A specialist provider of spare parts for maintenance (MRO) and a development and manufacturing partner for parts and components for industry (OEM) had suffered a significant drop in sales. The parent company therefore placed the interim manager at the CEO's side as Interim Chief Commercial Officer. His main tasks: To analyze and eliminate the reasons for the slump in sales and to define a route-to-market tailored to the German market. As a result, the optimal sales force capacity was to be determined.
Analysis of customer and sales structure reveals one-sided dependencies
In order to get to know the business and the organization as well as the sales executives, the interim manager first visited the five sales regions and gave the sales force the opportunity to present their view of the business. In combination with an analysis of the customer and sales structure, it quickly became apparent: The company was dependent on a small number of industrial clients in its core areas. In addition, the company's product portfolio was not fully positioned and sold on the market. This outlined the main challenges of the mandate: Business with key accounts had to be improved and new growth segments had to be identified.
Identifying new growth segments and expanding share of wallet
Together with a team of sales managers and selected sales representatives, the interim manager examined the company's broad product portfolio. The team identified numerous products that had not previously been offered in industries such as food, chemicals or semiconductors despite potential demand.
In the next step, the interim manager worked with the team to prepare the acquisition of new customers in these areas. For example, he ran target group-specific marketing campaigns in the form of online ads, which allowed potential customers to find out more about the technical retailer's product range. The resulting customer addresses were forwarded to the sales representatives for further processing as so-called sales qualified leads via the CRM system.
As a further sales activity, existing key accounts were offered complementary items to the products they had already purchased in order to increase the so-called share of wallet.
New route-to-market strategy with a focus on high-yield products
In the next step, the interim manager jointly developed a new route-to-market strategy. On the one hand, this was based on handling the spare parts business (MRO) largely online. Secondly, the freed-up sales capacities are now being used to promote the significantly more profitable services as a development and manufacturing partner for parts and components for industry (OEM).
The focus on an improved product mix associated with the new route-to-market strategy also made it possible to streamline the sales force. This was based on a comparison of the customer and product-dependent visit capacity of the sales force (target capacity) with the actual capacity. To this end, the interim manager worked with the sales force to develop key performance indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of sales activities.
Sales force gains significant effectiveness - growth of 7 percent
The interim manager's optimization work significantly increased the sales team's output. The focus on the profitable product mix increased efficiency enormously - and as a result, growth amounted to 7 percent. The improved cost structure in the client's sales division also had a positive impact on profits.
Corona challenges overcome and works council brought on board
The results of the 8-month mandate impressed the client all the more as the work of the interim manager and the internal teams was made considerably more difficult by the contact restrictions during the corona pandemic. In addition, the interim manager's proactive communication played a major role in the works council giving up its initial resistance to the newly created transparency in the field sales force and agreeing to the new regulations.
