Salesforce - Sales enablement

Challenge

Organizing events for customers and prospects is one of the most important parts of Salesforce’s marketing strategy. With the arrival of COVID-19 in February 2020, all physical events in EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) had to be turned into virtual events. Koen Rakers (Director Global Campaigns – EMEA):

“This led to a number of challenges: How do we set up a strategy and structure for the many virtual events of the various country teams, so that quality, speed and relevance are guaranteed? How do we effectively use these events as part of the customer journey? And how do we create maximum synergy between country teams and the Sales organization at scale? ”

Solution

Salesforce and SPOTONVISION started a project together to embed the coordination of all virtual events in a new way of working. We did this in 3 steps:

Identifying which forms of virtual events fit best in which phases of the buying cycle and for which target group. What is the most effective and efficient way to organize this while ensuring consistency in all countries within EMEA? And how can this both contribute? To the brand and the pipeline generating capacity of Business Development and Sales teams in multiple countries within the region?
Create an overview in the planning phase of virtual events for all marketers to avoid duplication in the production of similar virtual events in EMEA.
Creating a playbook with definitions, KPIs and guidelines for planning, promotion, execution and follow-up for 8 categories of virtual events.

This way we have established a structure and way of working with virtual events as part if the customer journey in one central place: the EMEA virtual Events playbook.

The result

Koen Rakers (Director Global Campaigns – EMEA):

“Together with SPOTONVISION we have set up an overview for everyone within the organization. All stakeholders from marketing, business development, sales and management now have insight into what is most critical to them. In addition, we launched instructional videos, playbooks and enablement sessions for EMEA marketers to ensure adoption and consistency. In 3 months, the “virtual events” channel has been redefined in all countries in Europe, the impact on our brand and pipeline has increased fivefold and we have managed to increase our production by 350%.

Virtual events are now integrated into all our customer journeys and form a structural part of our marketing strategy: now and in the future.

We will continue to innovate in this area to make the customer experience even more relevant and impactful. All this is partly due to the very result-oriented and pleasant way of working with SPOTONVISION. ”