Webinars Archive

Faced with the digitalization of commercial interactions, business leaders and sales managers are seeking to adapt the sales forces of their organization.

However, making the right choice between a new sales recruitment and a new marketing solution is no easy task.

In this Webinar, our General Manager Dominique Seguin helps you make the most optimal decision for your company.

Before considering sales recruitment, reorient your team's missions

To optimize your sales organization, it is necessary to direct the activity of your current team towards your most valuable customers.

By evaluating your customer assets in this way, you can direct your efforts intelligently and optimize your time and resources to meet your objectives!

This evaluation can thus become a way to cope with the current shortage in the commercial recruitment sector or, conversely, to realize the importance of a new hire.

Before considering commercial recruitment, free up your sales representatives' time

Did you know that sales representatives spend only 41% of their time on pure sales activities? Their days are indeed punctuated by numerous repetitive tasks that do not create added value: writing emails, preparing prospect files, entering information, creating quotes...

These different tasks are not what you expect from a sales representative, and neither does he!

But thanks to technology, you can now automate all these repetitive tasks to free up time for your team. Many marketing automation solutions exist, allowing you to create lead generation scenarios and enrich your online customer experience.

To make your choice easier, discover our comparative guide to 11 Marketing Automation solutions! Click here to download it.

By freeing up your team's time, you increase their productivity. This may then allow you to avoid commercial recruitment.

Modernize your sales prospecting

There's no point in carrying out commercial recruitment if your practices don't evolve as well. While greatly feared by salespeople, prospecting is nevertheless a crucial step for the development of your turnover.

To make the exercise more effective, combine traditional methods and new practices. "Hard-core" telephone calls can be combined with an inbound marketing strategy, particularly through your website.

By establishing a concrete process, you can then define specific roles for the different members of your team: digital marketing, prospecting, qualification, conversion, loyalty... This way, you can identify whether you need a sales recruitment or a marketing solution to carry out this process successfully.

Blend marketing and sales!

The challenge isn't so much about choosing between commercial recruitment or a marketing budget, but rather being able to work collectively to build a sales funnel that blends marketing and sales to best meet the needs of your customers!

To do this, it is necessary to identify its buyer personas. The exercise may seem simple but is actually much more complex and can guide the entire direction of your sales funnel!

Ask yourself the following questions: What is your client's role? Which market do they operate in? What are their biggest challenges ahead? What are their purchasing habits?

By obtaining this information, you can then offer your customer personalized marketing content, in line with their issues, and guide the discussions of your sales representatives.

Prospecting Program

3 Videos

Organizing a webinar involves key steps: choosing your topic, communicating your event, distributing the replay...
How can you ensure the success of each of these steps and make your webinar a success?

Nicolas Boissard and Théo Arnaiz give you the keys to a successful webinar in a new webinar!

The choice of webinar topic

When choosing the theme, it is important to choose a specific topic that will be explored in detail. In order to find the ideal theme for your webinar, you have to work on its persona. What are their challenges? What are their constraints? How can we help them?

Webinar communication

To promote your webinar, many channels exist, but some should be prioritized, such as Webikeo. It is also important to communicate internally within the company so that all employees are aware and can pass the message on to prospects/clients.

To promote your webinar, you can do so by email, with pop-ups, and landing pages. Obviously, it is also possible to share information about your webinar via social networks, especially LinkedIn.

It is essential to communicate via different channels in order to reach a maximum audience and increase the conversion rate.

To convince a prospect, you can use the SOAR method (situation; obstacle; action; result).

Live!

To conduct a webinar, there are many solutions available such as WebinarJam, Livestorm, GoToWebinar, Zoom, etc.

During a webinar, it is important to have a very specific timeline:

Introduction: Presentation of the company, engaging questions (polls), reminder of the webinar agenda

Content: Theoretical contributions with concrete examples.

Transition: Summary of the webinar highlights

Opening: Opening on the call to action (exchange, content)

Lead processing and webinar replay distribution

At the end of the webinar, the call to action is a fundamental element to allow the generation of new leads. This will allow you to know which prospects are potentially interested in the solution that your company offers.

