• [00:01:08] Introduction to Quentin Hanquet and Travie
• [00:01:35] What differentiates Travie: a very broad activity portfolio
• [00:02:32] Core values: inclusion, adapted environment, dedicated support
• [00:03:13] Commercial complexities within the sector
• [00:03:57] Seasonality: a very busy second half of the year
• [00:04:27] How new clients are generated
• [00:05:45] Pipeline management, follow-ups and internal practices
• [00:06:34] Building trust: collaboration at every level
• [00:07:06] Essential commercial skills: active listening
• [00:07:27] 2026 ambitions: offsetting the decline in inbound demand
• [00:08:16] Economic context and uncertainty
• [00:08:36] 2024 collaboration with PHCom
• [00:09:43] Time saved thanks to PHCom
• [00:10:21] Using PHCom’s DM programme
• [00:11:41] Is Travie more expensive? Pricing clarification
• [00:13:18] How workers join Travie
• [00:14:09] Why choose PHCom: a human and effective approach
• [00:15:14] Collaboration in three words: “excellent”
• [00:15:22] Podcast closing remarks

Stéphane Depaepe: [00:00:13] Hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast "Performance, Harmony & Commercial", produced by PHCom in the "transforma -bxl" studio using the techniques of "The Podcast Factory Org".

Nadia Ben Jelloun: [00:00:23] The "Performance, Harmony & Sales" podcast is aimed at marketing and sales managers, as well as company executives with sales responsibilities.

Stéphane Depaepe: [00:00:32] Every month, we share with you our best practices in finding new customers for business-to-business companies.

Nadia Ben Jelloun: [00:00:38] You can find each episode on the PHCom point be website, P.H.C.O.M, and on all the good podcast platforms.

Stéphane Depaepe: [00:00:48] You can support this podcast and promote its visibility by sharing it with as many people as possible via a like, comment or share.

Nadia Ben Jelloun: [00:00:55] The answering machine is always open so that you can leave us a message, which we'll be delighted to answer.

Stéphane Depaepe: [00:01:00] You can also book an appointment directly with Nadia or Stéphane on phcom dot be.

Nadia Ben Jelloun: [00:01:06] See you soon.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:01:07] Hello Quentin

Quentin Hanquet: [00:01:08] Hello Camille

Camille de Meeûs: [00:01:08] We're delighted to welcome you today in this beautiful PHCom podcast. So, tell us a little bit about what you do. What are your activities?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:01:15] I'm a sales manager at Travie. Travie is an adapted work company founded in 1980 and located along the canal in Anderlecht. There are roughly 400 people working at Travie, 335 of whom are disabled. And so our mission is to offer paid, suitable work to all our workers.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:01:35] There are a lot of ETAs, so E.T.A., so that our listeners understand what Entreprise de Travail Adapté really means.

Quentin Hanquet: [00:01:43] So I'd say that what sets us apart from the competition is the fact that we have an extremely broad range of activities. So we're a pretty big operation. And so we're going to offer a whole range of activities, including fresh food, dry food, assembly, packaging, mailing, as well as sending workers to our customers' sites. And so I'd say that the first thing that sets us apart is precisely this very wide range of activities, so as we say back home, "We produce fresh lettuce on electric bikes". That's how wide our range of activities is. What also sets us apart is the fact that we're a large structure, with a high production capacity, and that we can offer our customers flexibility in terms of production to attenuate their seasonal peaks. That's what sets us apart.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:02:32] What are the company's values?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:02:34] Company values? Our ben mission is inclusion, offering paid work in a setting adapted to the specific needs of the people who work with us. That's really what we want to offer, we want to offer a working environment in which people can blossom, which is nevertheless a job, so it's paid work, it's not occupational, people really come to us to work. But what really sets us apart from an average company is the fact that we have a supervisor who makes sure that each person is in the right place at each production workstation, and that the workstation is adapted to the person's disability.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:03:13] Now let's talk about the commercial stakes. What's working well and what's not in your sector?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:03:20] So it's a bit difficult to say what's working well and what's not in our sector, since we do so many things. I'd rather rephrase that as "What are the complexities of our industry?". What's complex in our sector is that we offer a service, so we're subject to the requests we receive from our customers, and to the seasonal variation in these requests. So, typically, as we're here to absorb our customers' seasonal peaks, there will be times of the year when we'll have a lot more work than other times of the year. Typically, the second half of the year is a very busy period, because there are a lot of requests from companies.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:03:57] We're right in the middle of it now.

