Sales Strategy: Tools and Techniques to Ensure Your Success

During the Innov Com Conference morning on May 6, 2014, participants interacted with 12 sales and marketing experts, as well as 6 Key Account clients, during 3 round-table conferences and a networking breakfast. For those who couldn’t attend or those who would like to recall what was said, we have summarized this morning, rich in expertise and innovative solutions!

Conference 1: Lead Generation: New Tools to Boost Your Sales

Hervé Gonay from Getplus launches and hosts this first conference addressing Lead Generation techniques via the web, best practices for finding prospects, the different forms of marketing, ways to boost conversions, and budget management in relation to ROI.

Here is some information delivered during this round table:

93% of B2B Marketing Departments have lead generation as their top priority.

5 to 8% of B2B companies’ revenue is invested in Marketing. Small and large companies invest almost the same proportion of their revenue in Marketing.

After Marketing, there is CRM and customer relationship management.

Today, with digital technology, it is clients and prospects who decide how to manage the customer relationship, and B2B companies no longer truly have control. Therefore, we no longer speak of a customer relationship controlled by the brand because it is the clients themselves who initiate contact.

Marketing is a matter of branding and advertising. Actions taken are, on average, split into 70% print and 30% web. For B2B companies, there are also events (conferences, etc.) where digital marketing is merely a support.

Today, Inbound Marketing works best. That is, inbound marketing: bringing the client to you rather than going to find them. To do this, you need to attract prospects’ attention through various means: website content, social networks, advertising, etc.

Outbound Marketing, on the other hand, is outbound marketing, such as emailing. This form of marketing generally yields low conversion rates, so it needs to be optimized.

At the beginning of the sales cycle, Inbound Marketing works best. Then, once the company has the prospects’ contact details, emailing tends to take over.

On average, a company uses 12 techniques to generate leads.

Here is a small image classifying marketing levers according to their effectiveness and implementation difficulty

How to generate and work with leads?

Florent Nosel from Kiloutou believes that each company must find its own codes and the marketing techniques that suit it.

Mohamed Khodja from Ubifrance explains in turn that marketing has evolved a lot, and has become much more complex because it now has to consider all the new levers.

Laurent Ollivier from Aressy confirms these major changes. Furthermore, for him, today we no longer speak of Business to Business but of Brand to Business.

He cites 4 important observations:

– To succeed, the different departments of the company must work together towards the same goal and by communicating effectively internally

– Everyone must be able to estimate the ROI of a marketing action before launching it

– You have to give to receive: companies must offer their expertise, provide services, and value, to create a form of dependence on their brand

– There is a need for consistency and personalization: prospects see many messages every day, so to differentiate, offers must be consistent and specific to clients’ needs

Finally, Laurent explains that emotion must be given a role. It is through this means that companies will make clients desire them more than a competitor. You have to tell a story.

Following the idea of “give to receive,” Kiloutou, for example, offers its clients a platform called Wikimat: a mutual aid community for sharing tips, good deals, and advice on equipment use.

To generate leads and, above all, work effectively on these leads, Mohamed Khodja explains that for Ubifrance, there is first and foremost a global strategy that consists of tracking (thanks to Getplus), scoring, and then qualifying to better target. Thus, they conduct campaigns on these qualified contacts, leading to greater efficiency and savings.

For him, it is necessary today to invest in existing tools to be more efficient. This involves an investment in tools, but also in the internal management of these tools.

Indeed, nowadays we are no longer really looking for communicators but rather managers, because marketing involves scenario planning, pushing the right information at the right time: therefore, people capable of analyzing and managing all these factors are needed.

Xavier Paulik from Tiki’labs then explains their smart email signature system to differentiate themselves: Tiki’mee.

Finally, Daniel Rivalin, Director of Webmecanik presents his Marketing Automation solution, i.e., automated tracking and behavioral marketing.

According to him, the worst salesperson is the one who simply does emailing, whereas the best is the one who does Marketing Automation and thus sends more precise and personalized emails.

Hervé concludes by saying that tomorrow, everyone will be equipped with these tracking tools in order to better qualify and target people in their communications.

Conference 2: Tools and methods for selecting, training, and motivating excellent salespeople

Evelyne Platnic Cohen, Founder of Booster Academy begins this conference with a lot of interesting information about the market and its evolution. The round table discusses ways to recruit high-performing salespeople, to retain them, retain, to help them grow, and to effectively motivate them.

She first reminds us that digital technology does not replace people! However, the latter must embrace all the new methods that digital technology and evolution bring.

Companies’ business models are evolving enormously, as are the channels, the means of contact used by clients, but also salespeople and their tools.

According to the Business Weather Report, published monthly by Météojob, BFM Business, and Booster Academy, last month only 25% of salespeople met their targets! We also note that 70% of salespeople find that decision-making processes have lengthened. So, we are clearly experiencing a change today, rules are evolving, and the market is not simple.

Furthermore, we are clearly in the Era of “Co-” and Sharing.

We particularly observe many strategic alliances between companies with the aim of always being more “big,” more “strong,” and more differentiating.

