Drawing up a sales action plan is a strategic step in the implementation of your corporate strategy. All too often, however, the implementation of this plan falls far short of the objectives and criteria defined.

So how do you build an action plan that your teams can actually implement? That's the question our President Fabien Comtet answers in this Webinar!

Sales Action Plan: definition

There are many possible definitions of an action plan. At Kestio, we define it as the characterization of various elements that enable us to define objectives and translate them into global actions on the commercial dimension of a company.

Whereas the business plan has a financial connotation, and the strategic plan anorientation connotation, the commercial action plan refers to the implementation of the company's strategy in relation to commercial issues.

A few pitfalls to avoid

There are a number of pitfalls to be avoided to ensure that your action plan does not become a static tool and that it is actually used by your teams.

One of the first pitfalls is to ask your salespeople for an estimate of their sales without even defining their objectives beforehand. To illustrate, this would be like asking them to reveal their game in a game of poker, before even knowing the stakes! The sales action plan must not be solely "results" oriented.

Another frequently observed pitfall is duplicating last year's plan for the coming year, without taking into account changes in your sales force, your company or your market. This approach will lead to the establishment of a certain routine, harmful to your company's productivity!

Discover other pitfalls to avoid in our Webinar.

Sales action plan: the keys to success

After learning about the pitfalls to be avoided when drawing up your sales action plan, discover a few keys to success to optimize its deployment.

One of the first keys to a successful sales action plan is to focus on what you can control: targets, actions and the sales process cycle. Defining these three elements will provide your sales force with a set of specifications , enabling them to determine the scope of their actions. These three characteristics are also elements that your sales force can directly influence.

Various tools are available to help you define your targets, actions and cycle. A SWOT will help you identify your opportunities and threats, and a "speed boat" your strengths and weaknesses.

Another essential tool for developing and executing your sales action plan is the business flow. A business flow is a tree structure, which can be used for both individual and group work, to link and compare the implementation of your actions according to your objectives.

We suggest you build your business flow using our construction template, which you can download and complete yourself ! To download the template, click on this link.

Did you know that 72% of BtoB buyers use social networks for information before making a purchasing decision?

Placing ads on these media can be a strategic way to be visible to your target audience and thus generate leads.

Executives and prospects in particular show a clear predilection for LinkedIn, the professional network par excellence. But the network's advertising system, LinkedIn Ads, can quickly prove difficult to master.

Discover our dedicated Webinar and get the best practices to efficiently generate leads with this tool!

What is LinkedIn Ads?

LinkedIn Ads is LinkedIn's advertising platform . It can be accessed through the Campaign Manager interface associated with your company page. The platform allows you to create advertising campaigns to achieve different objectives:

To generate leads
To increase the visibility of your posts
To increase the number of subscribers to your page

The main components of an Ads

There are various elements involved in the composition of a LinkedIn Ads, all of which can influence the effectiveness of the ad:

The budget deployed
Audience targeting
Advertising lifespan
Converting contacts into leads

What is the minimum duration of an ad? What is the cost per lead? How should I target? In this Webinar, Nicolas Boissard and Anne-Charlotte Jean will share their experience and best practices to help you adjust the budget for your LinkedIn Ads to its targeting and lifespan, in order to increase conversion.

LinkedIn Ads: best practices to remember

Without much experience in this field, implementing LinkedIn Ads can prove complex. That's why we've put together a few best practices to guide you in setting up your advertising strategy.

On the subject of budget allocation, an average daily budget of 100 euros per 50,000 people targeted is recommended for good results. It's also important to check your target audience, which should be between 100,000 and 400,000 people.

As for the content of your ads, don't hesitate to try out the different media offered by LinkedIn: text ads, display ads, conversational ads... It's also important to have several Ads with different content, and to stop the less successful ones to create new ones.

To discover other best practices, watch the Webinar replay above !

And if you'd like to go further in optimizing your LinkedIn Ads strategy, don 't hesitate to make an appointment with Nicolas Boissard by clicking on this link, in order to take stock of your situation and obtain personalized recommendations for increasing your number of leads on the platform!

Webinar

4 secrets for getting into "consultative selling" mode with your customers

Hosted by Fabien Comtet,

President of Kestio

As you have no doubt noticed, customers are less and less available and more in control of their purchasing process.
Each of us must therefore develop our own techniques for successfully co-constructing with them in order to involve them in our products and services.

