Building a revenue engine that unifies departments such as sales, marketing, customer success or operations it hard for every business.
Startups and scale-ups have the advantage, as their departmental silos are less established and more able to execute change.
But large, established organisations have some significant hurdles to overcome.
First, the plethora of legacy systems means finding a place where you can view all the organisation’s interactions with a customer (sales, marketing, customer success) can be at times impossible.
Second, larger organisations are more likely to have very established silos and unofficial (sometimes official) hierarchies, of which silo has the most sway with the executive leadership team.
This is why I was excited to be interviewing Dirk Abeel – Global Medical Sales Director of Reckitt’s medical division.
With over 200 years of history, operating across multiple geographies and selling regulated products, I anticipated the barriers to change to be significant.
Over the last few years, Dirk has been involved in a project to build an omnichannel sales process that is built around the customer’s desired buying experience.
Beyond silos, it has involved redefining key buyer personas, significant changes to the CRM and systems that feed into the CRM and a huge amount of engagement across all the departments.
Key Areas of Discussions with Dirk Abeel, Global Medical Sales Director at Reckitt:
- What were the goals of the omnichannel transformation?
- What were the first few things you focused on?
- How did you ensure the new buyer persona had buy-in across the organisation?
- How did you use the improved data in the CRM to help the sales teams have better conversations with clients?
- Why omnichannel strategies need to start at re-defining your buyer persona’s.
- The role the CRM plays in gaining buying from sales teams.
- Why creating a feedback loop between rev ops, marketing & sales key to success.
About Dirk:
Dirk Abeel has spent over 16 years helping sales teams improve performance. He has spent over 13 years at Nestle, improving the salespeople, sales process and sales technology. In the last 2 years, he has been working to help Reckitt’s medical division create an omnichannel sales process aligned to their customer’s preferred way of buying vs their traditional siloed approach.
