Professional lead management – the life insurance of marketing
For more than 25 years, COSMO CONSULT from Berlin has been modernising business processes and IT structures of medium-sized customers and industrial companies from the service, manufacturing and trade sectors with clever concepts, innovative strategies and new ideas. One focus is the introduction and support of business solutions. In the sense of an end-to-end solution approach, various systems are seamlessly networked until all business processes are seamlessly digitalised. In this way, the technologies that are best suited to the respective project requirements are always used in the diverse digitisation projects. With this claim, more than 4,000 customers in Germany and Europe have already been served since 1996.
SMarketing
Industry
Sales
SMarketing
Industry
Sales
The Challenge:
In fact, there was not one decisive moment for the transformation of the marketing and sales organisation at COSMONAUTEN. Rather, the professional and critical monitoring of customer and prospect behaviour led to the realisation that further growth required new ways of internal cooperation. In search of optimisation potential within their own sales organisation, the successful Berliners turned to the experts for digital marketing, Cloudbridge Consulting in Munich, for an inventory.
Even before Corona, we realised that with the many technical innovations provided by hyperscalers such as Microsoft, optimised collaboration between marketing and sales would become a competitive factor. It was clear to us that this would require a long-term transformation. So in 2018 we started to redefine the lead process with Cloudbridge,” Peter Dibbern describes the beginnings of the project.
The target:
Common goals were to be achieved faster, the overall performance of the organisation was to be increased. This required breaking down silos between departments and creating a unified approach to servicing potential clients and closing deals.
As a very sales-driven organisation, we have always looked from sales to the specific sales opportunity with which we have entered into a personal exchange. Cloudbridge has opened our eyes to the upstream process, the ways in which a lead becomes a sales opportunity in the first place according to the rules of the digital economy,
Peter Dibbern summarises the findings from the first phase of the project. He thus confirms Cloudbridge Managing Director Nicolas Wandschneider, who has been accompanying industrial companies on their way into the digital economy with his Digital Marketing Professionals since 2016:
We see a strong trend towards the professionalisation of digital sales & marketing activities.
The COSMO CONSULT Case:
Growth thanks to smarketing:
COSMO CONSULT pursues a stringent growth strategy based on paving the way to a profitable future for customers with innovative digital solutions. The need (some would also say the pent-up demand) for this is enormous in Germany and neighbouring markets. An intelligent portfolio and HR strategy also includes generating more and better sales opportunities in new markets, segments or target groups. “The transformation from a classic system integrator to an end-to-end provider and digitalisation partner was also a strong driver to transform our organisational structure and processes in sales and marketing,” Peter Dibbern, CMO of Cosmo Consult, describes the moment of truth. On the long road from the classic sales organisation with index cards, telephone book, trade fair stand and company presentation to the modern smarketing organisation, Peter Dibbern and COSMO CONSULT have gathered a lot of valuable experience that can be summarised in the form of four key learnings.
Learning 1: The fish stinks from the head – or not!
“We wanted to reach a new level of professionalisation. The development of a modern marketing organisation is therefore being driven forward with great vigour by our board members Uwe Bergmann and Klaus Aschauer. They recognised the added value of such professionalisation very early on and anchored it in the corporate agenda with the appropriate priority”,
Peter Dibbern describes the motivation of the COSMONAUTEN. For the change in habitus and status of the departments involved, it was crucial not to rush the process, but to develop it step by step.
Learning 2: Data sits at the table
When implementing an omnichannel strategy, a good CRM plays a crucial role. Cloudbridge’s experts helped us implement the new marketing module, which offered numerous new features that significantly simplified our business processes and enabled us to communicate with our customers & prospects in a much more personalised and targeted way. The team at Cloudbridge assisted us with strategy development, advised us on best practice and launched a pilot campaign with us. To ensure effective lead handling, Cloudbridge also worked with our marketing and sales teams to create an E2E lead management concept that we can use for all upcoming campaigns. This way, no lead is left on the street and the responsibilities are clearly regulated in terms of processes.
Learning 3: Holistic lead management makes you resilient
Peter Dibbern is glad to be able to fall back on external impulses. “With Cloudbridge, we have created the basis of our lead management: Pragmatic, customer-centric and (close) to what is happening in the market,” he sums up the sustainability of the process. “We have clear metrics to guide us. How much pipeline volume have we generated where with which resources, how much is in active qualification, how much is already being processed by the sales and how much have we lost. We don’t just look at the numbers – we can assess the quality very precisely and thus optimise the budget planning responsibly.” Today, product marketing, campaign management and lead management work together with the responsible sales roles on a holistic customer journey.
Learning 4: New technologies and media are part of it, but they do not replace a clear process definition
Hand on heart: Do you still have an overview of the multitude of new tools for sales? There are now an extremely large number of technology offerings. Evaluating them all in terms of a holistic approach and equipping the organisation with them is a process that requires a lot of time and further transformation. In fact, a look at the practice shows that there is no need to hurry on this point, but to be cautious in evaluating the opportunities that arise.
It is not important which of the tools one works with, but which processes one has defined for oneself and how one enables the employees in the organisation to work with new technologies.
Peter Dibbern explains the strategy of COMSO CONSULT.
Looking back and forward – is it worth the effort?
In any case. Because with the first of the new chapters, the growth story of COSMO CONSULT is far from over. The story has the potential for a real success series. The journey into digital marketing also continues for COSMO CONSULT. “Today, the responsibility for highly qualified sales opportunities no longer lies with sales, it lies with marketing,” is how Peter Dibbern describes the current status quo. This in turn lays the foundation for further cooperation with Cloudbridge. The topics have already been defined. “In the next step, we have to expand our digital capabilities in order to ultimately firmly establish a data-driven business. New technologies and artificial intelligence will then be used logically.” For COSMO CONSULT, the transformation of the sales and marketing organisation into a networked and agile smarketing organisation marks an important milestone on the way to becoming a resilient growth organisation.