The key sales tool, Kestionnement, is a real asset! It enables you to set up a "consultative sales" mode with your customer, and thus create real awareness.

Join our President Fabien Comtet in the second part of our Webinar saga "The Art of Kestioning". He'll reveal 4 secrets for mastering Kestioning techniques, used by dialogue and coaching professionals but still too little known by salespeople!

The 4 sales styles

Every sales person is unique. Each has his or her own characteristics, strengths and areas for improvement. However, there are 4 main types of salesperson :

The demonstrator, the relationship salesperson,
The salesman, the hunting salesman,
Consulting, i.e. the sales advisor,
The coach, or sales challenger.

In order to move towards a " consultative sales " mode, it is then necessary for the salesperson to move towards the last two types of salesperson, without denying his or her natural profile. In fact, "consulting" and "coaching" salespeople are more focused on providing value. They strive to fully identify their customers' issues and problems, in order to offer the product and/or service with the highest added value over time. By adopting this " consultative sales " posture, salespeople help customers to step back and identify solutions with them.

Would you like to know what type of sales person you are? Take advantage of an exclusive discount on our individual sales assessment with the code WEBINAR50 and discover your profile! To take advantage of the discount, click here.

Consultative selling: creating an alliance with your customer

To adopt a real coaching posture, you need to create a bond of mutual agreement between you and your customer. But how do you create this alliance?

One solution is to ask your customer questions to guide his thinking... What result do you expect from our exchange? What's most important today? How can I help you? In consultative selling, the aim is to validate an objective with your customer.

To discover other keys to setting up a coach sales mode and adopting a coach posture, discover the replay of our Webinar!

Webinar

How can you breathe new life into your sales?

Hosted by Dominique Seguin,

General Manager of Kestio

Read

How many of you feel that far more customers should have access to your solutions?
Many of you are dissatisfied with your company's sales performance. What levers can you activate to improve your sales organization?

Discover our dedicated Webinar, hosted by our Managing Director Dominique Seguin. Based on real-life testimonials from top managers, learn how to identify opportunities for optimizing your sales system and better grasp new customer realities!

Key sales figures

The digital transformation we are witnessing is paving the way for a new world of sales.
Some data are particularly revealing:
- 20 billion web pages are visited every day,
- 80,000 queries are generated every second,

- 78% of LinkedIn users are between 25 and 50 years old

- It now takes 8 cold call attempts to reach a prospect, compared with 3.7 in 2007.

To take full advantage of the new tools offered by the Web, the digitization of your sales processes must involve major organizational changes and new attitudes to adopt.
To obtain all the keys to understanding and acting on this new dynamic, discover our Homo Sapiens Commercialis" white paper on how to bring your sales into the digital age!

How do you get your sales into second gear?

Have you ever seen a commando decide on his own mission? Certainly not. In the sales function, the observation must be the same. Sales targets must be a collaborative issue between your company's management and sales team.

Another lever for progress: methods. Changing a method is a major lever of impact on your sales performance! Indeed, if methodologies remain static and do not adapt, results will take much longer to be observed. That's why it's important to keep abreast of new methods and how to apply them to your sales processes.

To discover other ways of optimizing your sales, watch the replay of our Webinar and register for the second part of the conference, on Tuesday November 09 at 2:00 pm!

Over 60% of salespeople do not consider their manager to be a good coach. And yet, what salesperson hasn't tried to improve his or her performance? Developing motivation, improving interest generation techniques, improving conversion rates, increasing the number of RDVs... Like great athletes, your sales reps deserve the best coaching, because there's no secret: the best get coached!

How do you get salespeople to want to be coached? What are the golden rules to follow during coaching? How to get buy-in during debriefing? Discover this Kestio Webinar where our President Fabien Comtet talks about techniques to increase the impact of your sales coaching.

Sales coaching: Definition

Sales coaching refers to theobservation of a company'ssales activities (through its sales people) in line with defined objectives, followed by debriefings on the methods deployed.

The aim of the practice is to help salespeople take a step back from their practices. Sales coaching is a key factor in the performance of a sales team, given that more than half of all salespeople consider themselves to be insufficiently trained, coached and supported to achieve their objectives.

The first key to sales coaching: creating an alliance

You can't coach someone who doesn't want to be coached! Your coaching must therefore be based on an alliance between you and your team. To achieve this, you need to define a common objective for the coaching. If this alliance is not established, sales coaching will be experienced more as an evaluation.

