How StaffPoint rebuilt its commercial model around customer understanding
Visibility into the customer interface, first-party data as a competitive edge, and what AI opens up for commercial leadership.
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The most important value Revial gives me as a commercial leader is staying on top of what happens in our sales meetings and customer encounters, seeing where we succeed, where we can improve and, above all, what our customers expect from us.
StaffPoint is one of Finland’s largest staffing groups. Founded in Turku over 50 years ago, today it employs around 11,000 people each year, and has established itself as the leading digital player in its field. At its scale, its commercial decisions touch tens of thousands of employment relationships and hundreds of client companies.
This year StaffPoint has renewed its commercial leadership, among other things by adopting modern tools as part of a broader change in systems and processes. The goal has not been to acquire more data, but to make its own data more visible across the whole organisation.
The customer interface is commercial leadership’s most important source of information
Sara Toivakainen is responsible for all commercial functions at StaffPoint. She describes visibility into the customer interface as one of Revial’s most significant benefits in her own work.
Commercial leadership often gets a picture of the customer interface afterwards and second-hand. Now, as commercial leader, Sara has an almost real-time, direct view of what happens in customer encounters and what customers are talking about.
Revial gives me a good understanding of what really happens at the customer interface every day. And that leads to us having a much better understanding of how we can succeed.
Visibility into the customer interface has turned into faster and better commercial decisions that rest on real customer information.
Marketing no longer has to run on second-hand information
Essi Knuutila is StaffPoint’s Marketing and Communications Director. She has been involved in renewing the company’s commercial process, particularly from the marketing perspective. In her work, Essi identified one of marketing’s most persistent challenges.
Before Revial, one of the biggest pain points in my work was getting up-to-date and accurate information from our experts. First you need time from the expert, and then you are at the mercy of their memory. Content production, for example, is slow for that reason.
Thanks to Revial’s data, the information from customer conversations has moved from the expert’s memory to the reach of all of marketing. “Now all of this information is available to me whenever I want, and I can analyse that large amount of data from different angles and refine it into valuable content to share with customers,” Essi says.
Already in her first encounters with Revial, Essi noticed how much valuable information for marketing had been in customer encounters that previously went uncaptured. The same data that once required another expert was now directly available to her. From it she has refined new material, and she is excited about the possibilities Revial’s data brings.
Now marketing no longer waits for sales to summarise. It has a direct view into the conversations.
Sales meetings serve the whole organisation’s decision-making
The significance showed concretely in the spring, when sales slowed down significantly. Instead of guessing the reason or pushing harder, Sara was able to go through the summaries of sales meetings across all business areas and find out which themes customers raised as obstacles to deals.
We could quite easily go through the summaries of sales meetings from all our business areas and find out what types of topics came up in customer encounters as obstacles to deals and reasons for the slowdown in sales.
At the same time, marketing gained access to the same observations. “It was great to see how Revial picked up the essential information and insights from meetings and could also summarise the content of the meeting. That information could then easily be shared with others, and the agreed actions with the customer too,” Essi describes. Sales meetings served the whole organisation at once.
This gives StaffPoint a significant head start. Direct visibility into the company’s own data gives sales, marketing and leadership a shared basis for making decisions.
When sales slowed down, StaffPoint didn’t push harder. It looked for the reason in customer encounters.
In the age of AI, your own data creates the greatest value
Today anyone can ask AI about the market, competitors or industry developments. Only StaffPoint itself can make use of the information created in its own customer encounters, because it does not exist anywhere else.
The value of your own data and your own insight has grown even more. I would like to be the first to find the kind of trends and data that no one else has but us. All of this is possible already now.
With Revial, sales meetings form a continuously updating picture of customers’ needs for StaffPoint by finding the connections among thousands of conversations. Without this visibility, most of what a customer actually says would still go unused.
StaffPoint has understood that sustainable competitive advantage today is no longer created by technology alone, but by the ability to combine technology with the organisation’s own, unique data.
I would be quite blind to what happens in the field. Revial gives me access to every customer encounter quite easily, so without Revial that visibility would be missing from me entirely.
Technology is available to everyone. Your own customer data is not.
We’ve taken big steps forward with Revial, like years forward. If it were taken away from me, the situation would be quite bleak, because I’d have to go back again.
For StaffPoint, the voice of the customer is now shared knowledge across the whole organisation. It’s something a competitor cannot copy, because it is created anew, and stronger, from every encounter.
What would happen if every customer encounter also grew your organisation’s shared customer understanding?