To keep your webinar alive, it is possible to broadcast the replay of it in a multi-channel way. It is possible to reshare it via YouTube, for example. To share it on social networks, it is advisable to break it down into several excerpts and share them with a link to the full replay.

Between 2017 and 2022, the number of marketing solutions based in Europe increased from 150 to... more than 2,000!

Faced with so many options, how do you choose? Which acquisition channels should you prioritize for your 2023 marketing plan?

Nicolas Boissard, Marketing Director, helps you see more clearly during a new webinar.

Select acquisition channels

The first step is to define all the channels you are already using and then list the channels that could potentially interest you for the coming year. You also need to have an understanding of the time and resources used by each of these channels.

Once you have calculated the budgets allocated to each channel, you need to associate the number of leads generated by each. Finally, calculate the cost per lead. All of this will provide a global view of the different potential choices and allow you to choose the best acquisition channels for your company.

There are also other criteria to consider during the selection process.

What is the scalability of the channel?

What is the lead generation potential?

Do I have the internal capacity to increase the volume generated by this channel?

Define the budget per marketing acquisition channel

To allocate a budget to each channel, you need to go back and start by questioning how to calculate the marketing budget. To determine it, the best method is to measure the impact of investments based on the objectives of the past year.

Overall marketing budget = cost per contact X number of contacts to generate

Subsequently, you must connect all the acquisition channels that you plan to integrate into your company's marketing budget next year.

Generally, to define the budget associated with each channel, the essential elements are the different costs incurred and the number of leads/contacts generated.

Sales objectives play a crucial role for your company.

They determine how it will develop and what types of investments you will need to make to achieve your ambition.

But how do you ensure that your sales goals are achievable while remaining motivating for your teams?

Fabien Comtet is hosting a webinar on this topic and giving you the keys to defining your sales goals!

What is the purpose of the commercial objective?

The way to define, shape, and sustain an objective is more important than the result itself. Indeed, the primary purpose of an objective is to mobilize teams by focusing them on goals with shared resources.

When the team reflects to set a goal, it is important to be realistic and set an achievable goal. For a goal to be unanimously accepted, the resources that will be committed must be considered.

It is therefore essential to have a framework for each year that remains identical or similar to that of the previous year.

Your level of commercial momentum: where are you starting from for this new year?

To define your sales objectives for the coming year, it is important to assess the current situation. The SMALTA method will allow you to review the strategy of the previous year.

It is also very important to define your company's MOSP in order to, subsequently, define your sales objectives for the coming year. By using this tool, it will be easier to distinguish those on which there is already a history and where it will be possible to project oneself compared to those that are much more uncertain.

How to define your sales objectives?

Once your business blocks are defined, you'll need to work on the business model by analyzing and defining:

Customer segments and customer potential
Types of commercial activities

By cross-referencing these elements, it will be possible to identify the available resources and the necessary resources. This will allow you to define the commercial coverage.

Reading list

4 Videos

6.08

11:00

13:58

17:14

Do you respect this golden rule of management: adapting your communication to your audience?

Indeed, each of your employees is unique. You cannot manage all members of your team in the same way. But how do you identify the profile of your employees and how do you adapt your communication?

Laurence Bonhomme, KESTIO's Customer Success Director, addresses these challenges in a special webinar.

It will present the DISC Profile method, a tool to identify the profile of your contact among 4 types of profiles.

DISC Profile: What is it?

The DISC profile is a model created by William Marston based on four basic emotions.

D: Dominance = Red

I: Influence = Yellow

S: Stability = Green

C: Compliance = Blue

Each color has its purpose and helps determine the main personality traits of a team member. For example, a person oriented towards facts, logic, and seeking to adapt to their environment while being analytical will be blue, which corresponds to conformity.

The challenge with the DISC profile is to recognize the colleagues you work with.

Each of the profiles has a different vision of the world and they are therefore all complementary.

How to recognize behaviors?

