Business Value from Your CRM: a Customer’s Story

On March 30th 2017 an event was organized by 21st Sense (the company currently known as Sales Engineers) with the theme:

“How to boost the Sales Results of your Organization”

At this event, Boudewijn van Nuland (VP Marketing) presented and shared his insights from a Corbion perspective. After the event, Boudewijn wrote an article that was published on the Marketing Tribune website (note: in Dutch, an English translation can be found below). The article describes Corbion’s journey, the changes they made, and the results they achieved. Sales Engineers (21st Sense) provided Corbion with their best-practices: the Sales Audit, a best-practice Sales Funnel, a reference implementation for the Sales Funnel in CRM, the Sales Review Cadence and a best-practice Change Mangement model.

Below you will find a translation of the original article in English.

Corbion realizes Sales Growth
through intelligent use of CRM

Biotechnology company Corbion is in the top 50 of ‘hottest global companies in the advanced bio-economy’. An excellent position and a positive indicator for their growth potential, but of course no guarantee for future growth. For many companies, this will be a familiar challenge: how do I turn my growth potential into real growth? VP Marketing Boudewijn van Nuland provides a behind-the-scenes.

The challenge: from good to better

In 2013, Corbion, former CSM, had an excellent starting position. In most of the industries in which they operated, they were the market leader. Corbion is a global provider of products in the markets for Biobased Food, Biochemicals, and Bioplastic ingredients. Growth had begun to stagnate in the Food business (at that stage, the largest market for Corbion). The sense of urgency for change in the organization was too low due to past successes. Although Customer Focus was central to Sales, little differentiation was made in servicing the different types of customers. Hence, time for a change! The sales funnel was examined (amongst other things) to organize future growth in a structured way.

The potential: structured management of growth

The sales opportunity funnel fulfills a central role in Corbion’s approach to structured new growth. The sales funnel was already part of the CRM system Corbion had implemented. This sales funnel was, however, not actively managed. As a result, the reliability of the insights was low; Opportunities were often outdated or painted a too positive picture. Furthermore, there was no connection with budgets, forecasts, or sales & operations planning.

On top of that, the CRM system was too complicated for daily use. A widely heard remark was that the CRM screens had the complexity of an airplane cockpit. Although this was not the ideal starting point, there was consensus about the value potential of the sales funnel, namely:

• To actively manage closing new business
• To provide Sales Performance Insights: which factors cause delays? What are the levers for acceleration?
• To predict future sales as input for Forecasting and Sales & Operation Planning
• To provide centralized insight into market and product potential, and bottlenecks
• To provide centralized insight into resourcing needs: who do we need to ‘close’ new opportunities?

From this shared conviction, the sales funnel became one of the integral parts of the Commercial Excellence program. But, where to start with the improvements?

Identifying the improvement potential

Based on the sales audit model of 21st Sense (now: Sales Engineers), the improvement potential was determined. Corbion specifically zoomed-in on data and insights related to the sales funnel and tested various hypotheses. The assessment was based on analyzing questions that reveal specific improvement points. An example of such a question is, for instance: “What are the common traits of new business opportunities that we are able to close quickly?” Is this a region, a team, or a product? When a common trait (or more) can be identified, the key question is: how can success be replicated?

Defining the improvements

Based on the sales audit, the following improvement potential was identified:

• Redefine the process of managing opportunities, and the sales funnel: Map the phases of the sales funnel with the steps in the customer’s buying cycle; Clearly define which steps should be taken in each phase of the funnel, and introduce clear and mandatory conditions for phase transitions. This change was supported by a sales excellence training that revolved around the customer’s ‘buying cycle’
• Introduce Key Performance Indicators for the Sales Funnel: Set realistic but ambitious targets for these KPI’s and monitor and steer on the realization of these targets on a regular basis
• Introduce a Sales Heartbeat: Create ‘rhythm and rigor’ by reviewing the status and progression of the sales funnel as captured in the CRM system at fixed intervals supported by standard reports
• Simplify the sales funnel in the CRM system: The number of fields has been minimized by limiting Account Managers input to what is essential for the sales process. Also, regular and active use is maximized by providing the Account and Sales Manager with CRM reports and dashboards they can use in their daily work

Managing change: What’s in it for me?

It is a typical pitfall for this kind of change projects to be too optimistic about the pace at which the organization can absorb these changes. Corbion recognized this risk and applied a change management model that revolved around the Account Manager, which:

1. Creates understanding and buy-in for the change
2. Gives the employees the confidence that they have the necessary skills and competencies by providing adequate training for the different sales roles
3. Anchors change through the sales heartbeat

The central theme in this change is the question: ‘what’s in it for me?’. The conviction that change also contains value from a personal perspective is for many a psychological prerequisite to ‘get moving’. Role model behavior of peers plays an important part. It triggers curiosity in ‘doubters’ about the value that others already seem to have found.

Results

The sales funnel meanwhile fulfills the planned, central role in Corbion and thus accomplishes the growth potential. Due to these changes, Corbion has achieved impressive results over the last 4 years, such as an EBITDA increase of 13%, a net profit increase of 29% and more than doubling of the share price.

The introduction of the sales funnel, and sales heartbeat are part of a more extensive and continuous change process that is driven by Corbion’s growing “Commercial Excellence” team. The result achieved is therefore primarily a next plateau from which the upward trend can be continued. Another project that Corbion has started involves closer cooperation with sales partners and customers. Through the use of a portal in the CRM application, Corbion can, among other things, share knowledge about the products with the sales partners and customers and gain faster insight into sales opportunities. The purpose of this is (even) better and faster service to our customers.

Author:Boudewijn Van Nuland, Vice President Marketing Corbion

Translation of Article on MarketingTribune, Published August 1st, 2017