Pascal Persyn, Author at Perpetos

About Pascal Persyn

Pascal supports organisations in delivering commercial excellence in the areas of Sales Enablement, Content Strategy and Buyer Journey Enablement. His pet projects are about helping companies overcome challenges due to the empowered customer and thus evolving into buyer-aligned organisations. His executive experience in private, VC-backed and public companies enables doing the right thing at the right time with the right people. Don’t hesitate to contact Pascal for expert advice: pascal@perpetos.com View all posts by Pascal Persyn

Nov 2013

Is Telenet putting the customer first?

Telenet proves that marketing communication hasn't yet been adapted sufficiently to suit the Empowered Customer.

Is Telenet putting the customer first?

Pascal Persyn | Customer Journey, Sales Performance

The advent of social media has given consumers a more powerful voice. Even though we’ve already known this for some time, it’s difficult to lose old habits, as Telenet discovered with its iPad campaign. The Facebook group criticizing this campaign now has 150,000 likes, which is much greater than the number of new customers Telenet will attract with a free iPad mini.

It proves that marketing communication has, despite everything, not been adapted sufficiently to suit the better informed and more involved customer of today. Telenet must now lie in the bed it has made for itself, but it could have happened to many others too. What three mistakes were made here?

Firstly, working with temporary campaigns is becoming less and less effective. In a saturated market with subscribers for an indefinite period, it comes down to the fact that your customer will also look at what’s on offer from your competitors, who are also trying to win regular customers with even stronger promotions. This results in smaller margins and there are no winners, except for the occasional individual who is happy with a new iPad.

Secondly, it appears that Telenet has too many latent unsatisfied customers who don’t fully realize their service provider’s added value. This is remarkable, particularly because the launch of King and Kong was otherwise a masterful success. The technical specs of what Telenet is offering are certainly not inferior, but customers apparently prefer an iPad mini to the ‘Internet 120’ from Telenet (because it’s easy to imagine what you can do with an iPad mini, but not why you’d need 120 mbps).

Finally, the customer is not central to the external communication. Otherwise you wouldn’t run campaigns that give new customers a very nice gift and existing customers simply nothing. Perhaps Telenet has to consider building up a community of customers and communicating in a language that a standard customer can understand (translate ‘Internet 120’ into the number of users that can surf simultaneously without experiencing any delay). Members of the community could also be tempted with gifts, of course: find a new quad-play customer and you receive credits for buying music online, or get two new customers for a smartphone, or three new customers for a tablet, for example.

Nov 2013

Marketing takes the lead

Your sales team excels in key account management, but like more leads. So what do you do?

Marketing takes the lead

Pascal Persyn | Sales and Marketing Alignment, Sales Content, Sales Performance

You have a sales team that excels in key account management, but you’d like more prospective clients. So what do you do? Invest in marketing communication, or in sales?

Take our client, Zetes: 25 of its 90 employees in the Belgian branch have a sales role, a third of which are internal. The others take to the road as key account managers and business developers. “The key account managers keep clients warm and happy, which they’re better at than canvassing, but it’s not the right way to reach all your potential customers,” points out Director Hervé Toussaint at a recent Business Meets IT seminar on marketing automation.

Zetes could have chosen to recruit hunters – sales people who are happy to canvass – but they opted for a different route. Our client has put all their faith in lead nurturing. “Traditional lead generation on its own doesn’t work any more,” says Toussaint. Zetes wasn’t generating enough leads from telemarketing and trade exhibitions, for instance, and the quality of the leads they did generate was disappointing. So it’s no surprise that 80% of these leads are not followed up by sales people. “And this was the case for us too.”

With lead nurturing, Zetes uses marketing communication campaigns that focus on the right products for the right audience at the right time. If you approach the buyer too soon, it’s possible they won’t be interested yet. Sometimes your prospective client opts to buy the product six months later, hopefully not from a competitor who gets their timing right. Lead nurturing helps you appeal to the buyer with the right message at the right time. “We’re no longer concentrating on our selling process, but on the prospective client’s buying process.”

Specifically, Zetes has put all its contacts in Salesforce, which is linked to eTrigue for marketing automation, email marketing and lead scoring. Potentially good leads are passed on to the marketing team who check where the prospective client is in their buying process. The sales people then only contact the lead when they are registered as being ready to buy in Salesforce.

Oct 2013

Fire your best salesperson?

Every employee should be an ambassador for your strategy. Otherwise you’re better off without them.

Fire your best salesperson?

Pascal Persyn | Sales Performance

The figure in your spreadsheet doesn’t lie: 13%. Your best salesperson accounts for about an eight of your sales, but you still have major doubts. His beliefs don’t fit in properly with your new business strategy, and even after lots of meetings, training and supervision, he’s still holding firm to his convictions.

He is still the technical salesperson who speaks most to your clients about how good your products are, but he doesn’t really listen, and is always boasting about his experience and skill. He still believes that selling to technical teams who can then defend their choices internally is the way forward. He doesn’t really help you think about the business as a whole or work out concrete ways your products can help clients move forward with their business strategy. But he’s still the best salesperson when it comes to sales and margins.

One of our clients struggled with this dilemma a few years ago. They ultimately decided – hesitantly and fearing a negative impact – to end the collaboration. And sales didn’t fall by 13%; indeed they didn’t fall at all. It seemed the salesperson was actually an obstacle when it came to capitalizing on the sales growth within the sector. In fact his departure even had a positive effect on short-term sales, and now – a few years later – it’s left no negative trace whatsoever. That’s the relative worth of your best salesperson. Other employees have noticed a positive impact on the internal operation too.

This mainly illustrates the importance of permeating company values and beliefs throughout all your business activities, including the HR policy. Every employee is an ambassador for your strategy. If this isn’t the case, there’s no getting round the fact that you’re better off without them. This might be a very unpleasant thing to do, but it’s essential for your department or company future.

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