Interview with Chloe Lasserre (BBA 2013), Director of Business Development UK & Ireland at Salesforce

Business Development at Salesforce was not the most predictable path after starting her career in Operational Marketing at L’Oréal, but this is the story of Chloe Lasserre (EDHEC International BBA 2013), who now oversees UK and Ireland Business Development team for the customer relationship management solution company called Salesforce. As the Tech industry doesn’t look like any other, Chloe sheds light on her commercial activities, especially in a post-Covid world where perspectives have been turned upside down with most business sectors pursuing their digital transformation.

How would you sum up your current position and responsibilities? 

My role is to coach and drive performance across my team of 5 sales managers in the UK and Ireland, who then support their team of 40 salespeople covering 5 different industries: Retail / Consumer Goods, High Tech, Telecommunications, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Media. We define the vision and values for the year and drive performance with monthly key performance indicators and business metrics.

I ensure that my reps are prospecting and negotiating innovatively as we've had to adapt our pitch so much over the past couple of years. During the pandemic, we were leading with a lot of empathy, sharing a lot of resources on well-being, and ensuring that our customers were being supported. I also needed to do a lot of sales training, to enable myself so I can coach others effectively. This year the biggest focus for us is not just business growth, it's also productivity and efficiency. I focus on career development for my leaders and my business development reps.

How do you choose your business representatives?

We get our talent through multiple sources. Externally (40%), we have recruiters who go and hunt in the UK, EMEA and Ireland, and 60% of our talent comes from in-house. Before our talent becomes business development representatives, they go through other positions. We look for the same skillsets in internal and external recruits. The major difference is that internal reps know the Salesforce systems and products, and they understand the ecosystem and values of the company. We value diversity and inclusion, we want people to come with different backgrounds and different perspectives on industries, which creates that richness in our organization. We look for people who have that fire in them to want to close customer deals and acknowledge that it will take a lot of resilience to overcome customer objections.

Generation Z and Millenials represent most of our talent in business development. We want to ensure that we can coach them on our product portfolio, sales techniques and that they are eager to receive constructive feedback to grow in their role. 

We also look for people with a cultural fit and strong values that they can bring to the organization. Recently we hired someone who is leading humanitarian actions for Africa in Ireland and one of her values is bringing different communities together. That is something that she's now bringing across my entire business unit and we value how passionate she is about diversity and inclusion.

What is it like to sell to salespeople or to people whose goal is to eventually sell?

We sell to different buyer personas because we have so many solutions in Salesforce that we can target different types of buyers. If we go after a sales team in a white space company, the negotiation process is fun because they know our sales techniques, however, there is mutual respect, and a lot of transparency both ways. 

We want to add value to the different buyers and the same goes for sales teams: we demonstrate how we can transform their business and use customer stories to add credibility and vision. We use a lot of metrics and data to showcase the value of Salesforce and what it can do. It's all about the customer and what we can do to increase their sales and business performance. 

There's a lot of relationship-building involved regardless of what buyer we go after. So if Salesforce has a footprint in one division, we ask for a referral to another division and then we can go after different teams and sell different products that will suit the business. Salesforce works best if we can transform and innovate one business as a whole versus one department. We work with C-levels, IT profiles, Customer Service, Marketing, Sales, Operations, and Strategy teams. 

What works very well is sharing what we're doing in Salesforce. We love to talk about what has and hasn’t worked for us. What's pretty unique in our sales process is that we fully embrace their selling methodology and what they're trying to achieve to tailor Salesforce to them.

How do customers usually come to you regarding their digitalization process?

It differs depending on the type of companies we work with. Scale-up businesses are disruptive and innovative companies, typically start-ups or small-medium businesses, and they're just at the beginning of their journey. So they come to us saying, “Show us everything that you can do because we need your help to grow and become the next unicorn in our industry”. That's when we showcase the art of the possible. We also introduce other unicorn companies that have implemented Salesforce and have seen a transformation and they will co-sell with us. 

As our customers grow, they become the mid-market enterprises of the future and develop a digital transformation team internally. And we work with a lot of CTOs and teams who already have a vision that's set. 

They tell us what they want to see transformed and the challenges that they face. Our platform keeps innovating thanks to the customers. We have had some really cool acquisitions like Slack, Tableau, and DemandWare over the past couple of years. We also upgrade our platform’s features 3 times a year to remain relevant and visionary in the CRM market.

Recently, most of our customers have been interested in predictive analytics so we've added a feature to every single solution in Salesforce which allows our customers to generate predictions for their sales teams and consumers. 

The latest innovation in Tech is Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT (an AI chatbot). The majority of IT leaders believe AI has the potential to help them better serve their customers, take advantage of data, and operate more efficiently as a business. Salesforce is now entering the space of Generative AI. 

How do you convince prospective clients who are not open to seeing the bigger picture?

A business development representative doesn't sell alone. We've got multiple teams that support one project and one customer. It’s up to our trusted advisors to showcase everything that they can achieve. Our role is to bring in the right people to a sales process. Our solution engineering team designs Salesforce for our customers so we can sell them the vision of the future. 

We also work with external partners who implement the solution for our customers. So they're also very involved in terms of creating that long-term vision because they adapt the product to the different needs and also phase out how Salesforce will be integrated in a business. 

The Field Sales team closes the deal and our internal Finance team ensures that the contract terms and conditions suit best the customer. Marketing provides us support with industry-based campaigns, and personalized messaging for our prospecting emails and invites our future customers to some exclusive events (like World Tour or Dreamforce). It’s a great opportunity for them to meet and network with different customers who have recently purchased Salesforce.

We take the time to build that relationship with the customer so they know that when they're buying Salesforce, they're fully bought in. In the enterprise space, the sales cycle can be lengthy as we want to bring in the best teams and allocate the best resources for them. 

In the digital era, does Business Development require you to keep a strong human component?

You can automate the way you outbound or qualify a customer. The next steps are to sure that all the follow-up emails are done, but if you robotize and automate everything, there is going to be a lack of the human touch. And what makes it so unique is the human connection. At the end of the day people buy from people.

When a customer reaches out to us, we will automate a couple of things at the start before reaching out to them. We have a Service Level Agreement in place where we've got 2 hours to call the customers. But the key element is for us to actually reach them and for the customers to hear a voice listening to them, understanding them and making sure that they know that we are the specialists of the platform. If we automate our sales approach too much, the customer won't understand it and it won't be as tailored as with the human connection. Salesforce remains very focused on keeping the human element. Hopefully future tech companies will continue to do so. 

What motivates business representatives today?

In addition to the financial aspect, Business Development teams’ ultimate purpose is to have an impact on the customers and know that they've been part of something in that business journey. 

People who go into Sales are motivated to see how their own customers are going to transform over time and how to evolve with the new demands that consumers have today. Fast career acceleration is also a motivational aspect of Technology and Sales. So if you're looking to constantly move into something different and adapt to brand-new teams, industries, and new customers, then a career in Sales is typically the way to go!