07-05-2020 | By: Reinier Rombouts
Stokke: Digital skills and sales to the next level thanks to TheNewTomorrow
Stokke, a global distributor of children’s products, asked TheNewTomorrow to help them accelerate their digitization. The key question: How do we improve the digital skills of our sales and marketing professionals worldwide? To be successful in the long-run, TheNewTomorrow trained Stokke’s Sales and Marketing professionals. Casper Linke Nielsen, Stokke’s Global Training & Development Manager, talks about the partnership with TheNewTomorrow and the results achieved.
“Stokke was performing well, but we wanted to move to the next level in our current rapidly changing digital world,” says Nielsen.” In 2019, TheNewTomorrow guided Stokke through three challenges to take our organization to the next level: there was room to optimize online marketing, there were opportunities to further improve the retailer performance and there was gain to be had in the way others communicated about Stokke and Tripp Trapp (‘word of mouth’).
Measuring and steering
TheNewTomorrow put together a team of internal and external specialists led by Business Guide Floris Regouin and started the pilot. First the consumer questions were made completely clear: what do parents want when they are looking for a highchair? And what choices do they make before making a purchase? Through constructing a customer journey framework, it then became clear what changes and priorities were needed to maximize both consumer and business value.
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That’s why we enjoy working with TheNewTomorrow. Now, tomorrow and in the future.
Nielsen: “The pilot proved to be very valuable and many of the found optimization changes were then implemented step by step and fast. Think about optimizing and maximizing the impact of consumer and expert reviews, optimizing the media mix and measuring brand awareness. And making the websites more customer-friendly and measuring performance so that it became possible to steer using a KPI dashboard”.
Digital training
Following the successful pilot, TheNewTomorrow developed a training program together with Stokke for marketing and sales. Nielsen: “The training program consists of three parts. The first is a training for our Sales people called ‘Trusted Business Partner’. This is a basic training which is designed to bring everyone up to the same level in thinking and TheNewTomorrow created the digital part of that training. Learning what is happening in the world and what this means for your role and current way of selling and collaborating with retail partners. An inspiring training course that led to the introduction of a new process for structurally assessing retail partners online regarding their quality and representation of Stokke through their digital channels”.
The collaboration between the various professionals, competencies and departments within Stokke was also addressed. Nielsen: “The Digital Marketing Essentials training course trained marketers to work smarter and better together with Sales and other departments within Stokke. They learned to work together on marketing and sales plans. The training included the most essential digital marketing channels and content. Using scalable ‘best practices’ from the pilot, the training became very concrete and immediately brought cross-company scalability into practical usage”.
Finally, attention was paid to increasing the ‘return-on-investment’ and impact of the means of communication, especially in an omni-channel environment. Think of better texts for e-mails, smarter content and more appealing social posts, closely aligned with their customers. Nielsen: “TheNewTomorrow developed the ‘Digital Commercial Essentials’ training course for this purpose. An instrumental training to power up the skills of more senior salespeople and optimize the (retail) marketing investments and build up the right negotiation skills as part of the joint business plans with their customers (retailers), also with a stronger involvement of the marketing teams”.
Personal involvement
Nielsen is pleased with the results achieved and adds: “Working with TheNewTomorrow is very satisfying, thanks to Floris’ involvement, his excellent professional knowledge and personal approach. He listened very carefully to our customer demand and was able to connect to it with his services. That’s why we enjoy working with TheNewTomorrow. Now, tomorrow and in the future.”
Floris Regouin
