Insights for changing the way we sell

Led by the emerging breed of SaaS companies, a new blueprint for B2B lead generation has emerged over the past decade, significantly outperforming the old on volume, quality and cost per lead.

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Have you heard, that digital is the word? #Digital

From entrepreneurship, to corporate and back again

If you've been in IT or B2B sales in Denmark in the past decades, it's very likely that you´ve come across Poul Bærentsen, co-founder of Wisehouse and dmsave in the early 2000's and until recently sales director at ATEA, Northern Europe's market leader in IT infrastructure (Link).

“If marketing is to effectively support sales, then we need to start by getting everyone on the same page regarding what success looks like. If you don’t invest the time to align on the big picture, then don’t expect to move the needle when you look at lead quality and quantity”

A partner at the consultancy where I started my career, once taught me something valuable, as they occasionally do.

The GM of a business unit at a Swiss B2B company, recently asked us a great question, as they very often do:

You can read the short version here: https://goo.gl/xqbgCZ

“Modern music making is much like modern marketing in that way. With digital marketing tools becoming better and more accessible, it is not enough for a marketing professional today to come up with creative campaigns or create good positioning strategies. They need to master the modern marketing tools to be effective at their job ”

Jesper E. Thomsen

Jesper Thomsen is a heavy hitter in the B2B world. Since finishing his business degree and starting at Maersk in 1994, he’s been around sales, marketing, HR and customer service. As Maersk Line VP of Customer Service and Sales 2012-2014, the largest container shipping company in the world, he headed the transformation of more than 10.000 people across the globe. One of these projects (CTWWS) was about changing the way sales is typically done in the container shipping industry. Moving from talking price and transit times with the customer to value and differentiators.

Moving from the idea that sales is an art, to the understanding that it’s about consistently doing the right things, in the right way at the right time.

Kvadrant sat down with him to learn more about his lessons learned from large scale sales development projects, his perspective on current commercial challenges in B2B and what musicians have in common with modern marketers.

Now that you’re not leading global large-scale transformations, how do you spend your time”

“I make music. I’ve always been interested in making music and have been doing it parallel to my work but obviously I have a little more time to dedicate to it now, than I did back then. I use it as a learning process to become better at the craft of innovation. Creating something out of nothing. So, I bought the right equipment and started producing and publishing”

How is it going?

“I’m no pro, but it’s amazing how accessible it has become to make -and publish high quality music. What would have run me multiple hundreds of thousands of euro in equipment just a few decades ago, you can now get for about 25k. Music production has become much more viable for the broad public, both from an economic perspective and from a user friendliness perspective. But the technological development has also meant that you need to be a good technician, to be a good music producer. Creativity gets you only a little way, you need technical craftsmanship to produce”

“Modern music making is much like modern marketing in that way. With digital marketing tools becoming better and more accessible, it is not enough for a marketing professional today to come up with creative campaigns or create good positioning strategies. They need to master the modern marketing tools to be effective at their job, in the same way as I need to master my equipment to be effective at making music. This has been true in B2C for a long time and it is increasingly becoming the case for B2B as well”

On the subject of large scale-transformations, what was purpose of launching the CTWWS?

“…Maersk Line is one of the leaders in reliability, but of course none of this matter if we can’t communicate what that means to our customers in dollars and cents”

"Well, the shipping industry has been -and still is characterised by commoditization and extreme price pressure. This is driven by the idea that we transport boxes from A-to-B, with transit times (how long it takes) and price as the only differentiating factors. But when you look at it from a customer cost perspective this isn’t true. As any operations or supply chain guy will tell you..."

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#B2BSales #Transformation #Change #MaerskLine

Commercial Managers are the classical music conducters of business. Powerful in their ability to make others play to their full potential and keep the rhythm of the orchestra. 

Before accusations of heredity start's flying my way I just want to clarify a few things.

“In fact, it shouldn’t be called Account Based Marketing or Account Based Sales. It’s Account Based Business, because you are not going to succeed unless you make it a joint commercial effort"

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Account Based Marketing suitable for commercial organisations driving complex B2B buying processes with high barriers to start
• Account Based Marketing requires total alignment with sales and tailoring of messages and content to target company and stakeholder
• Don’t underestimate change, when moving from a product company to a service company (which many companies are experiencing these days)

Founded in 1985, Finish Software company, Basware, is a relative old timer in the world of digital procurement, account payables and e-invoicing, at least compared to many of its never competitors. The company may in fact be the inventor of the purchase-to-pay (P2P) market, 30 years ago, at least by the company’s own account (Annual report 2017).

The company has grown steadily over the past years to around €150m in revenue in 2017 and 1820 employees, driven especially by growth in revenue from cloud services (19.5% growth, 2016–17). Growth driven by cloud services as a strong indication that it’s also a business and industry experiencing radical transformation these years, from one business model to another.

Lars Madsen (LinkedIn) has served as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, since joining the company in early 2016, with shared commercial responsibility to grow the company’s top-line. Coming from a position of UK Marketing Director at Canon, Lars is no stranger to marketing or transformation. In fact, most of his positions since joining Canon in 2001, had revolved around succeeding with business development, change and transformation.

We sat down with him for a talk about Account Based Business (i.e. Account Based Marketing), the difficulties of transformation and the importance of total sales & marketing alignment if you want to succeed commercially in complex B2B.

