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In these harsh economic times, CIOs will be looking to add value that is very visible on the spend side of the business if they are to justify their budgets. One way to do this is to work directly with sales and use technology to discover more and better sales leads that are there for the taking.

According to the CSO Insights' 2008 Sales Performance Optimisation Report, 56 per cent of chief sales officers cited -‘increased sales effectiveness' as one of their top objectives for next 12 months, second only to ‘increased revenues' (targeted by 61 per cent). And what better way to get a foot in the door of a hot prospect than to be introduced to a senior manager by someone in your company who has him or her on the friends list of their social network? Web 2.0's focus on social networking and informal news creation through blogs can produce a valuable seam of contacts to be mined for sales leads.

Sales 2.0, as Web 2.0 fuelled sales has been dubbed, is attracting vendors from all kinds of markets alongside the traditional CRM players, including US information giant Dow Jones. It describes its Business Relationship and Intelligence (BRI) line as social graphing and relationship mapping tools that will unlock the "who you know" within the enterprise and externally.

Darr Aley, (pictured) a Dow Jones vice president, says that the rapid growth of business networking sites has already made an impact in enterprise sales. "The advent and popularity of B2C networking sites like LinkedIn, Jigsaw, Spoke, and Plaxo have permeated sales organisations of all sizes over the last two years," he says.
However, he warns that organisations need to get a grip on social networking if it is to bring long-term sales benefits.

"The rapid growth and adoption among enterprise sales organisations has created the demand for more targeted solutions that offer proprietary private networks which leverage an entire organisation's eco-system of sales people, management, board members and customers," he argues, adding that the mass-market sites offer little in terms of competitive advantage.

"Relying on any single social network website alone for research will not add much real value as competitors will have access to exactly the same information. In some cases, sales organisations at very large companies forbid use of these sites for that reason."

Dow Jones' BRI crawls 75 million websites, 25,000 media sources, and three million blogs daily to create databases on companies, executives, news, events, and social networks. Users can link this information to relationship maps through work, personal, board and school affiliations, plus integrated Outlook, LinkedIn and other contact systems, showing the user and their organisation how they connect to other companies and people.

While Sales 2.0 companies and relationship mapping solutions are still new to the market, with a wide range of innovators, there has been significant interest among large traditional information, data, and application providers to buy into Sales 2.0 innovations over the past 12 months. Aley highlights Dow Jones' acquisition of Generate, D&B's purchase of Visible Path, Comcast buying Plaxo and LexisNexis's acquisition of Contact Networks.

Paul Honey, now managing director of Sales 2.0 company Strange, spent most of his career in senior IT management, which provided him with a unique insight into what the CIO can bring to sales.
"Linking traditional infrastructure into these more exotic interfaces is absolutely within IT," he claims.
"IT has the knowledge of process to be able to wrap it up into a bulletproof, production-ready facility. The ability to work the data into formats that can feed other systems is absolutely essential. You really need to know what you are doing with data cleansing; it is quite a skilled job."