Digital Transformation: Why and How to Leverage Digital to Boost Your Sales and Marketing Prospecting

Last Tuesday morning, April 12, the breakfast co-organized by Incenteev and Innov’Com took place, the theme of which was “Why and how to leverage digital to boost your sales and marketing prospecting?” Six experts shared their secrets with us.

Digital Transformation: The Tsunami Underway

This morning began with a presentation by Paul Nathan, Director of the Digital Marketing Institute and Academic Director of the specialized Master’s in Digital Management and Brand Strategy at ESSCA.

He explained to us that the digital revolution was truly underway in France and worldwide. Here are some figures:

• 3.7 billion people are connected to the internet worldwide
• 2 billion people have a mobile phone
• 2.3 billion people are connected to social media.

The world is changing fast and all the time! And with these changes, generations and behaviors are also evolving.

Institutional distrust is setting in. Today, we are aware of everything. We challenge everyone because we have access to all the information we want.

As a result, organizations are suffering and must adapt. There is a real “uberization” of sectors and professions that are being challenged in their way of creating value.

Here are some underlying trends of digital transformation.

The Collaborative Economy and New Value Creation

This underlying trend is very important. In 2014, the collaborative economy represented 14 billion euros for businesses. It is estimated that by 2025, it will represent 296 billion euros. Mobile has become a fundamental element to consider in organizations. Everyone must think “Mobile First”.

The 3 Aspects of Digital Transformation in Businesses

Digital transformation must first be a cultural transformation.

• The first aspect is the role of marketing and sales. Today, more than ever, it’s about connecting the brand to the consumer. The goal is to increasingly engage the customer.
• The second aspect is technological transformation. The goal for businesses is to amplify and cover the space of expression.
• The third and final aspect is business. Sales and purchasing processes must be accelerated in a world where everything is constantly accelerating.

Customer Experience is at the Heart of the Relationship

Customer experience is the sum of three types of experiences:

• UX: the “user experience” which corresponds to the product, design, and offering
• CX: the “customer experience” i.e., the customer journey and the relationship with them
• BX: the “Brain experience” or the impact on the brand and alignment with the strategy

If these three experiences are aligned, the customer experience is complete.

The sales approach must also evolve. Social Selling, i.e., the use of social networks in the different sales stages, becomes an important element.

Here are 5 points to design your Social Selling strategy:

• Design your content distribution system
• Plan your editorial strategy
• Train your sales teams in social selling
• Measure its effectiveness
• Continuously improve

Digital Transformation: Increase Your Leads Through Smart Marketing and Webinar Marketing

The morning continued with Julien Duhaubois, France Sales Director of Companeo. Julien began by giving us a brief overview of B2B marketing trends.

Today, email is the most used medium by 94% of B2B marketing professionals. It is the primary acquisition tool for 48% of B2B marketing professionals.

Investments in email are sharply increasing in 2016. That said, this tool remains complex to master and optimize.

Smart Marketing, or multi-channel marketing intelligence.

There are six pillars in smart marketing.

1. Targeting: the targeting of your prospects is done according to their geography, function, sector of activity, etc.
2. Content: you must be able to vary content to interest the maximum number of people. This content can be commercial, informative (White Paper, blog post) or more interactive and fun like quizzes or videos.
3. Channels: in smart marketing, it is very important to use multiple channels.
4. Behavior: you must identify your prospects’ behaviors, analyze them, and act upon them.
5. Scenario: for your smart marketing strategy to be optimal, you will need to implement scenarios to strengthen all of the above elements.
6. Automation: today, several marketing automation tools allow you to automate many things, so you can focus on your strategy and process improvement.

Julien also presented a new prospecting and nurturing channel: marketing webinar. The goal of a webinar strategy is to build a community of interest around your brand. To do this, you will implement a funnel strategy.

Over 6 to 12 months, you will organize three different types of webinars, starting with evangelization webinars, which will increase your visibility, then decision-making aid webinars, which will increase your legitimacy, and finally conversion webinars, which will generate leads. All with the same goal: to generate sales.

Here is an example scenario:

• September: Evangelization: webinar topics “How to organize a webinar that works?”
• October: Decision-making aid: “Marketing Webinar: Docapost’s Feedback”
• November: “Marketing Webinar: Discover Webikeo”

Webikeo is a solution that is part of the Companeo group and supports you before, during, and after organizing your webinar.