Brief about Lars Madsen

• Chief Marketing Officer, Basware (Former Marketing Director, Canon UK)
• Danish, returning to Denmark in 2016 after more than 15 years abroad (US, Netherlands and UK)
• M.Sc. Business Administration & Management

THE COMMERCIAL CHALLENGES OF COMPLEX B2B

“The key challenge here, from a CMO’s perspective, is to get a buying process initiated with the right people. C-level Executives at large companies are busy people with many interests fighting for share of their attention…”

kvadrant: We get excited about B2B sales & marketing and get the feeling that you do the same. Can you tell us a little bit about your role as CMO at Basware and what you find interesting about your professional world?

Lars: Sure. as CMO I’ve got the responsibility for all aspects of Global Marketing at Basware, that is, to make sure that the right people engage with us and that we engage with them effectively. Effectively meaning profitable top-line growth.

Now, our business is in the deep end of B2B sales & marketing, targeting large organisations with +€200m annual revenue and high frequency of invoice handling. That usually means +9 months sales cycles, multiple stakeholder involvement, need for C-level involvement. Complex buying processes, because they are buying an important solution from us, that goes to the heart of their company; payment and purchasing.

The key challenge here, from a CMO’s perspective, is to get a buying process initiated with the right people. C-level Executives at large companies are busy people with many interests fighting for share of their attention, both internally and externally. My job, in collaboration with sales, is to make the right people understand how Basware can help them reduce cost and boost growth and help them do something about it, to realise this potential

The good thing is that we have a strong, proven and quantifiable value proposition here at Basware, which enables us to clearly communicate the value on the table for potential customers. A “Value Engineering” approach; We lead with value and guide them forward.

This is what the structured rationalist in me loves about sales and marketing in a complex B2B setting. Tailored and quantified value propositions, around a logical structure, using customer numbers. Even more, I like that Marketing isn’t seen as a separate “lead generator only” function in complex B2B. It can’t!

To successfully navigate complex, multi-stakeholder buying processes, commercial needs to work closely together around the customer buying process. It’s a must.

ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING SHOULD BE CALLED ACCOUNT BASED BUSINESS

kvadrant: Tell us some more about your marketing approach, how are you engaging with potential customers?

Lars: We’re selling big solutions to big clients that have a big impact on their business. Change like that always carries an element of perceived risk, so we need to be extremely effective at communicating why the change is needed and what the business case is for doing it. That is best done if you communicate a value proposition that is tailored to the specific customer and uses the customers’ own numbers.

That for me is at the heart of Account Based Marketing, selling to a segment of 1 and tailoring your messages to that account from the beginning.

Of course, this approach requires more resources per account than pumping out generic message, which is why alignment with sales becomes extremely important in Account Based Marketing.

In fact, it shouldn’t be called Account Based Marketing or Account Based Sales. It’s Account Based Business, because you are not going to succeed unless you make it a joint commercial effort.

Together with sales’ territory planning, we identify the accounts which best fit our selection criteria (how much potential value we can create for the account and how likely they are to address this potential gain), so we don’t spend commercial resources on people that aren’t able or willing to use our solution. But those accounts that we do target, we target well

Using a value calculator, with target companies’ own publicly provided financial numbers, we are able to generate 100% tailored and data backed value propositions, that we can proactively share with those potential accounts, to initiate a buying process with them.

We deliver high value in the first interaction to jump-start the dialogue and collaborate closely with sales to follow-up and drive the buying process all the way to a close

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE CHANGE. DARE TO FAIL

“Change looks a lot easier in a project plan. In real life it’s challenging. It takes time align hearts and minds to a new direction and to get the organisation collaborating in a new way”

Kvadrant: What has been your biggest learnings from leading successful commercial organisations in the past years, at Canon and now Basware?

Lars: Two main learnings;

(1) Don’t underestimate change and

(2) Dare to fail and learn from it

I think it’s important for people to understand one of the big macro changes taking place in business these years. The change from products to SaaS. This is important because this change in business model radically changes how the company needs to operate commercially.

Where earlier, software companies might be selling to an IT department, they now have to develop a brand, value proposition and messages to an end user. Where sales before was the exclusive job of outbound sales, commercial interactions are now taking place in customer service, operations and on digital channels. In a world of connected buyers, customer advocacy and NPS becomes critical to manage.

Change looks a lot easier in a project plan. In real life it's challenging. It takes time align hearts and minds to a new direction and to get the organisation collaborating in a new way.

The people I experience as being most successful in this new environment, are those with an open mind-set, willing to experiment, learn and develop. People that dare to try new things, even if it means failing at times.

That’s what’s exciting about marketing these days; the ability to constantly experiment with your content, messages, channels and activities to find the tactics that deliver the highest growth and ROI.

It’s a never-ending job of structured and systemic trail, error, success and improvement.

A big thanks to Lars Madsen for sharing his perspectives on Account Based Marketing and the need for Sales & Marketing Collaboration

To learn more about how Basware creates value, read a few of their customer cases (McDonalds, Toyota, Philips etc.) here

By Martin Nyvang Mariussen,

Co-founding partner, kvadrant

mnm@kvadrant.dk, +4540412885

We live in an age of transparency and enlightenment. Our customers educate themselves through an abundance of digital information and social networks. The power of information no longer resides with the seller.

There is an abundance of advice on what B2B sales reps should -and shouldn't do.

Most B2B organisations are becoming better at enabling sales to engage more effectively with customers through new tools, training and coaching.

But as digitalisation moves direct customer engagement closer to marketing, who’s enabling them continuously perform better in customer interactions as well?