[CEREBRIX & UPWARD Part 1] Drawing out the creativity of your Salespeople

Kaneki: Thank you very much for coming. I would like to talk about sales enablement and sales engagement, two areas that are currently attracting a lot of attention, with the theme of ensuring the reproducibility of sales organizations.
First of all, in the area of "sales" that we have been looking at, various problems have emerged after the Corona Disaster. We are losing the productivity andcreativity of each individual, and there is a generational shift between those who have good sales performance and those who used to be good veterans, and labor productivity is not improving.
In such a situation, I assume that your company is working on sales enablement, focusing on the structuring and methodization of sales.

Imai: Thank you for your question. I do not think that the challenges faced by sales organizations have changed as a result of the Corona disaster, but rather that the speed of change has changed. Online business negotiations existed even before the corona outbreak, and what has changed due to the infectious disease outbreak is only " how customers buy," which has made the optimal method of communication very fluid.
However, the essential aspects have not changed. If we can set the right issues for the right customers and make the right proposals, they will buy. What has become of increasing interest after the Corona Disaster is how to optimizecommunication by facing the customer, how to find the customer, how to set the issue, and how to make the proposal, while also making good use of technology. This is the key.
With the expansion of remote work, it is difficult to ask your boss immediately when you are working from home, or no one has the answer to your problem... Even under these circumstances, sales enablement can provide a mechanism based on facts, starting from data, so that you can communicate in a common language. In this way, we can communicate with each other in a common language. Our approach to sales enablement is to " create a mechanism for selling.

Kaneki: I see. It seems to me that people with poorcustomer resolution, or rather, poor understanding and resolution of customers, have communication problems under remote working conditions.
What kind of business are you engaged in specifically in terms of "creating a mechanism for selling"?  

Imai: Celebrlix, now in its 24th year, provides sales functions to increase revenues, especially in corporate sales. Our representative business is sales representation, in which we handle a portion of THE MODEL-type activities on behalf of our clients, from making phone calls and proposing products to closing the deal, to customer success, up-selling, and cross-selling.
Our core is sales technology; we have sold more than 12,000 products and services on behalf of our clients over our 24 years in the agency business, and we have the most experience of success and failure in Japan. Therefore, we offer consulting services, original sales methods and manuals, wall-to-wall training on sales strategies, and more.
In other countries, sales is a highly specialized and fragmented job, and is also a very popular profession. (sales manager specializing in capturing large companies) " and "Enterprise Account Manager (sales manager specializing in capturing large companies).
But in Japan, these are all lumped together under sales manager. Furthermore, it is difficult to say that it is a very popular job title, and it is also difficult to recruit human resources in Japan. Therefore, I think it would be a less stressful world for companies to cover the areas in which they excel and where expertise is needed, while leaving the processes in which they are weak to outsourcing companies such as ours.

Kaneki: I think it is hard to provide support for different corporate values and commercial products, but the idea and method of being able to operate rationally in areas where we are not good at seems to continue to attract attention in the future.
In contrast, in our business, we are developing and selling UPWARD, a mobile service for field sales. It is currently being used by about 300 companies, mainly major corporations, and it is in the context of supporting sales engagement as a front-end app that is linked to CRMs such as Salesforce and Microsoft.
The product was developed from the perspective of the sales frontline, which is directly related to sales, so it is a product that can be used for IT anddigital transformation Even for companies that want to implement IT and sales engagement but have not yet caught up with the literacy level, UPWARD's support will ensure that it will lead to successful results.  

Imai: For outside salespeople, entering data into a complex system on the road, going out of their way to return to the office for a daily report, etc., would put pressure on their resources, so is this a tool to make entering data into the CRM easier?
In other words, it's a worldview where salespeople are customer-facing and don't need to do extra paperwork.

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Kaneki: CRM is a database, so we would like to automatically and as simply as possible input the user's activities in various channels (phone calls, visits, emails, etc.) into it. Then, from the automatically entered data, we would like to return good insights in an individually optimized format.
We want to create a system that does not cause unnecessary stress to salespeople. Salespeople are inherently attractive and creative people, and if they can focus more on customer touchpointtheir time with the customer, their performance will improve rapidly.
That is why we are developing our service with the mission of "revolutionizing the last mile in the field.

Imai: The common vision we have for each other's businesses is to be the ones who help salespeople become more attractive. If they become more efficient, they can make more time to spend on preparing and caring for customer proposals, and if they continue to make good proposals, the number of customers they are involved with will naturally increase. If you continue to make good proposals, the number of customers you deal with will naturally increase.
I am sure we are talking about similar worldviews in this area (laughs).  

Kaneki: Yes, that's right. I think that many companies had a particularly difficult time with the Corona disaster in terms of human resources being able to perform well and produce results onsite....
Even though the environment was changing, those who could increase sales could do so, while those who could not were rather more depressed.... I think there are still areas where we are not doing well in terms of sharing winning patterns and "reproducibility" as an organization.
In the second part of this report, I would like to delve deeper into the creation of a "pattern" for ensuring reproducibility in this area and the creativity of salespeople.

Click here for the second part of the dialogue article.