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SAFRAN wins Bronze Award for Best Customer Experience at the BtoB Leaders Awards 2023
The 9th edition of RIM has come to a close, and the winners of the BtoB Leaders Awards have been revealed! A wonderful evening highlighting the best initiatives of this year 2023 through 7 categories: ABM, LeadGen, Customer Experience, Sales Management, Customer Content & Influence, Data & Customer Knowledge, Methodologies and Performance Tools. We are pleased to announce that Safran Electronics & Defense's One Sales application has been honored with a Bronze Award in the Customer Experience category. We are proud to have contributed to the success of this project, and would like to congratulate: Bruno Palacios, Marketing & Communication Director and Anaïs Leboeuf, Digital Marketing & Communication Manager - Safran Electronics & Defense. This award is an opportunity to look back at the origins of the One Sales project, the challenges to which the application responds, its deployment, and the results obtained in the first year of its launch.
What is Safran Electronics & Defense's value proposition?
Bruno Palacios: Safran is a French industrial and technology group with an international presence in the aerospace and defense sectors. With over 83,000 employees at 276 sites, Safran operates in 27 countries and has sales of €19,035 million, up 24.8% for 2022.
Safran Electronics & Defense is a Safran group company specializing in optronic, avionic and electronic systems for civil and military applications in the aeronautics, land, naval and space sectors.
What prompted Safran to turn to a Sales Enablement solution?
"The Safran group has acquired several companies in recent years, which has broadened the scope of the products we sell and the type of customers we serve. With these acquisitions, we naturally integrated new sales forces. Our first task was therefore to homogenize and reorganize our sales force. Before, we were organized by product. Today, we're moving to an organization by world region, where each sales team will offer the whole of our product portfolio in a given region ", Bruno Palacios points out.
Against this backdrop, Bruno Palacios wanted to support this transformation by focusing on 3 key elements: making all marketing content accessible to the sales force, reinventing the sales approach during meetings, and optimizing onboarding and skills development for new recruits.
The project also aimed to meet other challenges: aligning sales & marketing teams in real time, reducing the time needed to prepare a customer appointment, offering a customer experience that makes an impression during appointments, and being able to track the application's performance and usage.
What criteria did Safran use to select Salesapps for its Sales Enablement strategy?
The choice was made on the basis of 5 essential criteria:
1 - The first concerns the use of marketing content: the Salesapps application enables marketing and sales departments to publish content rapidly and distribute it instantly to the sales force. Marketing content is always up to date, easily accessible (Online & Offline) and adapted to the sales process.
2 - The ability to create contextualized, customized sales paths: marketing content is directly integrated into intuitive sales paths. In this way, the salesperson's approach is adapted to the sales context in the field, so as to hit the bull's-eye with buyers during appointments.
3 - Multi-device: at Safran, sales reps employees are equipped with a laptop, a smartphone and sometimes a tablet. The user experience offered by these 3 devices must be identical, fluid and pleasant, both for the sales person using it and for the buyer he or she is meeting.
4 - An upgradeable tool: the application's administrator has the power to upgrade content and sales paths, in order to have a more effective and relevant tool for appointments. The idea is to help the marketing team analyze which content/sales paths are performing well, and which are being used little or not at all, and enable them to continually improve the salesperson's approach.
5 - Finally, Bruno Palacios stresses that " deployment had to be rapid, as it would come on the heels of the decision to reorganize the sales force". Implementing a Sales Enablement strategy cannot be improvised. To be effective, it needs to address specific issues, involve different players and be sequenced in stages.
What are the ROIs observed?
The results were convincing from the very first year, with 100% of sales reps customers on board from the outset, and still using the application today. The application has reduced customer appointment preparation time by 50%. In fact, Salesapps speeds up and improves appointment preparation by quickly identifying the marketing content sales reps need to personalize their sales approach.
The app offers an interactive and immersive sales experience for buyers, earning it the Bronze Award in the customer experience category at the BtoB Leaders Awards 2023. Multimedia content and 3D animations support salespeople in their sales pitches, helping them to modernize the customer experience and create the "wow" effect so eagerly awaited in appointments.
"The Salesapps application is also a good tool to support the change from our product-based organization to a regional one, and to encourage cross-selling", Bruno Palacios points out. emphasizes Bruno Palacios. Salesapps makes it possible to organize products into business universes, facilitating their promotion and the development of cross-selling. Salespeople can showcase their entire range of products aimed at their buyer's line of business, easily capturing the buyer's attention and creating a natural interaction as part of a memorable meeting.
We should mention that the app's usage rate is 100% during meetings and trade shows, underlining the relevance of the tool in the salesperson's approach. Indeed, when the application is designed with and for the sales person, the results are naturally there! A success underlined by Yvan Berger, DAV Export Sales Manager : "The One Sales tool complements our sales practices. It saves time on a daily basis and is a digital tool at the service of sales reps for greater responsivenesś of communication at our customers' sites."
Pour découvrir l’interview complète de Safran Electronics & Defense, c’est par ici
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