SalesTechStar Interview with Kirsten Boileau, Global Head of Digital Transformation Enablement at SAP

Kirsten Boileau, Global Head of Digital Transformation Enablement at SAP shares a few thoughts that can help sales and marketing teams enhance their approach to help create better customer experiences in this quick chat:

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Hi Kirsten, welcome to SalesTechStar! We’d love to hear about your journey at SAP and your transition in the company over the years!

I’ve been with SAP (via Sybase) since 2006.  I was in Business Development from 2006 until I started leading the Digital (Social) Selling program in July 2014.  Since then, I’ve been leading the Digital Selling program, and in January 2019 I was also tasked with upskilling the entire SAP marketing organization on Digital Marketing.

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By being part of a global tech company and team over the years in a dynamic marketplace – what have been some of your biggest learnings while moving through roles?

I’ve learned a lot about people – what drives them, what inspires them, how I can best leverage that drive and inspiration to support them to become the best professionals they can be.  I’ve also learned a lot about adjusting my mindset to be aware of and respectful of different cultures and viewpoints.

And since you’ve been part of the SAP journey for quite some time, we’d love to hear your side of the story – your observations on how you’ve seen teams evolve and the company change (policies / processes culture, etc) over the years.  

 When I started this journey, there wasn’t much credence given to the idea of approaching prospects or building relationships via digital means.  Over the years, that mindset started to change, and we saw a surge in the appetite for our program, when we were able to show the success that individuals and teams could achieve.  The past few months have obviously been impactful, but we were well-prepared, and the team saw a small increase in training requests.  We’ve been delivering this program for almost 7 years, and so now our teams are well-prepare.

We’d love to hear more about SAP’s digital selling program, let’s dive in!

In a nutshell – Started in 2012 with a pilot of 50 licenses of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.  It went so well that we quickly grew to 2000 license, and in 2014, Marketing and Sales partnered up to build up a training and enablement program.  In 2014 we did a experiment where we trained one team with our full scope of training to become a social (digital) selling professional, and another team with just the tool of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.  The team that had the full scope of training delivered 7x the pipeline that the team that just had Sales Navigator training.  Over the next couple of years we’ve trained 1000’s of people, built a training organization of over 200 internal volunteer trainers, and saw billions in pipeline and revenue.  While those numbers are important, they don’t tell us the real story – better quality deals, more opportunities etc.  So we decided to dig deeper with the help of Professor Joel LeBon of Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business.  We were able to determine that deals that used Social Selling techniques were 300% larger and convert 16% more often.  Since then we’ve spent our time on innovation and ensuring our teams have the support they need to sell in a continuously evolving digital space.

What are some of the top tools and technologies that you feel sales and marketing need to use more of today to drive better digital sales and marketing results?

In our program, we leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator as our foundation for building networks and building relationships.  For sharing and engaging in the social conversation we use Grapevine6.  We want to keep our program simple and easy for our sellers to use.

What are some of the top go-to market and growth strategies that you feel B2B sales and marketing teams need to now focus more on to ensure business success despite the global slowdown?

Teams need to ensure they build their social and digital brands – their professional ones, not just the corporate brand, to show the people that are searching for solutions that there are experts and advisors ready to support them as they search to find answers to their business problems.  The next step is to ensure they spend time listening, and not pitching.

How according to you will sales and marketing teams need to upskill / reskill (including those at leadership levels) in the new normal; to meet changing business needs?  

Ensuring that all levels of sales and marketing have a good understanding of each other’s methodologies and how they work together.  This means that sales needs to understand how digital marketing works, and marketing needs to understand the strategies and processes that sales uses to engage.

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Can you talk about some innovative ways in which tech sales and marketing teams in B2B have gone against the tide during this downtime, to build brand presence and growth or to create better structures and teams?  

When SAP offered up our logistics software to everyone for free when the global supply chains broke down is a great example of building brand presence.  I see also a trend towards building “digital Sales” teams, instead of just Sales teams.

A parting thought on your biggest goof-up and the learning that came from it!  

I think for this question I would have to say the many times that I’ve not been bold enough to speak up for what I believed in, what I believed to be best for the company.  I’ve learned that it pays to be bold even if it feels like the chips are down!

There’s more to B2B and Tech Marketing and Sales than meets the eye in 2021 and Beyond! Catch more here where leaders from Ness Digital, TeamViewer, JotForm, Xactly and others weigh in!