Heraeus is a leading industrial group with headquarter in Frankfurt, realising over 20Bn EUR turnover with 15000 employees in 40 countries.
The Challenge
Heraeus has a diverse portfolio of products, with sales teams in markets around the globe.
This situation presented particular challenges for sales and marketing. Sales executives were investing a lot of time preparing for customer visits and finding the right materials, and often ended up in situations where the customer wanted to discuss a completely different topic versus what was prepared. Often, the content needed was not at hand, or simply outdated.
Marketing struggled to produce relevant documentation in a timely fashion and distribute sales collateral to all markets efficiently. While it was clear that localized versions of content would be more suitable, a lot of valuable feedback from the field teams would not properly find its way to Marketing as tools and processes to get feedback organised were not available.
The high cost of solving things internally
A number of attempts had already been made to solve the challenges by building tools internally but this proved to be too complicated and costly. Collaboration platforms like Microsoft SharePoint did not provide the efficiencies for sales as the content was too static, not easy to search, not available offline and limited on mobile devices. This was impractical for sales people, while marketing lacked the possibility to collect feedback on content, usage and usability.
Good collaboration between Marketing, Sales and ICT is essential for the success of a company. Because of the strategic relevance of the project, a joint Sales/Marketing/ICT project team was formed, to guarantee a smooth selection process and the best possible outcome for all stakeholders.
The Solution
SalesMatik, d!nk’s sales enablement platform, offers the flexibility to build, customize and localize interactive tools to support the sales teams. The project was kicked off with a pilot roll-out in 4 countries (United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium). As the pilot group was immediately convinced about SalesMatik as the right tool to support them in their daily challenges, the global roll-out started four months later.
Usage quickly ramped up to 20 countries. A survey 3 months into the project listed 85% of users rating the platform as beneficial, and about the same number were willing to recommend the use of the platform to others. Subsequent research showed an average of 4,5 hours per week in time savings on various non-core sales tasks.
The important lesson is not to try building new cathedrals. SalesMatik helped us to find the low hanging fruit providing valuable insights for customers at all touchpoints of the sales cycle – at a reasonable cost.
SalesMatik, a cornerstone for commercial transformation
With SalesMatik, sales executives can now consult an almost real-time state of affairs of their customers, and always have the relevant and most recent information on the Heraeus products and services at hand. In terms of “mobilizing” the CRM, SalesMatik is really at the forefront.
As sales is becoming more complex, Sales teams need to be equipped with adequate responses to the many cues they get from customers. In order to shorten the sales cycle and accelerate the overall process on the customer side, the right information has to be available at their fingertips, on an easy-to-use device.