Tools for sales are flooding the market and the flood seems to increase in strength every year. That said, few know there's a vibrant community of sales tools and sales tech stack vendors packed together in a tiny part of tiny Belgium.
You may have visited and studied our sales tools overview - the most recent version for 2018 can be found here.
When we set up a sales workflow a bunch of challenges need to be addressed. There are many ways to describe the selling & buying stages we all go through on our path to solving a problem through buying software. A path I like is from creating "Awareness" to "Education", "Selection", "Commitment", "Handoff/Onboarding", "Use/Impact/Utilization", "Expansion" and finally "Renewal/Repeat business".
An interesting way of describing this comes from Rob Jeppsen's method, which I found on Burke Alder's post on "How to Build Out Your Customer Experience Journey". It goes like this (see Burke's post for full details):
The Experience Customer Journey (Jeppsen’s Approach)
Pre Sales
1. Ugh! I’ve got a problem and it needs to be better—Awareness
2. Aha! There’s actually a solution that works—Education
3. This is the place! There are actually experts here—Selection
Sale Occurs
4. Let’s do this! I’m committed to success from both sides—Commitment
Post Sales (Customer Success)
5. I’m in good hands! They clearly know what I want and need—Handoff
6. Boom! They did what they said they would do—Onboarding
7. Yeah! This is working—Utilization
8. Awesome! I’ve got to share with others—Expansion
9. ROI! I have tangible results and I’m excited to work with you again—Renewal
Sales Tools "made in Belgium"
We've covered a rough outline of the journey our sales tools-supported process must be able to guide companies through. In future posts we'll dive more deeply into what that process specifically looks like and how a selection of tools can do that.
Here are some of the best-in-class Belgium-headquartered companies that have an impact on the sales process:
Story Chief - create awareness and gather initial interest
Salesflare - capture & manage leads & opportunities
Teamleader - capture & manage leads & opportunities
Prospect.io - Sales Automation Platform for modern sales teams
Plann3r - Finds the Best Moment to Meet
Vectera - collaboration, demoing, and video conference
Showpad - Sales Enablement for the Modern Seller
Dink - High Impact Sales Interactions
Connective - Electronic Signature
PieSync - Integrate your Apps
Naturally it remains incredibly important to understand what each tool can do for your sales process. There are other tools from Belgium as well, and we'll include them as time allows.
At the Core of it All
A functional "stay-out-of-my-way" CRM system has always been my preference. Sales Professionals aren't made for data entry and are usually too expensive to it too. That's why we've been working with Salesflare for an extended period of time: To make sure any company's most expensive resource - Sales Professionals' time - is invested in talking to customers.
In this case, as we'll show you how to do in a future post, Salesflare let's you automate an amazing amount of tedious data entry and integrates with a long range of tools that support various parts of the sales process. In Belgium, of course, there's plenty to choose from in the CRM space. One could have picked Teamleader's CRM instead.
Pre Sales
1. Awareness
2. Aha! There’s actually a solution that works—Education
3. This is the place! There are actually experts here—Selection
Story Chief makes it a lot easier to generate inspiring thought leadership content and distribute it to blogs, social networks, influencers, email marketing software, etc. Using Story Chief makes it easier for your company to help potential become aware that they may have a challenge in their organization AND that your company can help them fix it. Story Chief CAN play a role in Pre Sales in both Awareness, Education, and Selection. Whether content generated and distributed via Story Chief's channels is the only component in this part of the customer journey really depends very much on the way you solve the problem you solve.
Also Prospect.io could be utilized on its own or with others in the sales process to tackle the Awareness, Education, and Selection phases. Use Prospect.io to research and verify email addresses. When you've verified them, use Prospect.io to change your prospect's awareness of a looming problem and enlighten about your ability to solve it. This can be done smoothly using Prospect.io's sequence builder.
Making sure to use PieSync at this point to sync Prospect.io with Salesflare makes good sense.
It's natural to have several appointments throughout the sales cycle. Meetings take place and appointments need to be made. 10 years ago we may have done all that manually, shuffling emails back and forth. working on the futile task of finding time where everyone is available for those critical conversations.
In the Pre Sales stage Plann3r changes all this. Just send a scheduling link with a collaborative message of "here's a faster and easier way to schedule time to talk". This takes all the tedious trouble out of scheduling. Here's the use case: Imagine how much valuable sales time goes into scheduling one appointment. A solid Sales Professional will have hundreds of appointments throughout the year. Now multiply the number of appointments by the time you think it takes to schedule one appoint. Now you have the total amount of WORKING DAYS this will take per year. You should feel free to wonder what might have been achieved with all that time. How many more clients? Or you calculate what the cost of just scheduling appointments is. For yourself. For your combined sales force. Either way, this is likely to be the easiest business case to make in sales. Ever.
When it becomes time for the Education and Selection parts of the Pre Sales section of the customer journey, enriched communication becomes essential. Your clients and you may not always have time to get together. Using technology to shorten the distance between people who may be 1000s of kilometers/miles apart quickly seems like a solid idea.
Vectera to the rescue! Vectera helps you not only set up video rooms to enrich human communication. It adds flexibility by equipping the video room with what you'd expect from a regular meeting room: whiteboards, document sharing and collaboration on content be it presentations, documents or literally anything else that runs on your computer. All you have to do is bring your favourite coffee.
Ever so often, though, it just so happens that potential buyers like and need to flip through any relevant collateral on their own time. In Belgium there's plenty of ways to NOT provide PDF or paper collateral. Both Showpad and Dink offer intelligent ways to present customers with the content, which will help them onwards on their journey and with ways for Sales Professionals to have additional value once the collateral has been delivered. No more guessing about whether content has been viewed or whether the buyer has read it all.
Sale Occurs
Alright - it's all discussed. Let’s do this! Time for commitment. Just send over the paperwork - we'll print it out, review, send over some email comments, negotiate, sign modified contract, scan it, send it back via email. Then you'll print out, sign, scan, and return all the signed paperwork. Right!? Wrong!!!
Commitment time has been subjected to the process developed by Connective. Unlike many others in this space Connective allows you to be absolutely 100% certain of the identity of signees, since they make use of services around the World, which securely ensures that you can trust all signatures are valid. You're all set to progress and get on with the real work of making the customer successful!
Post Sales (Customer Success)
5. I’m in good hands! They clearly know what I want and need—Handoff
6. Boom! They did what they said they would do—Onboarding
7. Yeah! This is working—Utilization
8. Awesome! I’ve got to share with others—Expansion
9. ROI! I have tangible results and I’m excited to work with you again—Renewal or Repeat business
Post Sales will vary greatly depending on the complexity and nature of both your solution and the problem being solved. Either way, you must walk your new client through the process above.
Professionally orchestrated creative setups with all the software mentioned above help you through successful Post Sales. Here's a quick example:
Use triggers in Salesflare to set in motion a process, which delivers a Prospect.io delivered sequence of onboarding messaging. If conversations are required for success, use Plann3r to schedule them and Vectera to actually have the meetings. If the meetings take long or are high in complexity, you might want to meet with your client. Bring either Showpad or Dink to share customized content related to the client's onboarding.
A well-executed onboarding process for clients who get their problems fixed should result in happy customers. Use Salesflare actions to trigger Prospect.io sequences strengthening the client's success with the solution and at the same time making it really easy for them to share their success with others.
And so you can restart the customer journey with this Made in Belgium sales stack.
Good selling !