Quentin Hanquet: [00:03:57] That's it, we're right in the middle of it. For the end of the year, for Easter and, in short, for all the commercial news ahead. This keeps us very busy in the second half of the year, but the first half is traditionally a quieter period. The challenge for us is really to be able to complete our business during this slightly quieter period, and to find additional activities to ensure that our business is as smooth and stable as possible throughout the year, so that we can fulfill our social mission.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:04:27] How do you generate new customers, new leads if I can call them that?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:04:31] There are different ways of generating a new type of activity. First of all, the contact we have with our customers. At the moment, we're trying to work in good coordination with our customers to anticipate certain productions, to try and smooth them out a little more. We also have a series of activities for which we have a little more control over the schedule in terms of production. These are activities that we've been looking for, for which we can manage production, so that's a good complement. And of course, and I think this is why I'm here today, there's a real need for us to be proactive on the sales front to continue developing our business. We have to be constantly on our toes to keep developing our business, we can't afford to rest on our laurels. Even if we have a portfolio of regular customers who are loyal and well-established, that's not enough to guarantee us stable business throughout the year, so we need to be proactive in our approach to finding new customers, and also in different areas of activity, where there's less seasonality. That's why we called on PHCom to initiate this process in a structured way.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:05:45] So it's understandable that PHCom has really come, or at least arrived, to help you with your business development. But apart from that, do you have any specific tools or practices for managing your pipeline, your follow-ups, your appointments, beyond PHCom? Is there another structure made in-house?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:05:59] Before working with PHCom, I used to say that we did things a little with our own resources and common sense. It was a matter of relaunching customers and former customers, etc. But I would say that the axis that has always been favored, and which I think is also, and remains despite everything, an essential axis, is first and foremost to continue to listen to our customers at the present time. The major challenge right now is to keep our customers, support our customers, listen to their needs, and eventually add other types of activities that we don't do with these customers to enrich our activities.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:06:34] How do you create a long-term relationship of trust with your customers?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:06:38] The relationship of trust comes from working together at every level of the company. So it's not just at commercial level that the relationship with the customer is established, it's also at production and team level. And it's when all levels of the company work really well together that people talk to each other, share their problems, and from that moment on, well, the trust is there, it's really something that's built, clearly!

Camille de Meeûs: [00:07:06] What business skills do you consider essential today? We can't do without it.

Quentin Hanquet: [00:07:10] The business skills that are essential are listening. Clearly, it's all about listening, getting an idea of our customers' needs, and seeing how we can support them, how we can adapt our structure to meet those needs. I think that's the core competency.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:07:27] Is there an ambition or business goal that Travie would like to achieve? Here we are at the end of 2025, in 2026, how do you see things?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:07:36] It's a complicated year at the moment because, given the current economic climate, we're facing an erosion, not in terms of the number of our customers, because our customers are there and are still there, but we're facing an erosion in terms of the contribution made by our customers in terms of work in our companies. The big challenge for us next year is going to be to find additional activities to complement this erosion that's taking place, and when we see the current economic context, we tell ourselves that we can't just sit back and wait for things to happen, so we really have to be proactive about this and take the lead.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:08:16] It's scary, even in your sector?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:08:19] Well, let's just say that the current context, and I'm not even talking about the political context, eh? In which, at the level of the Brussels Region, there is still a great deal of uncertainty for all associations. I'm not even talking about that aspect, but clearly at the economic level, there's a lot of uncertainty, and we feel it in our business, we feel it in our day-to-day activity.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:08:36] Now let's talk about working with PHCom. We worked together in 2024, I think (Quentin Hanquet: Absolutely), we did a first mission. How do you think it went, and why are you calling on us now? It's late 2025, what happened in between?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:08:50] We initiated a first collaboration in 2024. Because in 2024, we were faced with exactly the same problems as we are now. We also wanted to round out our customer portfolio a little. The collaboration went really well, we worked really well together, so I'm not going to say in terms of the sales strategy because that was defined by us, but in terms of the implementation of this sales strategy in the scripts, in the canvassing, in the way you were going to canvass the various prospects. We're really in the B2B business, not the end-customer business. It had gone well, we had worked together for a few months and it had resulted in additional activity on our part, which is far from nil and far from negligible, hence the desire this year to re-initiate a new collaboration to really give a boost to this approach because it's necessary, that's all.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:09:43] Has working with PHCom saved you time or made you more productive?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:09:47] Working with PHCom enables us to focus on the part of prospecting on which we have, I'd say, more added value because we work in the company. The fact that we can delegate qualified telephone calls to PHCom to qualify prospects enables us to concentrate on these prospects once they've been qualified and try to see how we can respond to their problems. It allows us to concentrate on what's important at the end of the day.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:10:19] Which is the most important thing.

