Digital Transformation: 5 key factors to ensure your success

Last Friday morning, September 18, the breakfast meeting co-organized by Incenteev and Innov’Com took place, with the theme “Digital Transformation: 5 levers to ensure your success.”

Five experts shared their secrets to grow your business through digital. A look back at the conferences.

Digital Transformation: The Dawn of a Revolution for the Sales Force

This morning of conferences began with Simon Vandendriessche, CEO and Co-founder of Incenteev, who explained how digital transformation impacted the sales function. Currently, we are only at the beginning of the digital transformation of sales management. Not all sectors are transforming at the same pace.

Marketing, however, is evolving very quickly; technology has completely transformed the way marketing is done. While for sales, there is still little transformation. The explanation is quite simple: sales are primarily a human affair, and as such, technology struggles to change that.

But in recent years, many transformations have appeared:

• The arrival of mainstream social media has changed communication dynamics.
• The advent of mobile has dramatically increased usage; salespeople have become highly connected to their smartphones.
• The appearance of terms such as gamification and big data offer exciting prospects for transforming sales team engagement.

But how can you transform your sales management with digital? With a mobile application like Incenteev, you can leverage 3 very important levers: motivation, communication, and training.

• Motivate your salespeople: broadcast your salespeople’s results in real-time, directly to their smartphones.
• Communicate: accelerate exchanges with the field.
• Train: help your salespeople progress daily with micro-learning.

Digital Transformation: discover the necessary tools for the sales process

The morning continued with Evelyne Platnic-Cohen, Founder of Booster Academy. For Evelyne, digital transformation does not give more power to the customer but gives more intelligence to both parties. Many tools exist for both sides to get informed. But how to use all these tools in a sales process?

The 5 key stages of a sales process:

1. The preliminary phase

This phase is essentially focused on information. All information is valuable. What you can do is use digital to monitor your competitors and thus adapt your sales pitch.

2. Prospecting

In France, only 15% of salespeople correctly use digital tools. In the age of the digital revolution, this figure seems very low. In a sales organization, it is necessary to use ‘personal’ social networks for professional purposes, for example, LinkedIn.

The digital image is very important; when a prospect is to meet one of your salespeople, they will necessarily check their LinkedIn profile to get an idea of the person they are going to meet. And your salespeople do the same. The goal of using social networks such as LinkedIn is to increase your customer knowledge.

3. Closing / Face-to-face meeting

For this stage, digital tools like tablets allow for hierarchical work and add more quality to your presentations. There are also tools that allow you to set up automated proposals; this is called ‘Proposal Management’.

4. Customer follow-up

Here, the most important tool will be your CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). It will allow you to record every step you’ve taken with your client, every call made, every appointment taken, etc. CRM is the essential tool for good management.

5. Retention

Successfully closing a contract is great, but if your client does not renew their commitment, it’s a shame. Don’t hesitate to use customer satisfaction measurement tools; have them fill out questionnaires. This will allow you to improve yourself and your service to best satisfy your customers and ensure that your relationship is lasting.

Digital Transformation: The 2.0 communication strategy to adopt to energize sales networks and develop business

For Anne Burlot, Director of the STIM-IT division at Manitoba agency, the winning mix for digital transformation is:

• Engage salespeople
• Engage networks
• Engage customers

It is necessary to focus efforts on stimulating salespeople to increase your business. But engaging your sales network is just as important.

How will all this boost business?

Digital transformation, through the application, will enable:

• Create interactivity with the market
• Optimize and adapt the offer in real-time
• Develop and boost sales activity
• Shorten the distribution channel
• Strengthen cross-selling

What could be more telling than a customer testimonial? Médéric Renouf, CEO of Groupauto, therefore speaks to explain the benefits of their business application. “Our business application increases the effectiveness of our sales actions by 30%,” he confides.

Digital transformation has become a truly essential lever for your growth and business.

Digital Transformation: how can sales force compensation support this requirement for rapid change?

Fabien Lucron, Sales Director at Primeum, came last Friday morning with a surprise for all those who want to optimize their salespeople’s variable compensation: the preview presentation of an application addressing three major needs: the implementation of a variable compensation process, the calculation of variable compensation, and the engagement of salespeople.

As this application has not yet been released, we advise you to stay very attentive and monitor Primeum’s website, as it will revolutionize your way of compensating.

Digital Transformation: why and how to leverage digital to generate leads for your salespeople

It is Julien Duhaubois, Sales Director at Companeo, who concludes this insightful morning by explaining why digital should be used to generate leads.

In the field of lead generation, digital is a game-changer. In B2B, 94% of professionals will use the internet to make a purchase.
Many tools exist, but it’s not easy to navigate them.

Here are Companeo’s five tips.

1. Use Smart eMailing

Emailing is the primary lead acquisition tool. For this channel to be effective, it is necessary to work with a named and targeted B2B database. Then offer interesting content to your database, and follow up on the actions your prospects have taken.
Set up scenarios; for example, don’t just create a series of webinars for the sake of it, but create a series of webinars to progressively qualify your prospects.
And combine your emailing with retargeting.

2. Leverage the strengths of Marketplaces

These ‘marketplaces’ connect SME leaders and suppliers of products and services. B2B marketplaces mean: a need, quotes = leads for you!

3. Adopt webinar marketing

Webinars are short conferences that you broadcast directly online. These conferences will allow you to speak to your prospects and progressively qualify them through your various webinars.

4. Think mobile

Today, mobile has overtaken computers. It is necessary, even essential, to think ‘Responsive’.

5. Optimize your lead management

Generating more leads is good, but they need to be handled correctly. On average, a salesperson takes 39 hours to contact a lead. Without a well-established process, you risk missing opportunities. Take time to think about this process and implement it correctly to optimize your salespeople’s lead management.

As you can see, digital transformation is a powerful lever to bring you more business, so don’t wait, transform yourself.

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