When Digital Helps You Optimize Your Sales Representatives’ Variable Compensation

Fabien Lucron, Development Director of Primeum, explained to us the impact of variable compensation on the effectiveness of your sales representatives and how a digital solution can make your life easier.

Variable Compensation: The Three Golden Rules

1. Avoid pitfalls in rule design: i.e., how to incentivize your employees to generate performance
2. Calculate accurately: it is necessary for you to have an accurate calculation, on time, and while controlling your budget
3. Stimulate the calculating mindset of sales representatives: give them visibility into what they can earn by putting in the efforts you expect

To do all this, it is important to understand motivation.
To motivate its sales representatives, a company will organize a sales challenge. Employees will then study its feasibility. To do this, they will measure the efforts they will need to provide and analyze the stakes of this challenge to achieve results and bring value to the company.

As a sales manager, you can act on certain points:

• Feasibility: you must be able to break down objectives fairly
• Efforts: you must make the bonus progression and performance variations consistent
• Result: to obtain the desired result, you must respect the commitments of the system.

Comment-rémunérer.com is a solution that will enable you to achieve the digital transformation of your sales representatives’ variable compensation. They help you to:

• Design an effective and motivating system with the help of experts
• Calculate bonuses and have effective real-time budget tracking
• Animate the system while employees have the levers of action.

Digital Transformation: The Data Visualization Revolution

Baptiste Jourdan, Business Development Director of Toucan Toco, then took over to talk to us about data visualization.

But what is data visualization? It’s about how to move from a difficult-to-read environment to something graphical and therefore easier to manage.

Toucan Toco has developed software that allows you to tell stories in business and especially to tell your own story.

The questions they asked themselves were: how to democratize access to information within the company? How to provide access to data within the company?
Their solution is simple and allows you to create “small apps” in complete autonomy.

• Here are their promises:
• Provide access to data within the company by being relevant with the visualization of best practices
• Offer an exceptional user experience
• Be mobile. Their tool is available on all your favorite devices (computer, tablet, smartphone)

Toucan Toco conducts its projects in agile mode; in one month you get a clear and easy-to-manage dashboard.

Choose Your Customers Through Predictive Marketing

We continued this morning with a presentation by Philippe Spenato, Sales Manager at C-Radar.

Philippe began by asking the audience a question: Why choose your customers?

For two reasons. The first, sales costs. It’s no secret that the cost of qualification and pre-sales efforts can be significant for highly variable success rates. Choosing your customers means being more effective in opportunity generation with a message adapted to your target.

The second reason is the virtuous circle of the vertical sector approach in B2B. That is, knowing your prospects’ needs so that your offer is aligned.

To achieve optimal qualification, Philippe advises you to use the “Blue Ocean” method.

This method is based on four criteria:

• Reduce: Which criteria should be reduced compared to the level considered normal by the industry?
• Create: Which criteria, until now neglected by the industry, should be created?
• Increase: Which criteria should be strengthened well beyond the level considered normal by the industry?
• Eliminate: Which criteria, accepted without thought by industry players, should be excluded?

The objective being to obtain a new value curve.

How to Choose Your Customers?

C-radar will enrich your market knowledge with new information. You will be able to see what your competitors don’t.
They help you replicate your successes and choose the best sectors.

Digital Transformation: How to Develop Effective Prospecting Through Digital

Our morning concluded with Thierry Miriel, Associate Director at Manitoba.

He begins by giving us four existing observations today.

• 60% of purchasing decisions are made before a buyer speaks to a salesperson
• It is necessary to adapt to new market conditions
• Aligning marketing and sales around the customer perspective becomes essential. The salesperson is no longer the first point of contact. It is therefore necessary for marketing to qualify the prospect’s interest so that sales representatives can sign contracts.
• It is necessary to implement new lead generation practices.

He continues by presenting a client case to us: the case of KONE

KONE is a global leader in the elevator, escalator, and automatic door industry. Their challenge was to increase their lead generation for the launch of new services.

Manitoba addressed this challenge with 3 elements:

• They launched an email campaign in five waves
• They set up a mini-site dedicated to new services with specific landing pages for each service
• They created a video on the site to explain the brand and the new services.

The result was immediate because in just 5 weeks, KONE managed to generate 143 new leads.

Manitoba is a communication and marketing strategy consulting agency that will be able to help you and address all your challenges.