BtoB Summit 2021: Customer Success Management, Digital Marketing and Sales Enablement
On November 18, 2021, we were at the BtoB Summit 2021! An exciting day where we listened to and met BtoB professionals around the challenges and tools of tomorrow. First, workshops on customer success management, sales enablement, digital marketing and employee motivation: leaders explained how to turn users into ambassadors, how to make each B2B sale a unique experience, how webinar can become a lead generation tool. They also drew up a portrait of the salesperson of the future, identified the motivational levers for building a successful sales team, and presented incentives as a tool for winning and retaining customers.
According to the Boston Consulting Group, 50% of B2B customers trust recommendations from friends, colleagues and peers when making a purchasing decision. Thus, word-of-mouth can quickly become one of the main sales drivers, with satisfied customers being transformed into ambassadors. This transformation requires loyalty actions and satisfaction measurement through the NPS (Net Promoter Score), but also work on the company's image beyond the technical scope: "Apple's reputation is not only explained by the technical specifications of its products", and finally by a controlled Customer-Centric approach that provides a premium service throughout the product life cycle. To succeed in transforming the user into an ambassador, Sonia Ouaksel from Contentsquare and Léonie de Verdelhan from Jeudimerci gave us three practical tips:
The impact of ambassadors is huge: acquisition, retention, awareness, sponsorship, upsell... So? Ready to adopt a Customer-Centric approach?
80% of customers prefer a remote deal.
With this in mind, Adrien Vicard of Welcome to the Jungle uses Benjamin Perrau's GetAccept solution to make the closing process more fluid, personalized and faster. Indeed, a classic buying process is very long, which creates a risk of losing the customer, because in the time lapse, the customer's budget may have been revised downwards or he may have met one of your competitors... Moreover, email exchanges to close a deal are often tedious and not very efficient, because emails get lost in inboxes and they have to follow a decision loop generally involving 12 to 20 people...
Another tip? Automatic emailing has had its day and conversion rates are falling. We now need to diversify communication channels and personalize exchanges as much as possible, with tools like Vidyard, Loom and of course Get Accept. For example, sending a personalized video to a customer will generate +40% engagement from this customer. This can be done by MMS or Whatsapp. Finally, you can also send personalized SMS. Today, contacting a customer through these channels, which were once reserved for the personal sphere, is no longer considered as intrusive, as long as the message is adapted and relevant.
Finally, Benjamin Perrau predicts that by 2025, 50% of B2B companies will have implemented a Digital Sales Room in their solution, with video conferencing, chat, content sharing and Sales Enablement tools and methods. Will you be one of them?
Morgan Benoit of Mailinblack organizes webinars on a regular basis. For her, the webinar meets 3 challenges: building a community (a long-term investment), finding an adequate distribution rhythm, and ensuring post-webinar prospecting via marketing automation or audience scoring. She identifies 3 types of webinars:
In addition to these webinars, Morgan Benoit insists that it is essential to do a lot of communication by email, social networks (free or sponsored), or on media such as the " Gazette des Communes " with sponsored articles. The objective is to bring a maximum of prospects to the webinars.
His favorite tool? Webikeo, represented by Pierre-Henri Tataranno. Among his 1,800 contacts made since February 2020, 65% come from Webikeo...
His last "tip"? Don't hesitate to invest in filming the webinar in a studio: the professional quality of the rendering will have a real impact on the prospects.
Katia Thomas fromESSEC started by saying that the sales person must be a good listener to build a relationship of trust; he must be agile because customers are more and more informed; he must be a "geek" to master social networks, CRM and all the computer tools that have changed the practice of his job; and finally he must have a great capacity of analysis to exploit the growing number of data.
Stéphane Renger from Salesapps added that the salesperson must first and foremost love his or her job, as he or she must also make himself or herself highly visible and position himself or herself as an expert.
"selling is more about attitude than skill
Cyril Kovarsky from Capgemini continued by adding that the sales person must be an expert, a pioneer, a pilot in an increasingly fast-paced context, and a bold one.
They all deplore the lack of training in the commercial profession in the various educational programs. Indeed, the sales profession has suffered from a bad reputation for a long time. The result? Today, most salespeople are trained in companies, especially by account managers.
The final word was reserved for Katia Thomas: to encourage the empowerment of his sales representatives, the manager must create a climate of trust and benevolence in his teams. No more management by pressure!
Sacha Kalusevic from Page Personnel started by warning managers against typical post-covid mistakes, which would be to communicate as if everything was normal, not to involve a person in a decision that concerns him or her, to be too direct, to stigmatize, to be resistant to change. On the contrary, he encourages them to use attention, availability, dialogue, to reassure them, motivate them, and involve them individually in a collective.
Emmanuel Noguès from Reuters spoke about the bonus system for salespeople: it is a complex and delicate system that can be counterproductive if it is not implemented in an intelligent and benevolent way, and it should not be the only criterion to value in a salesperson. In any case, Emmanuel Noguès concluded by saying that a good manager must make himself visible virtually to his collaborators, he must over-communicate, manage the well-being and the mental state of his teams, be benevolent, frank, authentic, available and reactive.
Sacha Kalusevic continued by listing the new expectations of employees in general, and not only of sales people: flexibility, autonomy (stop to control!), mental health and well-being, clarity, transparency, empathy, frankness, authenticity, benevolence and finally new moments of conviviality. According to him, we can motivate teams by recreating 2 fundamental needs: desire (emotion, ambition, aspiration, vision...) and individuality.
Finally, Sacha Kalusevic ended by quoting Jean-Michel Philippon in his book "Désengagement au travail, quand le baby-foot ne suffit plus" (Disengagement at work, when table soccer is no longer enough), which denounces the shortcomings of modern management and stresses the importance of activating the 9 motivational keys: autonomy, simplification, trust, recognition, growth, pleasure, sharing, cooperation, contribution. Managers, it's up to you!
Julien Ducrocq fromIllicado highlighted the Illicado e-gift card as a tool for the company to build customer loyalty: he also stated that a discount on a contract will have less impact than a gift card.
Fabrice Rumeau from Laubion confirms it: his company Laubion has experienced a 20% growth in its turnover vs N-1 thanks to short and regular challenges, rewarded by gifts and based on the SMART method which recommends setting Specific, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic and Temporal objectives. To learn more, discover the SMART and OKR methods on our blog!
All these interventions echo our vision of the management challenges of tomorrow. We will check at the next B2B Summit if the challenges have been met!