Salespeople must therefore adapt to all these changes. Nowadays, it is necessary for salespeople to have an increasingly broad general knowledge and to better understand their environment, as well as the client’s environment. In this way, they truly know the value they will bring to the client, and they adopt more of a consultative and analytical approach: they almost become a consultant.

Client behavior has changed: they choose their entry and exit points. Salespeople must therefore accept the multiplication of channels and adapt to them.

Evelyne points out that the average salary of a B2B salesperson has decreased in recent years. She explains this by the fact that, in addition to the salesperson, the company also needs tools, sometimes costly, to optimize its efficiency.

However, it can be complicated to find salespeople, and this observation is confirmed by the audience.

The new generation is ultra-connected, but paradoxically, they don’t always use everyday IT and web tools well.

There is a shift in mindset: employees are increasingly impulsive and less focused. This makes management more difficult: we should no longer rely solely on authority and top-down approaches, but rather work collaboratively.

Training is clearly a lever for sales performance and allows a good salesperson to become an excellent one!

The company must adapt to societal changes and its new employees. It must implement genuine collective and individual support policies. Teams can be taught through training, challenges, or sharing. It is necessary to spend smarter and provide the new tools required for new salespeople.

Compensation is not a salesperson’s primary motivation: it’s recognition!

Éric Mallet from Primeum implements high-performing variable compensation systems for his clients. He sometimes advises involving the salesperson concerned in the discussion.

Lionel Deshors from CCLD Recrutement explains that his clients’ specifications for candidate searches are often too narrow. CCLD then brings a new vision of talents who can add value to the company to broaden the scope of recruitment. One must think in terms of expected skills and not just “profiles”.

Salespeople, especially good ones, are rare and often employed. 20,000 sales positions remain vacant. Therefore, you need to be present at the right time to recruit them.

For this, Météojob offers subscriptions so that a company’s opportunities are visible all year round. Thus, as soon as a good salesperson becomes actively looking, the company’s advertisement will be clearly visible. Compared to other professions, very little time indeed passes (2-3 weeks) between when a high-performing salesperson becomes actively looking and when they find a position.

Ethane Derhy, Commercial Director at Raja France, explains that clients have changed and you need to make a difference very quickly to have a chance. Today, the salesperson must be good from the very first contact.

For this, sales training is necessary. Raja uses Booster Academy. They start by establishing a skills framework to then intelligently support salespeople. They build this framework as a team, collaboratively: so it is the salespeople who wrote the criteria, which is more relevant. Then they implement a sales plan for the profession: what to say, how to say it, etc.

Simon Vandendriessche from Incenteev adds that if it’s difficult to recruit good salespeople, it’s also complicated to retain them! Therefore, you need to engage and motivate them. To do this, you can start by valuing them and stimulating them with challenges. But you can also provide them with value: relay relevant, interesting, or educational content and have them share their comments and best practices. It is also important that they are in contact with marketing and aware of the company’s developments.

The enterprise social network allows to break down silos between marketing and sales.

Find ActionCo’s article on this conference

Conference 3: Sales Prospecting and Marketing: Increasing Your Team’s Performance

12 PM, Olivier Piscart, CEO of Salezeo, presents this last conference of the morning. It addresses the new r ules of prospecting, essential tools for sales performance, and the CRM system.

3 out of 5 consumers make a purchase decision after researching online

We are in an era of over-information. Before meeting a company or a salesperson, the prospect Googles them. They therefore know everything about the company and the person they are going to meet! In return, the company must also know the prospect very well to be effective.

Today, telephone prospecting is increasingly difficult because clients refuse calls with a stereotypical approach. They want personalization and specificity in line with their company’s needs.

It is necessary for the salesperson to collect relevant information about a prospect to provide a personalized response and differentiate themselves.

Among the new tools available, there are:

– Information crowdsourcing of all types. This is the system Salezeo uses with its prospect database for its sales prospecting software.

– Social Listening tools to monitor what is being said about your company or your prospect.

– Predictive analytics tools to contact people at the right time (job change, fundraising, etc.). For this purpose, Salezeo implements an alert system.

– CRM and mobile applications which are true Swiss Army knives for salespeople.

In prospecting, the right equation is: the right person + the right message + the right time.

It can be beneficial for the salesperson to have a tablet or smartphone application during meetings.

Juliette from Silamir presents their ‘geographical intelligence’ application EGEO Siliga. For example, this application offers geographical assistance that tracks the location of clients and prospects, so that sales representatives spend less time on the road. According to her, today sales representatives are asked to bring in revenue, but they don’t always have enough support tools available to help them.

At Solocal (Yellow Pages), they aim to optimize mileage. Sales representatives now travel 30 km less and therefore have more time with clients. They can recalculate mileage in real-time and optimize their routes.

For Stéphane Kusic from Clearchannel, it is necessary to segment the customer base according to each one’s potential to know where to focus the sales team’s efforts.

Reporting is essential, but it is one of the sales representative’s tasks that is quite time-consuming for them, as well as for Management who must process these reports. CRMs significantly simplify this task.

For Ines CRM, using a CRM saves simplicity and time, and allows for a centralized and collaborative IS. With a CRM, you save 2 hours per week!

You were present at the congress ? ‘hesitate to leave us your comments or suggestions for our next events Innov‘Com.

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