Quentin Hanquet: [00:10:20] That's right.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:10:21] It seems to me that you're still working with our DM, our program, you started using it in 2024, we stopped the prospecting mission and you've continued to use it until now? How are things going for you? It's easy, it's intuitive?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:10:34] The program is actually relatively intuitive to use, and really helps us to keep track of the various communications we've had with prospects or customers. So in this respect, it's a database that we're building up as we go along, and one that will be much needed, and is already needed now, but will be even more necessary in the future. Because customer communication management is something that can't be neglected, and needs to be done in a structured way, and that's where the PHCom database really comes into its own, so that we can do it in a way that's different from the usual piecemeal approach. We continued to work on our own, with a small sales team, doing proactive canvassing in much the same way as PHCom. So, we've reaped some rewards, but in the end, we realize that it's something that consumes an enormous amount of time and energy, and that trying to do it on top of the work we're doing at the moment, our work in sales, is complicated. At the end of the day, it doesn't allow us to do it intensively enough to be able to get quick results in fact.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:11:41] When we talk about ETAs (Entreprise de Travail Adapté), is it expensive to work with you, if we can put it that way? When it comes to prices, because it can be a false belief when a company calls on you, how do things work?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:11:52] In general, a company calls on us because we have production capacity. People don't call on us because some do, but people don't call on us because we're an ETA. People call on us first of all because there's a need in terms of production, and we're there to meet that need. So do we have a competitive price advantage or not? I'd say that's for customers to judge. Now, the subsidy we receive from the regional authorities is there to compensate for the fact that a person with a disability is less productive than the average person. And so this subsidy is there to compensate for this lower productivity, in quotation marks, so this subsidy is not there to give us a competitive advantage. There are companies in Belgium that do packaging work similar to ours, with whom we'll be competing directly, and there's no guarantee that we'll have a competitive price advantage over them. But it's clear that we need to be well-positioned in terms of price, because if we're poorly positioned in terms of price, people won't come to work for us if there's a price differential compared to the competition, they won't come to work for us because we're an ETA, in the majority of cases I mean.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:13:18] The question may seem a bit silly, but how do the workers manage to work for you? How does it work? Do they come with a CV or are there intermediary agencies that place people with disabilities? How does this work?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:13:30] In this respect, we operate like any other company, with an HR department, with workers coming in and applying to work in our company, with positions opening up from time to time, and positions closing up from time to time, so there's not much difference. The only thing is, of course, that our workers' disabilities have to be recognized before they can come and work for us, and that's part of our social mission, so we can't, for economic reasons, hire workers who won't be subsidized. So we'd be going beyond our scope and our mission, so there you have it, so as long as the disability is recognized, people can come and apply to us without any problem.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:14:09] Let's get back to the PHCom collaboration. Why did you choose PHCom instead of another partner?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:14:16] So, first and foremost, I called on PHCom because I'd met Nadia, who works for you, at an event organized by Travie. And so, at that point, we discussed things a little together, and the prospecting approach proposed by PHCom seemed to me to be an original and human approach above all. And that's what immediately appealed to me and made me want to go a little further. Telephone canvassing may seem a little old-fashioned, but these days, I think, when you see what's coming into mailboxes, you quickly realize that, in fact, mail is useless - people don't look at it. And so you really need to be able to find a channel to reach the right person, with the right message, and generate interest. And that's what I think PHCom does so well. So that's why we work together, and why we work again together.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:15:14] So, if you had to define your collaboration with PHCom in three words, what would you say?

Quentin Hanquet: [00:15:18] It's excellent, that's three words.

Camille de Meeûs: [00:15:22] Many thanks Quentin, and all the best for the future.

Quentin Hanquet: [00:15:24] Thank you, Camille.