I wasn’t sure what the definition on Sales 2.0 was, so I looked it up  in Anneke Seley and Brent Holloway’s new book Sales 2.0:

“Sales 2.0 is the use of innovative sales practices, focused on creating value for both buyer and seller and enabled by Web 2.0 and next-generation technology. Sales 2.0 practices combine the science of process-driven operations with the art of collaborative relationships, using the most profitable and most expedient sales resources required to meet customers’ needs. This approach produces superior, predictable, repeatable business results, including increased revenue, decreased sales costs, and sustained competitive advantage.”

It’s a fantastic book for any business interested in improving sales enhanced by technology. You can buy it straight from Amazon below:

I’ve recently started working with dSales, a consulting practice specialising in leading edge processes, technology and skills development to increase sales conversion rates, improve resource productivity, and enhance the customer experience across distributed sales and service teams.   We often enable this processes with technology based on salesforce.com.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been researching more and more into the SaaS world.  The ScioDec blog has some interesting posts, and this recent one doesn’t have a lot new to say, but sums up what most of the people I speak to are thinking.

http://blog.sciodev.com/2008/12/31/prediction-more-clouds-and-saas-in-2009/

In the meantime, it’s not totally clear to me how the business model is going to work for a lot of the smaller players unless they get swallowed up by salesforce.com or others.

I’m also reading Groundswell, the book about social media written by analysts at Forrester.  It’s a great summary of the impacts that social media is starting to have in the world of marketing and how corporations can harness the power and reach of social media to their advantage.

Known as On Demand or Software as a Service (SaaS), this area of technology is fascinating to me.   A few years ago, it was known as ASP (application service provider) or hosted applications.  Now it has a new buzzword and although some of the architecture has changed, the idea hasn’t.      And is there really a big difference between SaaS and outsourcing your server and application infrastructure to a 3rd party?

Anyway, the world of www.netsuite.com and www.salesforce.com now have entire eco-systems of other companies and applications surrounding them and they are pushing into the enterprise space, which for a long time, resisted the thought of having their IT infrastructure offsite.  The great thing is that it means a business can get systems up and running very quickly with minimal capital expenditure.

It seems like Software as a Service is finally come of age.   All the major vendors are offering their enterprise software in ‘on-demand’ versions.   And there is a whole host of companies developing applications that were designed to be delivered on-line, along with consulting groups focussing on configuring those applications and integrating them with in-house applications.  Telstra and NEC are both launching SaaS offerings, with single sign on to multiple applications.    And even companies like Amazon now offer platforms as a service (PaaS), allowing you to subscribe to the use of computing power on which you can develop your own services and ramp them up as demand requires.

Just like in the evolution of the provision of electricity where companies built their own power plants and eventually bought their power from the grid,   hardware and software services are migrating to a utility model, whereby users pay for the resources they use, rather than having to build all that capability in house where the capacity is often under-utilised and requires constant maintenance and upgrades.

What a massive change this will mean to traditional corporate IT departments in the next decade!