The challenges of the packaging industry are manifold. Perhaps you find yourself in one or more of these complex situations?

• Having to generate ever more innovation in your packaging’s practicality and safety, whilst using less material to respect the planet.
• Preserving your competitiveness in the face of low-cost countries without relocating to avoid the social and environmental impact.
• Continuing to invest while remaining independent, without necessarily receiving financial support from banks, in an industry eager for consolidation.
  

  If, like many packaging manufacturers and despite your expertise in this sector, you are faced with this type of contradictory injunction, know that there are solutions to remain competitive and attractive whilst tackling them.

The automated prospecting solution:

Everyone agrees that prospecting is an essential component of a business's long-term survival. However, this activity is frequently relegated to the background. Indeed, prospecting often doesn’t appeal to senior salespeople who, at best, delegate it to junior salespeople.

Remember that effective prospecting is a supply of new blood. It is the guarantee that your expertise in the packaging industry as well as your brand image last beyond the perimeter of your core of "historical" customers. A nucleus that will have a natural tendency to contract rather than expand.

 Automating your prospecting  offers the following benefits:

• The healthy reappropriation of prospecting activity by the sales teams.
  
  The automation of prospecting helps generate qualified prospects and thus increases the productivity and results of your sales team. Aware that they have a formidable acquisition channel in their hands, they redouble their inventiveness to feed the process.
  
  
• Personalizing your customer approach.
  Your packaging expertise feeds on the market. Your advice is only of value if it addresses the specific and unique issues of each client. The automation of prospecting is not about promoting a standardized offer. On the contrary, capturing specific issues aims to deliver personalized responses. Gradually your prospects recognize your expertise and acquire the conviction that you are the supplier they need and able to solve their problem.
  
  
• Your salespeople focus on hot leads.
  
  The physical intervention of a salesperson is crucial in converting the prospect into a customer. In addition, it is very rewarding for a salesperson to focus on prospects in the decision-making phase because their conversion rate significantly increases.
  
  This transfer is perceived by the customer as a logical extension of the previous digital process and ensures that you are in direct contact with the market and its expectations whatever they may be.

The automation of your prospecting will naturally result in a more detailed listening to the multiple and sometimes contradictory market expectations. By classifying and segmenting these expectations to meet or even convert them into marketing briefs, you give yourself the means to be at the level of your prospects' requirements in real time. All without losing sight of your medium and long-term strategic challenges such as your financial profitability or the reduction of material weight or waste

The solution for digitizing your customer journeys:

A customer is not stuck in a specific issue. Indeed, the reasons that have led them to trust your expertise in the packaging industry and your ability to solve their problems change over time and according to their own constraints.

It is therefore essential to know how to listen, trace, collect and analyse the slightest dissatisfaction, questions or movements before he turns to another supplier.

If a CRM tool is essential, you must know how to use it to benefit from its added value:

• Your CRM tool must be at the service of the sales team and not the other way around. Unfortunately, too many CRMs are still viewed negatively by salespeople. Either because they consider it as a tool to police their activity or because they do not perceive the direct benefits.
  We can only encourage the marketing and sales departments to take control of this tool so that they can appropriate it.
  Together they define the customer journeys, the conversion funnels, the automatic emailing sequences, the procedures for resuming a physical relationship as well as the indicators of dissatisfaction.
  In the end, the CRM will become not only a machine to convert and retain customers but will be your sales team’s best friend, who see nothing but profit.
  
  
• Your CRM is the centrepiece of the digitalization of the customer journey and experience.
  A CRM offers the double advantage of automating customer interactions and capturing their slightest inflections. Thus, as long as all the indicators are green, you offer your customers permanent, personalized, local attention, while saving precious time thanks to the automated sequences implemented by the marketing and sales teams.
  As soon as a response time is extended, a remark is made, a concern is expressed, you are able to intervene physically to respond to it and thus reinsure your customer.
  Thus, a well-orchestrated digitization is not a dehumanization of the customer relationship. On the contrary, customers and suppliers alike can only be satisfied with the reconciliation it generates.

As you can see, a CRM is a powerful customer support tool that allows you to be as close as possible to their needs throughout their buying and re-purchasing process.

The proximity and responsiveness that a CRM offers is the best parade against competition from countries with lower labor costs but who will always prove to be further from the market than you.

The solution of calling on an expert in digital strategy specialized in Packaging

The BtoB packaging industry has remained in an industrial marketing logic, focused on the product rather than the customer. Probably a legacy of the traditional operation of heavy industry, with a focus on its technical constraints rather than on its customers and above all very far from end users.

Yet customers, brands and consumers overwhelmingly subscribe to digital marketing and are therefore in no way resistant to this approach. It is actually the opposite since, as we have seen previously, all digital approaches to prospect conversion and customer relationship management are always built with the aim of improving service and the customer experience.

Call on an expert in the packaging sector to define your Digital Marketing strategy:

• This is the guarantee that you will get a recommendation matching your business needs and market.
  Not all digital channels are equally effective in all markets. The packaging industry is unique in that it is extremely dependent on the end product. At the same time, the final product needs the packaging to sublimate itself, to protect itself, to convey itself to the consumer.
  Adopting a specific packaging strategy is a guarantee of profitability and efficiency of your digital actions. Only an expert in packaging is able to make a true benchmark of effective levers in this very specific market.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > This is the assurance of easy communication with your marketing and sales teams.
  The fluidity of exchanges and the bond of trust with your teams are fundamental elements in building your Digital Marketing strategy.
  By speaking the same language, by knowing your practices and your customers, the definition of the digital strategy is accelerated.
  Ultimately, this collaboration between "pairs" helps your teams fully take ownership of the strategy and its execution.

   

  
  

  By endowing yourself with a Digital Marketing strategy adapted to the packaging industry, you contribute to the satisfaction and sustainability of your customer relationships. You promote the engagement and the commercial and marketing creativity of your teams. You are able to perceive and respond to the needs and expectations of your market before others do.
  

  What better way to ensure your growth, gain market share, preserve your independence?