Has Sales 2.0 crossed the chasm?

Most of those who commented on my blog post of the same title, believe that Sales 2.0 practices have not yet crossed the chasm as the advancement of  Sales 2.0 practices lags the adoption of Sales 2.0 technology.

As part of his comment on the blog post, Umberto Milletti, Founder and CEO of InsideView, listed a number of  Sales 2.0 technologies:

• forecasting
• analytics/reporting
• marketing automation
• sales intelligence
• sales compensation & incentives
• process playbooks
• quoting/configuration for complex offerings

Sales intelligence includes online data which is also known as ‘data in the cloud’.

Prior to Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Jigsaw on April 21, I asked Garth Moulton, VP of Community and Co-founder of Jigsaw if online data has crossed the chasm.

Garth responded:

I’m not exactly sure that something as amorphous as “Online Data” can be put into the Chasm discussion, which as I understand it generally refers to a product or company.

Let’s re-ask the question: Has the usage of online data sources moved into the past the Early Adopter phase?

My answer is absolutely- just witness the number of sales and marketing people in Fortune 100 companies, manufacturing companies, brick and mortar companies, et al that use Google or LinkedIn to find “online data” about prospects. If you want to refine the category to online data companies like Jigsaw and ZoomInfo, I will bring up the example that D&B licenses our contact data to sell to late stage companies. Another example is the amount of Jigsaw corporate customers (30%) that don’t have a CRM system in place. I assume that we all think CRM companies like Salesforce have “crossed the chasm?”

The facts seem to support Garth’s position:

• Salesforce.com pegs the market for online data at $3 Billion
• Over 95% of the Fortune 500 use Jigsaw
• Demandbase, a compiler of online data, counts more than 30,000 sales and marketing professionals as customers.
• Use of LinkedIn for prospecting and research has accelerated with close to 50% of the salespeople recently surveyed.
• Hoovers, one of the pioneers of online data, is almost 10 years old (launched in 2001).
• Data providers Hoovers and OneSource have evolved into providers of sales intelligence and data aggregaters.

If we believe that a solution has crossed the chasm at 16% (according to the Diffusion of Innovations), it is evident that online data has crossed the chasm.

Another sign that the market has matured is vendor consolidation.  The Salesforce.com purchase of Jigsaw will be one of many to come.

Michael Maoz, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, predicts in a recent blog post that by 2015, 85% of all social media companies will be under different owners.

As online data has become a commodity, this Sales 2.0 solution has evolved from a standalone tool to one that is integrated to CRM systems.

With Salesforce acquiring Jigsaw for use with its internal collaboration solution  Chatter, we are upon the next phase where data is ubiquitous in our sales and marketing systems.        Data will seamlessly flow as part of our sales and marketing processes without having to initiate a discrete call for data.

Resources

• Online Data Sources – my post on a published report comparing online data providers.
• Online Data Twitter List – a compilation of online data providers who tweet, often announcing promotional offers.

Photo Credit:  Flik