Wim GE De Vos

Category: Digital transformation

  • Growing vs leveraging your sales force

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    Genesis is a pure-play B2B company selling solutions. In our quest for growth we asked ourselves the following question:

    • add sales people ?
      OR
    • leverage the best sales talent we already possess ?

    Our sales talent needs to do 3 things basically. More or less 1/3 of their time is spent on the following.

    1. Admin of some sort (system design, expenses, email replies,…)
    2. Prospecting for new opportunities (projects, clients, applications, relationships,…)
    3. Magic moments. Spend time building relationships and developing opportunities with existing customers (when the magic happens)

    At Genesis we have chosen to leverage the best sales talent we have.
    Statistics really… 
    Multiply guaranteed success vs multiplying the number of gambles…

    Using dedicated software has helped us leverage the success of our best sales talent as follows:

    A. Reduce admin time and effort.
    So more valuable time is freed up for prospecting and magic moments.

    • find information faster
    • easy system design and accumulative learning (templates and sharing of best practices)
    • clients can self-serve (getting information, initial system design/spec,…;

    B. Optimise prospecting for new opportunities (data leads us to insights…):

    • premium homes = the opportunity
    • visionary architects = the creator
    • best-in-class installers of technology = the craftsman

    C. More magic moments…

    • tailored system designs – The difference between style and fashion is quality. (Giorgio Armani)
    • perfect timing – A wizard is never early. He is never late. He is always perfectly on time. (Lord of the Rings)
    • Gamification of our work-life – badges, leaderboards and fun trips for our loyal partners.

    Leveraging your best sales people is always a good idea (small a-teams run circles around large abc-organizations…) but has proven to work especially well in the following scenarios:

    1. Selective distribution: grow via a select group of partners (relationships and insights are key)
    2. Moving from product to system sales (systems are sum of products + knowledge + services and tailored to specific opportunities)
    3. When good and experienced are in short supply
    4. When it takes a long time to train new salespeople

    Small decision that get us to where we want to be.

    The choice is (y)ours. as always.

    Note: more on where to start your digital transformation journey in this post.

  • Digital transformation – where to start

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    A recent survey of  directors, CEOs, and senior executives found that digital transformation (DT) risk is their #1 concern in 2019. Yet 70% of all DT initiatives do not reach their goals. (source Harvard Business Review)

    Digital transformation is a matter of survival for any business. But especially tricky for SME´s.

    Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, SAP, but also thousands of specialised players like Xero, Slack, Bootcamp, Mailchimp,… are all promising you the world.

    So where do you start? How do you decide?

    • Look for the perfect “total solution provider”?
    • Build upon whatever software you already use?
    • Cloud or local packages?
    • Departmental approach (accounting, sales, production, shipping, IT, finance,…)

    The decision making process I propose is the following:

    Start with an in-depth business analysis. Where are we today?
    Then lay out your strategic vision for the business. Where are we going?

    And then a hybrid, personalised and phased approach will start to emerge.

    Some parts will be hosted locally (eg sensitive information), some parts will be hosted in either a private cloud (own infrastructure) or public cloud solutions (external suppliers).

    There is no Holy Grail of digital transformation. You are unique. So is the solution you need.

    So start with analysing where you are today and plotting where you want to be tomorrow. Not by selecting softwares or vendors.

    And I bet you will find that the digital transformation of your business will be hybrid, personal and phased.

    Some interesting reads are:

    ZDNet: Digital Transformation: making it work in the real world.
    Harvard Business Review: Digital Transormation is not about technology.
    Insead Knowledge: Setting the stage for Digital Transformation