Today, 100% of our sales start with customers who come to our website
«Hoy, el 100% de nuestras ventas empiezan por clientes que acuden a nuestra página web» — Diari de Tarragona, February 2019, in Spanish
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“Els debats del Diari” was a session on digitalisation and internationalisation organised by Banco BBVA and Diari de Tarragona. Pep Ruiz, chief economist at BBVA Research, gave the opening talk; a round table followed with three companies from the province — Paño Fruits, Tio O’Bama and AiCROV. The translation below covers the part about AiCROV.
Our translation (extract)
Pep Ruiz, of BBVA Research, explains that digitalisation contributes to growth in company size, to higher productivity, to the emergence of new activities, products and services, and to the opening of new markets. He sums it up with an example drawn from the experience of Albert Rovira, managing director of AiCROV, a Tarragona company that designs and manufactures industrial machinery for filling chemical products: “When in 2012 and 2013 we saw that we had to internationalise, we prepared a digitalisation plan so that our customers would find us. Today, 100% of our sales start at our website.”
An “inbound sales” strategy taken to the extreme, which has opened the door to doing things their size would otherwise not have allowed. “We have spent a lot of money on digital marketing,” Albert Rovira explains, “but nothing compared with hiring people with briefcases to travel the world.”
Albert Rovira was one of the three speakers on the round table that followed Pep Ruiz’s talk, where the importance of digitalisation as a tool for internationalisation was set out with practical examples grounded in the day-to-day life of small and medium-sized companies.
With a team of barely three people working full time on this inbound strategy — in inbound sales, as in inbound marketing, you do not go out to sell, you produce content and actions so that they reach your potential market and it is the possible buyers who come to you — AiCROV has gone from 0% exports in 2012, six years after the company was founded in 2006, to 95% of its turnover in export today.
Albert Rovira, of AiCROV, sums it up: “Once the filtering is done through the website, the sale happens face to face, getting on a plane and going to see the customer, because you do not sell machines costing €250,000, €400,000 or three million euros over the Internet.”