We can associate a red profile with a person who will question, make decisions and take initiatives, and will also stimulate the spirit of competition within the company. In a stressful situation, they may be authoritarian, impatient, or even aggressive.

The yellow profile will provide energy and vitality to the team. They may be very talkative, impatient, and lose their practicality in situations of boredom and/or routine.

The blue profile will be anchored in reality, provide high-quality work, and constantly analyze. In a stressful situation, they may appear cold, say what they think regardless of the consequence, and question everything. Surprises and unforeseen events are the main sources of stress for the blue profile.

We can associate a green profile with a person who works step by step and who will be calm and patient. They will have a lot of trouble saying no, they will avoid conflict and will be dependent in stressful situations.

Adapt to different employees based on their profile

To adapt your communication to a red profile, you must get to the point, be convincing, prepared and professional. However, be careful not to be slow, indecisive or prevent them from giving their opinion.

With a yellow profile, you should be spontaneous, let them express themselves, value them, and be positive. However, avoid adopting a stern or distant attitude, or suppressing their enjoyment of relationships.

It will be necessary to be empathetic, to listen, to respect the pace and above all to reassure a green profile that no "surprise" could occur. Consequently, it is necessary to avoid skipping steps, denigrating anyone or letting them get lost in details or tasks without added value.

With a blue profile, it's important to be rigorous, provide quantified information, be patient, and allow them time to adjust. However, avoid being overly emotional, communicating vague information, or being unpredictable.

"The training was too academic."

"The training had no impact."

"The training did not take into account the specific needs of our company."

Who has never heard these phrases from their sales teams?

How to ensure that sales training is no longer a dreaded step by your sales teams?

Our Managing Director, Dominique Seguin, will share initial insights during a special webinar.

The educational system implemented to train its sales teams

In-person training poses significant constraints, including the need to gather all participants in the same location, on the same date, and, above all, it requires teams to be mobilized for several days.

On the contrary, distance learning can be followed anywhere, anytime, and above all gives the possibility to bring together participants from several locations. Also, it will be possible to divide the training into several modules of a few hours. Indeed, the human brain cannot concentrate for more than 2 hours. Breaking up the training will allow participants to retain more information and be more invested.

Methods for facilitating sales training

How to combine the right elements to empower participants to be the main players in their sales training?

Before the training, it's important to make the participants as active as possible, for example, through a platform.

e-learning. This will allow them to start absorbing content at their own pace, based on their level and in a personalized manner.

For training, it is important to have groups of 2 to 6 people to ensure connection and involvement of participants. Indeed, if training is given to groups of about twenty people, there will not be enough space to allow participants to fully experience the sales training.

It is important to maintain the attention of the participants and avoid their boredom. To do this, it is important to allow for interaction times every 10 minutes so that the participants are active in their training.

Personalization and role-playing in sales training

The personalization of sales training is essential to allow participants to project themselves and find themselves in the content. The first essential element is to offer in-house training. Indeed, it will be easier to focus on the market context, the competitive context and the reality of the company. We can therefore integrate it into the training.

A second important element to start any training plan is to organize kick-off meetings, which will allow you to prepare the understanding of the important elements for the managers whose employees will be in training. This will also allow an exchange between the trainer and the sponsors of the training.

The aim of sales training is to support each employee in stepping outside of their comfort zone. Having small groups of participants will increase memorization, as well as their concentration during the training. Therefore, they will be able to follow the course much more easily.

The impact and implementation of sales training

A sales training course without implementation inevitably becomes an expense. Therefore, it's essential to ensure that at the end of the training, employees put into practice what they have learned.

To ensure the impact of the training, participants should be encouraged to help each other and exchange ideas between sessions. To do this, they can, for example, participate in challenges.

The manager must also play a role by challenging and helping their employees implement what they retain from each training session.

It is important that participants can give their opinions on the training. This will allow trainers to modify and adapt the content based on the feedback obtained.

