B2B sales processes are increasingly digital and automated, but adopting CRM and Marketing Automation is not enough: it is necessary to start from the business strategy, create processes and perfect execution, in a gradual transformation path, which overcomes the silos between marketing, sales and customer service. An interview with Massimo Calabrese, CEO of Digital Sales, now part of the Digital360 Group and Hubspot partner Published on 31 Mar 2022 Manuela Gianni Director, Digital4Executive Increase sales, improve lead management, automate and integrate marketing and sales activities. These are objectives that B2B companies can achieve by working on three dimensions, namely strategy, processes and execution, and using digital platforms such as Hubspot as a glue . Digital Sales deals with this , born a year ago on the initiative of Massimo Calabrese, management engineer, long-time manager with a past first in strategic consultancy and then as sales manager in large industrial companies, and with great familiarity in the implementation of SalesTech and MarTech , especially for lead generationand automation of sales processes. Today Digital Sales has joined the Digital360 group, to strengthen the offer of services for B2B companies, already used by over 100 customers. Massimo Calabrese CEO of Digital Sales Topics index What prompted you to found Digital Sales? What lessons have you learned from your experience in sales in the industrial world? How can this customer orientation of the organization be achieved? And what is the role of digital platforms? What is the starting point of your projects? What prompted you to found Digital Sales? What lessons have you learned from your experience in sales in the industrial world? There is a lot of talk about customer orientation, but the truth is that in large companies this does not happen. We continue to work in silos: sales, marketing and customer service are not oriented towards the external customer, but towards the manager, towards the internal customer. Everyone looks at his garden. For example, marketing generates leads, but then the salespeople aren’t really knowledgeable about what’s going on in the market, the two areas aren’t aligned, and the results aren’t coming. You don’t create value, you don’t connect the customer with the brand. Organizations need to change the sales process, and that’s where we come in. Today the differences on the markets are minimal, price and quality are no longer competitive factors. The service is the critical success factor: for this, digital processes are needed. How can this customer orientation of the organization be achieved? We need a cultural change, creating streamlined processes, connecting silos, integrating sales and marketing, and this can be achieved with the technological platform, with data. I think that companies must become “Company as a service”, a model in which each function is really at the service of the customer, but the final one, not the internal one. Strategy, processes and execution are the pillars of our value proposition. We start from the knowledge of business models, from the entrepreneur’s pain points , and we implement methodologies and processes consistently. Success comes if you manage to enable cultural transformation, guide change, direct the different areas towards the same horizon: it is not enough to implement technology. And what is the role of digital platforms? A platform like Hubspot allows all the interactions that each individual contact (lead, prospect, customer, supplier) has had with the company to be brought together in a single point: from sending an email to filling out a form on the site, from behavior on social media to interaction with advertising campaigns, up to call tracking. The platform, starting from the CRM which is its heart, enables change because it allows sharing the same information, aligning sales and marketing processes and KPIs: this is smarketing (Sales and Marketing crasis – ed). Our claim is “lean evolution”: exponential transformations are not needed, technology is fast, but people are not, they think in a linear way. We need a streamlined evolution that respects the company’s business model, with learning by doing . Companies that deal with CRM look too much at technologies, and too little at culture and processes. Not surprisingly, according to the “State of sales” report, only 10% of managers think that the implementation of CRM has had a positive ROI: they have had a difficult impact with technology without a new method being created, based on strategy and processes. 68% of companies in Italy have a CRM, but few managers think it’s not a technology, but a process. It follows that adoption is very low, people don’t use it.
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