The fine art of B2B sales – Interviewing our experts: Wouter Versonnen, Sales Manager at Terms.Tech

B2B sales is an art form, combining deep industry knowledge, a flexible mindset, and a nuanced understanding of human psychology. After all, it’s humans behind the cogs of business making key decisions. In this new edition of ‘Interviewing our Experts’ Terms.Tech is thrilled to introduce you to B2B sales artist, Wouter Versonnen.

Wouter walks us through how successful B2B practitioners blend strategy and empathy to tailor their approach to meet the unique needs and challenges of each business client. Some highlights include building relationships and trust, reveling in teamwork, the helpful hand of multi-cultural awareness, and deploying new technology at the right time.

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We’d love to know a bit about your background and how your career journey led you to becoming a Sales Manager at Terms.Tech?

My background is in international B2B sales predominantly in the payment space – for over 25 years! I’m enthusiastic when it comes to companies who deliver frictionless financial services. I’m passionate about sales and I love supporting FinTech companies of all scales, in their GTM or growth strategies and reaching their goals by working together. And, academically, my background is Economics and I hold a Masters degree in Management. 

So, putting all that together you can understand the main drivers behind why I’ve joined Terms.Tech, which is the perfect context for me.

You speak Dutch, French, English and Italian and have worked in several countries. How do you see the opportunities and challenges working in such a multilingual and multicultural environment? How do you navigate through this diverse landscape?

I get super excited working in a professional environment where different cultures and backgrounds meet. Speaking several languages helps you to interact and understand each other. From my point of view, multicultural organisations are the new norm. 

Business is done across the world – across borders – more than ever before so having cultural and linguistic empathy and awareness is essential for creating long-lasting and meaningful business relationships. The positive thing of working with colleagues from around the globe is that it helps you to keep an open mind. 

What excites and motivates you in your role with Terms.Tech?

As mentioned earlier, what gets me excited is to be part of paving the way to frictionless, easy-to-use, fast and secure financial services. We all face the inefficiency of traditional financial institutions, so my aim together with all my co-workers at Terms.Tech is to help customers to get a better, smoother experience for their transactions. 

Let’s give SMEs, the key drivers of the economy in most European countries, easy access to financial funds to help level the playing field for them.

What are some key challenges in your B2B sales mission?

Generally for every startup one of the key challenges is creating, building, and maintaining trust and credibility when moving sales forward and fostering relationships with other businesses and the people behind them. In the case of Terms.Tech, I have the great pleasure working with co-workers who have a wealth of experience in financial services and the technologies behind risk mitigation. 

At Terms.Tech we have a wonderful mix of talents (e.g. Rron, Robby, Adrian, Jessica) – people with strong backgrounds in risk, legal, product development, operations, marketing, sales, and customer support. Furthermore, especially regarding instilling a sense of trust, we are backed by one of the best credit insurance companies in Europe and undoubtedly this combination of people, experience, and institutional credibility certifies the necessary trust.

I like to think of our current times as ‘The New Era of the Sales Manager’, and what I mean by that and what I really enjoy about it is the omnichannel sales approach. This means work across teams is more important than 20 years ago. And, this brings me to the next challenge of scaling the sales operations. Once you start getting traction in the market, you want to scale as fast as possible. That means building and developing sales & marketing processes and automating tasks capable of following that pace. 

From your perspective, what differentiates Terms.Tech’s B2B payment solution from the competition?

We offer our payment terms solution across the EEA and Switzerland – this gives us extensive reach and allows European merchants and marketplaces to function effectively without borders. We can offer up to 120 days, too! 

I also want to add that our agile approach enables us to develop or add in record speed features to our solution – thus enabling us to tailor a BNPL solution for each customer. On top of that, we offer a white label service for those who prefer keeping everything on brand.

How do you see B2B sales evolving recently and moving into the future?

Interesting question, Greg! For sure, AI and machine learning tools will become more important in the digital transformation of B2B sales tools, helping sales and marketing teams to get the necessary data to take accurate actions and to work more efficiently. For Sales Managers those tools will help to provide better insights and reporting data they need in just a couple of clicks.

Collaborative selling is what I saw coming up over the last couple of years. An approach of sales colleagues teaming up with product development, operations, sales support and marketing in their sales tactics. Working together across teams is bringing another dimension into sales and making the process much more dynamic and holistic. Bear in mind that your customer is also probably mirroring this process, especially in more complex deals.

Another evolving aspect of B2B sales is omnichannel sales. Not only cold calling or above the line marketing campaigns are sufficient to get leads. Today a combo of multiple channels is needed. You will need to manage online platforms, social media, in-person meetings, attend events, etc. Sales teams need to be equipped to engage prospects and customers wherever they are in their buying journey, and the individual Sales Managers will need to be more flexible than ever in how they prospect and approach customers.   

But my number one priority will be to keep the customer first approach. You can have the best, fastest and most expensive tools, which everybody can buy in the end, but the human touch, the human interaction, the way you have that connection with the customer still makes the difference and cannot be copied. That is the art of being effective in sales. My advice is to focus on forming long-lasting relationships. 

Let’s move away from B2B sales and find out about what you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately

I recently watched “The Gentlemen” on Netflix, which I would recommend for those who love mystery and drama supplemented with a sense of British humour.  

The last book I read was “High Growth Handbook” by Elad Gil – it’s full of business insight thanks to its interviews with C-level executives of well known companies (Stripe, LinkedIn, AirBNB, Coinbase…).