You thought you could choose your CRM tool on your own, but you're facing reality:

· Too many solutions on the market?
· Paid comparison guides
· Limited tool demonstrations
· Difficult to understand functionalities
Result? You don't know which CRM solution is best suited to your company!

With over fifteen years of experience helping people choose a CRM, Nicolas Boissard reveals 5 key questions to ask yourself in order to choose the right CRM tool.

Choosing your CRM: How important is CRM to you?

Level of company involvement

When embarking on a CRM project, it is important to ask which parts of the company are involved. Is it just a project for the sales team, or is it a true company-wide project involving a willingness from management to improve the company's strategy?

Allocated budget

To choose your CRM wisely, you must start by establishing a budget. Indeed, there are two budgets to plan for

The first is the deployment budget. During the project development, you will need to establish a budget for the implementation and user training. This budget will therefore be unique.

Next, there will be the "run" budget. This should be the same each month/year to pay for access to the solution.

To get an idea of the budget, you can estimate that a solution will cost you between 20 and 70 euros per month, per user.

Measured impact

When you start choosing your CRM, it is important to measure the impact of the project on the organization. Launching a CRM project within a company is a significant change! That's why it's necessary to anticipate the project's impact on the various stakeholders and employees, but also in terms of costs, resources, and overall processes.

These factors must be taken into account because if they are not considered during the implementation of the project, it may be jeopardized. If you encounter difficulties and your CRM project fails, refer to Nicolas Boissard's webinar: How to revive a failed CRM project?

What do your employees gain from choosing the right CRM?

The true success of a CRM project lies in whether or not employees use it. Indeed, the primary risk in a project like this is resistance to using and adopting the project by employees.

However, once the project is well integrated within the company, employees will gain a lot in terms of personalization of the customer experience and follow-up.

Let's take, for example, a software vendor specializing in automotive fleet management. For them, the CRM project is a subject that affects the entire company; sales, marketing, and particularly customer service.

Their main problem is that today they have no visibility into customer service regarding the historical commercial relationship (how long has the company been in contact with the customer? what frictions have occurred?). Therefore, a piece of information was missing to personalize the customer journey, which will be a problem solved thanks to the deployment of the CRM.

Who will take care of the CRM?

Ideally, a company should have at least one CRM expert who can use their skills to help colleagues improve with the solution. This expert should have a business vision, meaning they should be familiar with the users' business.

The reference person must also have a minimum technical understanding in order to handle the solution's configuration (user creation).

Finally, the referent should be able to devote the majority of their time to the CRM, to resolving any incident. If the person does not have enough time, they may miss important problems which in some cases can lead to the failure of the CRM project.

Therefore, it is preferable to choose someone within the company as a reference person.

For more advice, watch the Webinar above presented by Nicolas Boissard, Marketing Director at KESTIO.

Business Leader: How to stop spending all your time selling

As a business leader, do you still feel like you are the best salesperson in your company?

This may seem like good news... But in reality, it's not!

But how can you delegate your sales tasks and no longer be the best salesperson in your company?

At Kestio, we support many companies in implementing a complete and self-sustaining commercial system.

Fabien Comtet, President of KESTIO, gives you the different steps to initiate to successfully make this transition!

We are our own limit to the development of our company

We control our schedule; if your days are filled with sales activities instead of strategy activities to develop your business, then you should consider delegating these activities and focusing on your tasks as a business leader.

The evolution of their role and place

The book The E-myth reveals the myth of the reinvented entrepreneur. It helps to understand that the glass ceiling of companies, VSEs, and SMEs is due to the fact that the company director does not change their stance. When you create a company, you start with a technician (subject matter expertise) stance, but you cannot remain in this stance throughout the life of the company. This is not the way for a collective, a group of people to have a company that grows and stands out from the others and dissociates itself from you. To become the ideal company director for your company, you must find a balance between Technician, Entrepreneur, and Manager.

The feeling of venturing into the unknown and losing control...

What subjects should be set aside? How to organize your schedule?

If your goal is for your company to grow, to have more customers, to acquire new markets... The challenge is to transition from Technician to Manager to Entrepreneur. The company is an investment in time, a matter of building assets. If you reach stage 3, entrepreneur, the company can develop without you.

