Yesterday
was the 7th edition of the RIIM CONF’ (relationship intelligence and influence
management conference). Opinion leaders,
experts in sales, network specialists and international business people
gathered in the Cercle National des Armées in Paris to share their ideas on
relationships and networking in complex sales, global accounts and differing
cultures.
Over the
coming weeks we will be sharing some of the key ideas from the speakers on this
blog. Today, I’ll give a general outline
of the speakers, to whet your appetites.
The day
started with François Fleith, from Alcatel-Lucent, who spoke about the need to
understand and manage relationships when working with large accounts in the
public sector. He told us of the all too
real possibility of eliminating deals as “no go” too soon in the process, due
to a lack of technical ability, while relationships and networks can save the
day and help both sides of the deal develop new products and therefore new
business opportunities.
Serge Papo,
President and co-founder of Nomination, demonstrated how important it is to
follow decision makers as they make career changes. He used illustrations from Nomination’s own
business case studies and during a live demonstration let us see the “musical
chairs” in some large companies.
Christian
Maurer, co-author of this blog, spoke about the myth of the ultimate decisionmaker. He drew on his experience as an
independent sales and business consultant to show how there are influencers
working behind the scenes in every decision, and also how the role and
positioning of the decision maker changes with the company culture.
Jean-François
Ruiz, co-founder of PowerOn showed how to use social networking sites like Twitter and LinkedIn to for new
business development in a B2B context.
He gave a concrete example of recent work PowerOn has done to develop
leads and sales for a client using the technique “collaborative white book”.
Hervé
Debaecker, Chief Methodologist from Perfluence, spoke about the need to manage
the relationship capital of a company. Based
on years of experience and feedback from many clients, he gave approaches to
doing this and ways that a sales team in a complex sales situation can work
together to manage their ecosystem.
Matthieu
Aubusson and Sébastien Leroyer from PricewaterhouseCoopers spoke about strategic
value selling. Matthieu started with a
precise and informed description of what exactly is strategic value selling and
how to go about ensuring your company provides it. Sébastien continued by sharing information
from PwC about the reality of what companies are actually doing versus what
they should be.
Antoine de
Septenville, Chief Technology Officer from Perfluence, introduced the Sales
Data Hub. He spoke about recent and
continuing trends in IT, in sales, and in data management systems. Using “pivots & facettes” he showed how it
is possible to combine several systems to answer a company’s particular needs.
Sophie
Galoo from ADP-GSI showed how to bring value to clients by enlarging the shared
ecosystem. She told us how ADP-GSI has moved
very quickly from working alone as an HR specialist, to now working within and
managing their ecosystem, including their partners and competitors in their
scope. She laid out the essential
question that anyone embarking on this route will need to ask themselves.
Then two
speakers shared their insights into different cultures and how these affect the
networks and relationships. Sam
Wellington from Safran spoke about Brazil.
Starting from a historical perspective he showed how networks in Brazil
are created and maintained. Jean-Michel
Terrier from Altair gave his experiences of working with Asian cultures, notably
China and Japan. He was able to draw
comparisons between these cultures, the Anglo-Saxon culture and the French
culture.
The day
finished with a round table chaired by Christian Maurer with the following
experts.
David
Gotchac from E-DEAL, Thomas Cochin from Microsoft Dynamics, Khalid Madarbokus
from Oracle and Hervé Debaecker from Perfluence. They discussed the triangle of people, processes
and tools, and the efficiency of CRMs to manage this. The question of how to achieve high adoption
of any tool was raised along with the importance of good change management. The general conclusion was that any IT system
should be sales method agnostic and that users would adopt it if / when they
could see that it served their own best interests.
Special
thanks for
Matthieu
and Sébastien from PwC, who stepped up at the eleventh hour and gave a
remarkably solid presentation.
Sam, who
came from Brazil not just for us but it was very appreciated.
Apologies
to
Sophie, who
had her presentation cut short. About
half the audience came to complain to me in person.
As I get in
the blog posts from the speakers I’ll add links to their posts to this page.
Please feel
free to comment and share your ideas on this.
