Jorrit Drieënhuizen from Centraal Beheer, who provides internal ambassadors.
Conviction
When you hear Drieënhuizen talk, you can feel his conviction. With that conviction, he approached the management team. There, he gained a foothold. Not only he, but they too believed that he had something in his hands that could become a success.
He was given his self-invented role and a year and a half to show that social selling could work. After two years there was real proof. 95% of account managers have skills that they did not have before. And more importantly: the skills are actually used. One account manager does this minimally, the other extensively.
Drieënhuizen's first approach sounded logical. He selected a number of employees and gave them fax lists training on how to use LinkedIn for sales. The idea was that they could apply this immediately. An external agency provided the training. "The idea that you can achieve a change in behavior by just getting an external agency involved and then expecting it to happen automatically, you can forget," Drieënhuizen emphasizes.
The agency was not part of the discussions in the organization, for example between marketing and sales. In this way, it was not supported sufficiently. In this case, this was not the fault of the agency, but of the client. Drieënhuizen: “You can outsource things perfectly well, but you really have to make the party part of the process. There has to be strong alignment.” He also indicates: “Not the agency, but internally there has to be a driving force. Someone who continuously and in detail manages the program.”