Case Study: Sodexo

Sodexo, a world-leader in food service and facilities management, places insight at the core of their marketing strategy. The company recognizes the importance of leveraging primary research to ensure that service offers meet the needs of the target market, with all their business decisions born out of research insights. Whilst regularly monitoring market and consumer trends, Sodexo partnered with B2B International to help to them understand typical buyer journeys and personas across four different business units.

These insights were used to inform top of funnel marketing strategies, sales engagement strategies during the purchase process, and ensuring that the ongoing relationship throughout the contract period is nurtured in order to encourage customer satisfaction and loyalty.

There were several business units we worked with, all with their own specific objectives. These included:

• To understand how to engage with and influence buyers at the early stages of their journey towards outsourcing.
• To deepen their understanding of the challenges, pain points and moments of delight across the buyer journey.
• To understand the more emotional needs of clients and prospects during the buyer journey.
• To identify the extent to which buyer challenges, motivations, and pain points varied by type of organisation.

Market research was required to understand the needs of organisations and buyers in each sector. There were several key aims of the research:

• To validate and build the buyer journey for each segment
• To develop buyer personas of the different job roles in the decision-making unit
• To develop value propositions for Sodexo to target customers and prospects, through highlighting pain points, delight factors, emotions, and moments of truth in the buyer journeys

Across the four sectors, we carried out over 100 in-depth telephone interviews with Sodexo’s customers and prospects. All respondents were actively involved in the procurement of outsourced services within their organisation. Job roles ranged from C-suite to finance directors to facilities managers.

The research provided Sodexo with valuable market insights on the journeys that businesses outsourcing services, or businesses looking to outsource services, go through. We were able to tap into information on key challenges in the marketplace and the barriers that Sodexo must overcome to build their customer base in sectors resistant to outsourcing.

The research also explored which specific areas of outsourcing and which personas Sodexo should target to give Sodexo the best possible opportunities in each sector. Moreover, research into the key perceived benefits of outsourcing provided Sodexo with messaging architectures which would resonate with prospects who were not yet outsourcing.

For each of the four sectors, we provided Sodexo with an in-depth report covering the buyer journey, highlighting moments of truth for buyers. We gave recommendations to them which detailed the key actions at each stage of the journey. The reports included frameworks to contextualise the qualitative data, verbatim comments, and strategic recommendations.