The Digital Transformation Show [E3P1]: Data-driven, interactive sales with Prezentor
We had the honour to have Sara Leander-Pehrson, CEO of Prezentor, visiting our set in Aarhus. We talked about the challenges of sales representatives who need to meet the customers on their own journey, the challenges of digital marketing for the sales funnel and how to use the sales enablement platform that her company provides.
#TheDigitalTransformationShow E3P1
We had the honour to have Sara Leander-Pehrson, CEO of Prezentor, visiting our set in Aarhus. We talked about the challenges of sales representatives who need to meet the customers on their own journey, the challenges of digital marketing for the sales funnel and how to use the sales enablement platform that her company provides. Watch the interview or read the transcription below:
Sara Leander-Pehrson, CEO at Prezentor
E: Welcome to one more episode of #TheDigitalTransformationShow. We are very happy to have Sarah Leander-Pehrson all the way from Copenhagen to meet us here at the Dome of Visions in Aarhus today. Welcome, Sara.
S: Thank you, EstefanĂa.
E: Thank you so much for taking the time to take such a trip today, the weather is not as nice as we would like to but it’s nice to have you here.
S: Very nice to be here, thanks for inviting me.
E: Let’s go straight into what your company does. You are the CEO of a company called Prezentor and it’s a company that works with sales enablement, or sales tech. To begin with, what can we tell our audience about your company, what does it do?
S: That’s a good question. We are a sales a presentation platform. So basically what we do is we facilitate the sales situation for the actual sales rep, making sure that all the sales material that he or she needs in the meeting with the customer is easily available in an app, on their iPhone, on their iPad or their computer. And at the same time we make it easy for the marketing department who actually create all the sales content, to create it in one place, make it interactive, to optimise the customer dialogue and then push it out to the sales rep so that the sales reps meeting the customers are always prepared, they always have the latest material, they know that they are always up to date and giving the best possible customer experience.
E: So we could say that it’s basically a software that helps people track almost on time what’s going on with their sales and have some real, up-to-date statistics about it so they can actually visualize it and present it in a more understandable way.
S: Exactly.
E: You sent me some nice statistics before you came here and one of them was about how big the sales enablement and sales tech industry is and it’s right now valued in around one billion US dollars, as an industry, and it’s expected to grow to three billion dollars in the next two to three years. Why do you think the growth of this industry is expected to be so great?
S: I think there are multiple factors influencing it. One is that if you look at the marketing process and the digitalisation of marketing, it’s exploded over the past ten years and even before that it started already in the mid-2000. And we basically have the technology to connect with the customer and provide information from the very beginning of the sales funnel until you meet with him or her. That’s where it stops. So we have a lot of technology supporting at the beginning of the sales funnel and the marketing funnel but when we actually engage with the customer on a more personal level, it stops.
And this is where companies now realise that it’s not enough to use the same old PowerPoint or the same old catalogue even, as they did back in the 1990s. They NEED, they MUST, in order to say competitive, to present themselves in a really up-to-date way, in a digital way. And also that everyone is super busy today, we are overloaded with information and looking at it from a buyer perspective, the B2B buyer today does 57% of their buyer journey or the research online before they even talk to a sales rep. This, of course, puts a whole different pressure on a salesperson today, to meet the customer where they are in their mind because sometimes they even know more about what they want to buy than the seller him or herself, and that itself puts pressure on the material being presented and the way you present to your customer.
If you traditionally have your PowerPoint which is 15 slides, you updated it the night before, you think you have an idea of what the customer wants to talk about, but in the meeting, it turns out that the customer has researched something else and wants to talk about that. Then you as a salesperson need to jump along with that and be where the customer is, and with our platform, you always have everything that you need in one place, and because it’s interactive and digital, you can just jump over there, making sure that you optimise the sales situation.
E: That sounds great! I would like to know about the actual practicalities of the platform but before we go into that topic there are two things that you mentioned that I find quite interesting. One of them has to be with the data and the amount of data that we are gathering in nowadays digital world and how we can use that to our favour. And the other one it’s about the customer journey and this customer journey process and concept that has gathered a lot of strength the past few years. So let’s start with the data. Why do you think is so important now for sales departments and marketing departments to have the most up-to-date, accurate data possible?
S: It’s actually quite simple. It’s in order to stay competitive, because if you don’t actually analyse your customers, know your customers and have data on what’s being shown to your potential customers (what does the customer actually look at once it’s being sent and then analyse on that) then you’re operating in a black hole, you’re blind where either your competitors can see. That’s why is so important to actually get tracking on these things and analyse on the data that you get.
There wasn’t a good enough tool out there to help with the dialogue with the customer. At the same time as there was frustration over not knowing what the customer look at after they have received the sales material, so after the sales meeting, to know when to follow up and when not to disturb or finding that moment when the customer is ready to talk to you. Not when you’re ready to talk to the customer because of course, you’re ready to talk any day, but needs to be when she or he is ready. And that’s actually was Prezentor was developed, to begin with, and then it’s been a huge learning journey for us and also figuring out where exactly is it that we provide value and wherein the customer journey is there the most need from marketing and from the sales side to get this data and get the statistics and get the transparency.
E: So you can say that Prezentor was essentially born being customer-centred…
S: Yeah, definitely.
E: When you open your Prezentor account or you get the software, what are you going to find there, how are you going to start to use this platform?
S: First of all, it’s super easy to get started, you sign up on our website and you’re automatically directed into our backend, that’s where you can gather your existing content or start building an interactive presentation in the Prezentor editor. We provide some templates and some inspiration for how you can easily get started with this new way of working. There’s pre-made template for return of investment calculators, cost calculators that you can easily adapt to your sales situation.
E: So it goes beyond the actual aesthetics of the way you present the information but also to the way it’s analysed. So you actually provide templates with graphics and visualizations that reflect on the data of the companies.
S: Just go on our website and sign up for a free trial, you have 15-days free trial to our full platform, there you have all the bells and whistles. After the 14 days if you don’t choose to upgrade, you can just continue using our platform on a free version and once you feel like you’re ready and you want the value of our tracking and the data-driven aspects then you upgrade to a Starter package, it’s 19 euros per person per month, and once you get a little bit more professional and you get warm in your quotes, you take a Professional for 36 euros per person per month. And then we also have an Expert, mainly for our enterprise customers and that’s also integration to salesforce and integration to Microsoft dynamics, customised support and other features that are really valuable once you’re a more advanced user.
