 but author and his family own GOOG stock.

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Thinking about Facebook’s Beacon from a partner perspective…

The Techdirt Insight Community recently addressed this issue and posited it to their group of experts.

“Does it make sense for a consumer-facing company to sign on to Beacon — or has the program forever been tarnished? How should we approach using Beacon? In an ideal world, we would like for it to be a way for fans of our products to pass on effective “endorsements” of the product, but we do not want to be seen as doing something intrusive or upsetting. If not Beacon, is there a better way to do this either within Facebook or through a different platform?”

(Continue »)

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Zack Miller
IsraelNewsletter.com

Well, Google’s (GOOG) April announcement that it would be adding a hosted version of presentation software as part of Google Docs — Google’s nascent stab at a full productivity suite– via an acquisition of Tonic Systems has been realized today with the search provider’s official announcement of Presentation as part of its hosted office solution. Presentation joins Google Docs Word Processing application, Docs (creative name, no?), and Spreadsheet application, Spreadsheet (even more creative).

What this means is that Google now has the equivalent functionality of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Office Suite to compete head-on versus Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA]

Adding to the excitement, without much fanfare in the press (hey, it’s Apple — a company known to plan entire days around Steve Jobs’ choice of lunch), Apple had a seminal announcement last month as it introduced a speadsheet application, Numbers (a bit more creative!) to round-out its own productivity software in iWork ‘08. Apple now offers Pages, its word processing software with Apple flare, Keynote (hands-down, a Powerpoint killer — hey, I’m biased), and now Numbers, Apple’s spreadsheet offering.

I’m not going to use this space to compare functionality, mano a mano, of the three office suites. There are numerous analysts (See Carl Howe in particular) who do excellent work in this space. Instead, I’d like to think (write?) out loud about how these products stack up against one another in light of their parent companies’ strategic objectives. While these companies will compete head-on with their new product suites, as we’ll explore in this article, each company has its own, very different reasons for producing a kick-butt office suite.

Microsoft

The Office Environment for Office: In spite of talk of its demise, Microsoft hasn’t been dismissed yet. While the open source movement continues to make inroads on the server side with Unix-inspired systems, Microsoft’s dominance of the OS and Office Suite on the desktop of corporate computers worldwide is still extremely entrenched.

Because Microsoft continues to control the heart of the office (see image at left), Microsoft continues to run a healthy business off of providing solutions, services, servers and programs to the global business community.

Lock In — from the office homeward: For MSFT, controlling the office means that for me to communicate as a business person, I need to buy Microsoft products (or at least products that can be translated to work with MSFT products) This has historically enabled MSFT to own my computer’s OS and office suite at home. For to communicate with my work life, I need parity of products and platform. This leverage into the home computer via the office environment, is why it’s so important for MSFT to maintain its Office Suite dominance.

What’s happening to MSFT after years of failed attempts for competitors to take on Office within the corporate office, Microsoft now faces competition from the backdoor: home users. As Apple, Google, Open Office and whatever begin to garner a following at home, this momentum, if it reaches critical mass in terms of demand and functionality and support in terms of supply, may begin to chip away at MSFT’s dominance in the office. If MSFT’s dominance in the office is challenged, their dominance at home is equally at peril.

Strategy to Compete: I know there is a lot of rhetoric coming from Redmond on their strategy, but I’m hard pressed to see a cohesive strategy to compete with Apple and Google. Microsoft Live is not living up to its hype and spending time and money on game consoles and failed consumer devices shouldn’t be MSFT’s strategy. Nor should be competing for search. Google is using search to take over the desktop and ultimately, trojan horse into the corporate environment — MSFT needs to understand this.

Google

Capturing web search to own the Web Operating System: I know the stats say otherwise, but do you really use any other search engine other than Google. Really?? Google owns my web experience by organizing my web life and by using apps/products/services to get me to commit more info into the system, Google creates a lot of reliance. I’m still using Gmail at work and to communicate with clients. I’ve got Google Desktop running on my office machine. Google’s new productivity suite aims at Microsoft’s jugular and it’s Google’s foothold into challenging MSFT.