Second key to sales coaching: thou shalt use the customer's truth

The best way to get objective data to use in your coaching is to note what the client says. But this new approach allows you to give concrete examples and illustrate your coaching with a "customer" perspective!

Would you like to discover the other keys to successful sales coaching? Watch the replay of our Webinar ! Also check out our blog post on how to set the right objectives for your sales people.
Want to move from thinking to doing? We've created a training course dedicated to the posture and practices you need to adopt to become a manager coach. To find out more, click here.

Webinar

Marketing Automation: what publishers will never tell you

Hosted by Nicolas Boissard,

Marketing Director Kestio

Would you like to deploy a Marketing Automation solution in your company, but the overly technical jargon used by software publishers prevents you from fully identifying the functionalities required by your organization?

At Kestiowe work with our customers around 4 key criteria to help them make sense of the jungle of Marketing Automation solutions.

Marketing Automation: Definition

The term Marketing Automation refers toall the devices used to automate marketing operations. This can range from sending e-mails and publishing posts on social networks to segmenting contacts and carrying out lead scoring.
The advantages of this automation are to save precious time and to identify and "feed" your hottest prospects automatically.
Such a system is generally coupled with aninbound marketing strategy and the use of a CRM solution (click on the link to take part in our dedicated Webinar on CRM tools!

Pay attention to the technical complexity of solutions

According to a study carried out by Focus, " 50% of respondents claim not to be using the full functionality of their Marketing Automation software ". Not all software requires the same level of technical expertise.

To find the solution best suited to your needs, you need to identify the level of complexity of your campaigns. The higher the level, the more functional the chosen solution will need to be. Certain resources and skills will also need to be deployed in-house.

This balance is key to the success of your Marketing Automation strategy! If your solution is too complex for your needs, you'll lose efficiency when you start using it. On the other hand, if you underestimate your needs, you'll soon find your solution too narrow.

Marketing Automation is not the only answer to your marketing challenges

But deploying an effective Marketing Automation solution won't solve all your marketing problems!
On the contrary, to achieve real results, you need a solid marketing foundation upstream.

Your solution is just a support for your actions! A real marketing strategy needs to be established, with precise objectives and targets. Your action plan must be ready to ensure that your processes run smoothly.

Once these prerequisites have been met, your Marketing Automation system can finally bear fruit!

As a Sales Director, Marketing Director, President or Business Developer, you want to take stock of your business and your company's marketing and sales processes . But you still have unanswered questions about thedevelopment, deployment and impact of your approach...

Discover our "Kestions-Réponses" Webinar hosted by our Managing Director Dominique Seguin and our Marketing Director Nicolas Boissard. Together, they will share their experiences and provide you with the first keys to action to optimize your marketing and sales process.

Is it better to have one pipeline per salesperson, or a general pipeline with filters?
How can you track the leads provided by marketing and give them value?
How do you get a customer to respond to a sales proposal?

These are the questions related to the marketing and sales process that Dominique and Nicolas address in this Webinar.

Defining and developing your processes is a key condition for optimizing your company's performance. A well-thought-out and relevant process enables you to reduce costs and minimize risks, while improving the flow of information between your teams and ensuring considerable time savings .

Without a clearly defined process, your company will struggle to identify the sources of a malfunction that has prevented it from achieving a certain objective. As a result, your organization'sefficiency will be impacted, and employee motivation may even decline .

This Webinar will provide you with valuable tips for designing and optimizing your marketing and sales processes !

Webinar

Closing: 4 techniques to encourage your customers to buy before they go on vacation

Hosted by Fabien Comtet,

CEO of Kestio

Like many salespeople, you dream of signing your deals before heading off to the sun, so that you can clear your head completely.

But every year, it happens all over again... the customers you've been talking to for weeks become unreachable, and others call you at the last minute, hoping that your reply file will arrive when they get back from vacation...

What if you could reverse the trend and close your deals effectively?

In this Webinar, discover 4 closing techniques that move your customers to action.

Closing: definition

Closing simply means the conclusion of a sale, the moment when the contract is signed. It represents a key stage in the sales process, as it is at this point that many criteria are validated, such as the price of the product and/or service. At this point, the customer may have second thoughts and decide to back out. How can we counter this?