How to implement these changes?

1- List your MOSPPs

MOSPPs are homogeneous marketing units on which specific objectives and strategies can be defined, deployed, and managed. Each market/customer target represents an offer and a specific sales process.

Ask yourself the right questions: What are your client types? What are your offers? What are your current sales approaches?

Which MOSP has potential without requiring excessive complexity during the sales phase?

You need to choose the product for which it is easiest for you to train someone.

2- Move from Partner Selling mode to Active Selling mode

Partner selling: sales made by associates in consulting firms, lawyers... focused on emotional connection, relationships...

It is necessary to identify a MOSP triangle that is simple to transition into active selling methods and that is not centered on the individual. Find a domain, a product that can be done by others.

3- Reverse the organization

In partner selling models, the Senior (the experienced one) sells and the Junior carries out and delivers the assignments. We need to reverse this model: the juniors sell and the seniors produce and support the clients.

4- Document step by step what is done, written with the prospects of the MOSPP

The sales book is fundamental to successfully organizing and deploying other resources.

5- What will you start delegating first?

The key point is to delegate what you yourself master the most. You will then be better able to brief and monitor, and this will save you time safely!

To delegate, you can do it internally, but especially by using external resources such as freelancers, agencies, or our Get Calls offer, so we can do your prospecting for you!

6 keys to modernizing your sales organization

The sales systems in 70% of SMEs in France deserve to be modernized. It is observed that 70% of customers prefer remote or self-service interactions. To overcome this problem, companies will have to implement various solutions by modernizing them in their sales organizations.

Key step 1: Define a clear business strategy

Since the Tapie era, the role of the sales director has changed enormously. At that time, sales directors were considered sergeants, in the logic of enforcing defined elements. In 2022, this role is over. The number of actors and parameters has increased, a sales director will be considered as a conductor nowadays than an officer who enforces a defined policy. 4 components have changed significantly: customer segmentation and the level of response to the offer, variable resources, acquisition and interaction channels as well as the roles on the customer cycle. There is therefore a real evolution to take into account all the components as well as an evolution of the role of the manager.

2nd key: Develop and manage teams

To develop and manage your teams, you need to know how to coach them well. Everyone needs a coach, even the best. There are 3 types of field support in a sales organization. First, there's coaching to integrate a new employee and show them how to progress, coaching to help an employee progress, and finally, coaching to help an employee succeed with a project. The time allocated for coaching by a manager should represent 70% of their monthly time to develop their teams.

3rd key: Generate leads

How to generate leads in 2022? The usual methods work, but new ones exist. You should spend 20% of your time exploring and testing new components to generate leads. It is therefore necessary to define the areas of exploration by analyzing the pipeline and focus on the areas that work best. Collaboration between the marketing and sales departments must take place in order to generate and convert leads.

4th key: Convert leads

To properly convert leads, you need a sales organization with clearly defined roles. You need to evolve the shape of your pipeline: sort and maximize! Working on the GO / NO GO will allow you to achieve your objectives. If the percentage of deals that are stopped is minimal, then the GO / NO GO process does not allow for real decisions to be made.

5th key: Structuring information and providing support

To structure your information and support your sales organization, you must first have a multi-channel process. This process is accompanied by continuous digital interaction: LinkedIn, Email, webinars, groups, blogs, etc. A CRM is also an essential tool for proper information structuring. One problem: the CRM is not directly linked to the tool; you need to know how to enrich it and get it running. However, 43% of companies observe a lack of investment from managers, and 65% of sales organizations admit that information is poorly entered by its users. Therefore, choosing and using a CRM requires careful consideration beforehand to maximize its use. To structure your sales organization, you can also use sales enablers, which are very relevant depending on the actions you want to implement.

6th key: Offer a unique customer experience

Customer experience is a key point; the customer uses all their senses to be able to live a unique experience. 3 points should be taken into account: the personae, the journey, and the expectations and needs.