From my home into the office: I’m addicted to Google products at home. I NEED THEM. When I get to work, that dependence doesn’t go away. Now that Google has an offering in the Office space, a product that actually has some advantages over other products of its type, I’m apt to begin introducing my colleagues to Google (I’m thinking Aaron “Instant Rebate” Katsman may write even more compelling analysis on Israeli stocks in a Google Doc).

I love Google Docs for two reasons:

1. Storage: I love that these docs are accessible from whatever machine I use. I log in via my phone, my home laptop, and my office box and I never have to worry about versioning. I manage one doc in one place.
2. Collaboration: I know MSFT has had collaborative tools for years. But guess what? I never used them — nor would I know how to. With Google Docs, I invite my colleagues (read, Aaron Katsman) into a document that’s hosted by Google and updates in real time. We can edit each others’ articles and even chat in real time on the document itself. What about biz dev and legal stuff with contracts? I don’t know about your firm but I’ve been part of negotiations where the red-lining probably went back and forth over 50 times — all saved under different file names. That’s too much to manage for me (maybe for anyone, other than lawyers).

As I think about how I’m decreasing my dependence on Microsoft products, I realize that Google has added an incredible feature as well. Certainly, Google Docs allows me to save documentation into standard formats that my non-Google-ized colleagues can use. But there’s more. In fact, Google provides the ability to upload your MSFT Office-created documents to Google Docs, convert it into Google format, and continue to work with the application vis-a-vis Google Docs. This is big and important.

Jumping the shark: Given its competitive technology, collaborative features and an ever-growing reliance on Google products, I believe that Google Docs will provide a slow movement away from MSFT Office in the office. In fact, Google is basically saying, “We’re coming to your crib to party!” with last week’s announcement that Cap Gemini will support enterprise versions of Google Docs in Europe. Google will need to continue developing functionality and integrating Docs into your core Google experience. Apple will need to follow suit on the support side and learn from Google’s prescient move to attract the business user.

Apple

Using consumer devices to own my desk: Apple is on-fire with all its new product introductions. In fact, I think the velocity is a bit much, BUT, I’m listening to a lot of music that I’ve bought via iTunes on my iPod that I’ve upgraded 3 times. Apple’s also done a good job convincing me to add phone functionality to this experience. It all works very well with my MacBook Pro. Apple’s Halo Effect, introducing consumers to Apple consumer electronic products and eventually funneling these to increased Mac sales, has been, until recently, about owning the home computing experience. We’ve seen the numbers attest to Mac notebook growth in market share (according to NPD, Apple’s U.S. retail notebook market share for June 2007 was 17.6%, a gain of 2.2% over 2006).

Filling the business void with an office suite: What business could afford to migrate to a Mac environment given the fact that while things might run more smoothly internally (I’d postulate — though I can’t prove it — that although Apple products retail at a higher price point, total cost of ownership is lower for Apple products), they can’t interface with the rest of the world because of Microsoft’s dominance. No longer — Apple now provides the functionality to compete for the business customer. Apple’s next move will have to be global training and mobilization of third-party support to attract, service, and retain the fledgling business customer.

What does this all mean for investors?

Of these three players, I think Google is best situated for success. What Google, Salesforce.com, et al. have shown is that there is going to be a huge market for SaaS (Software as a Service). In fact, Web Search is really just SaaS 1.0. Instead of buying yellow page CD-ROMs (remember doing that?!), I just count on Google to provide great, FRESH results — all the time. I just type. I think the hardware becomes less important (not more important as AAPL is betting on) and it’s going to be all about the integration of web apps with my desktop and allowing the heavy processing to occur server side. Lastly, Apple and MSFT are going to ultimately butt-heads in a way that Apple doesn’t really know how to compete. To get to the business customer, Apple will need to open up by partnering in the service experience — something they didn’t quite get and the same thing that almost sunk them a decade ago. And for Microsoft, I think they’ve really reached the point of becoming a “Technology Utility”.

Disclosure: Author’s fund does not have a position in any of the stocks mentioned here as of 9/18/07. Author owns GOOG personally.

Please see our Disclaimer HERE.

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Zack Miller is the lead equity analyst for America Israel Investment Associates, LLC. and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund. For more information, go to www.israelnewsletter.com or call 1-888-327-6179, or email zack@profile-financial.com

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