An objective review of your deals

For a successful closing, you need an objective review of your current business. To do this, ask yourself some key questions, to which you'll answer with a score between 0 and 5. Have you had regular exchanges with your customer? Do you feel you're in the lead? Is your project feasible for your customer? The answers to these questions will help you define the position to adopt at the closing.

Don't suffer from closing

There are a number of ways in which you can regain the upper hand when a closing goes wrong. One way is to never hand over a complete file in order to stay one step ahead. This way, the customer will always have something to ask you, and you'll position yourself as the leader of the exchange. But be careful not to deliberately forget key elements of the file, such as administrative resources!

Creating positive tension at closing

By creating this positive tension, you'll provoke a reaction from the customer and prevent the closing from dragging on until you return from vacation. Explaining to your customer that the rates and resources announced cannot be maintained beyond a certain date is a good way of creating a stimulus during the closing.

The leapfrog of closing

The final technique for closing deals is simply to put yourself in the same frame of mind in which you did your closing! By adopting this attitude towards the customer, you'll bepsychologically guiding himtowards acceptance of the deal. Ask them about the launch date, the tools used, the next steps to come... so that they can project themselves with you towards validation of the closing.

If you'd like to find out more about the balance of power you need to adopt when dealing with your customer, we suggest you take a look at our Webinar dedicated to the key account approach, by clicking here.

Webinar

Account Based Marketing: is it for you?

Hosted by Nicolas Boissard,

Marketing Director Kestio

Key accounts are complex prospects requiring a specific approach strategy. But the deployment of this strategy by your sales team can be critical.

Did you know that there are marketing methods for optimizing and deploying your key account strategy?

Account Based Marketing: definition

Account Based Marketing can be translated into French as "strategic account marketing".
This approach enables you to make contact with high value-added prospects through ultra-personalized content. As the Okedito website explains, the strategy is based on the implementation of B2B marketing campaigns targeted at a limited number of high-potential prospects from key accounts.
The aim of the approach is to show your prospects that your company is the ideal solution to their needs!

The Account Based Marketing approach

Traditional marketing strategies generally seek to reach as many prospects as possible. Targeting and identifying issues only come later.
Account Based Marketing is the opposite of this strategy. Target accounts with defined needs are targeted, before any communication action.

Instead of fishing with a net, we fish with a harpoon! However, both strategies are complementary and adapted to their own objectives.

The 4 key stages

1. Select target accounts
2. Contact identification
3.Nurturing
4. Accountconversion

To help you implement these four key steps, Kestio offers you a downloadable content pack. Comprising various templates for you to complete yourself, this pack enables you to record and store all the vital information on your target accounts, throughout your Account Based Marketing strategy. Click here to download the pack.

And to take your key account strategy a step further, take part in our "Questions - Answers" Webinar dedicated to this topic by clicking here.

Webinar

Onboarding a salesperson: the keys to success

Dominique Seguin, Managing Director, Kestio

Hosted by Dominique Seguin,

General Manager of Kestio

What is onboarding?

According to Culture-RH,onboarding refers to the process of enhancing the integration of new employees. The aim is to deploy various actions that will facilitate the arrival of a new employee in the company.

But onboarding can be time-consuming and complex. How can we be effective without drowning the newcomer in information? What content should be provided? What posture to adopt?

What are the keys to successful onboarding?

To ensure the best possible integration, the manager must develop three pillars with the new salesperson:

Knowledge of the company : products, internal operations, market knowledge
Skills : sales techniques and other elements specific to the sales profession
Motivation : financial or non-financial

Moving from "I know" to "I do".

One of the keys to effective onboarding is to offer a variety of content, between abstraction and practice, between guidance and empowerment. For example, have your new recruit listen to podcasts and then apply two of the techniques they've learned, or ask them to make a presentation of your playbook at the next team meeting.

For the new salesperson, this approach mobilizes many more sensory receptors, maximizing the ability to appropriate content and thus succeed.

The playbook: a key tool

Also known as a sales book or "sales bible", this tool sets out in writing the main guidelines of your sales organization: company strategy, sales activities, number of customers, sales pitches, etc.

Used as a reference tool, the playbook will enable onboarding to gain in impact and speed, and to be easily reproduced.

Onboarding is therefore a key moment in the life of a sales team. The successful integration of a new member of staff can have a major impact on the productivity of your entire team!

But once they're on board, managing a new recruit doesn't stop there. To discover all our resources and advice on managing your team, click here.