How Can I Convince My Company to Invest in a Sales Experience?

Justifying major expenditure is always difficult. If it’s a piece of machinery which will demonstrably speed up a process the task may be easier, when it’s something as all-encompassing as a digital sales experience platform it can be more challenging.

The challenge

One of our customers, Wienerberger UK, a global leader in brick and building infrastructure solutions, approached us to create a customer-centred digital sales experience.

They had a number of challenges that they needed to address with their extensive product portfolio to meet the ever-growing needs of their broad customer base, ranging from large multinational merchants, architects and developers to smaller local builders.

Wienerberger needed a customer experience that was easy and intuitive to navigate with consistent messaging, sales materials and one that supported their digital transformation strategy.

One of the issues was how to address the understandable requirement at senior management level to see a worthwhile return on investment (ROI) and to persuade them to move forward with the implementation.

The solution

In this case the proposal to senior management needed to be less about the capabilities of POP, and more about demonstrating the concrete financial benefits of the system which would enhance their bottom line.

According to Forbes, sales reps spend 65% of their time on non-revenue generating tasks. Largely this is administrative and preparatory work. With POP, time available to sell is significantly increased as all sales material is held centrally and becomes a sales team’s central source of truth.

Customers who prefer rep-free sales or online meetings benefit from these capabilities within POP. This matches what B2B customers are increasingly looking for, while reducing travel time and costs for your sales team.

Any company which handles a large inventory of products, and which has new products being added regularly has to devote considerable resources bringing them to the attention of their customers.

This was certainly true of Wienerberger, and the ability to push out new product information quickly, often within minutes, to sales reps and customers delivered a clear commercial advantage.

Moreover, the speed with which relevant, detailed information could be delivered, face-to-face or remotely, enabled buying decisions to be made with more certainty and less delay.

There was a substantial decrease in sales cycle time thanks to the centralised control of product data.

Data about what customers were interested in, which datasheets they downloaded and more could be extracted from POP into a customer’s CRM allowing for analysis and could be fed directly into sales strategy. More information, less staff time.

The results

In the first year of operation Wienerberger estimated that POP generated a seven-figure profit directly taken out of their competitors pockets.

That alone represented exactly the sort of ROI they had been looking for from the platform.

They also discovered that other benefits, such as the ease of cross-selling and upselling contributed directly to this impressive increase in profit. 

The dramatically reduced reliance on printed material, both in terms of the production costs and the resources necessary for distribution, represented a substantial saving to the business.

All of this fed directly into the return on investment in terms of savings to the company.

That alone represented exactly the sort of ROI they had been looking for from the platform.

They also discovered that other benefits, such as the ease of cross-selling and upselling contributed directly to this impressive increase in profit. 

The dramatically reduced reliance on printed material, both in terms of the production costs and the resources necessary for distribution, represented a substantial saving to the business,

All of  this fed directly into the return on investment in terms of savings to the company.

The next step

Return on investment is a critical consideration for any business faced with adopting new solutions. The value of the POP platform is not just in the sales it generates, but in the savings in administrative and logistical tasks.

If you would like to know more about how our solution can improve the confidence of your sales team, strengthen your marketing message and deliver an ongoing return on investment, contact us and arrange a consultation.