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Mr. Job, how are things going in your business unit right now?
Karsten Job: We’re all hard at work and looking forward to writing a new chapter in our PLA sales story. Since I’ve been here, we’ve never undergone a change process like this. It’s pretty exciting.

What exactly is changing?
We’ve sorted all of our approximately 1,600 direct customers into categories based on new criteria. This was initially carried out using a digital tool. The sales team then double-checked the results. We categorized our customers into four groups. The largest group, which includes roughly 1,100 customers, requires little sales resources but also has little growth potential. Then we identified the customers who already have a high market share but are hardly growing at all. We definitely want to keep these customers, which is why we named this group Defend. The Focus group is growing with the market, and we want to grow with it. The last group is the Grow group. We see the greatest growth potential with this group, even if – or specifically because – it doesn’t yet account for as much of our revenue. With these four groups, we’re now looking to the future and want to retain customers who will perhaps be the strongest players in the market in the future. We should be done assigning all of our customers to one of the four market segments by the end of the year, at which point we can start implementing the changes.

How will this impact your sales representatives’ day-to-day work?
We need to reposition ourselves based on this forward-looking approach – customers with significant growth potential require more of our attention. It used to be normal for a sales representative to be responsible for up to 50 customers. We no longer consider this to be effective. We will increasingly rely on digital channels and distributors for our customers with low growth potential. This is how we will reduce the amount of direct sales resources we allocate to this group. However, the remaining 500 or so customers require such a high level of attention, especially in the Grow group, that in the future some sales reps will only be responsible for four to eight customers. This will allow us to focus on the group in which we see the greatest value.

Won’t the teams need training for such a major change?
Our entire team is experienced and qualified. I have no doubt in my mind that everyone on the team will get on board with our concept. We also have clear guidelines for what we expect from each customer contact and what our objectives are for them. We make distinctions here, too – does the customer require personal visits or are they more interested in communicating via digital channels? The employees who take care of the “digital” customers are part of the Inside Sales team and, of course, are responsible for a larger number of customers. Overall, we will be emphasizing the service aspect in the future. When it comes to our customers with growth potential, we will increase the availability of our technical support and marketing employees as needed. We want to be our customers’ partner and support them in their endeavors to the best of our abilities.

How is your team responding to these drastic changes?
The feedback has been extremely positive. We got everyone involved in this process from the start. We will now be holding three large meetings with the teams in the Americas, APAC, and EMEA regions by the end of the year where will present and discuss our concepts. Incidentally, they can also be implemented in the other BUs. To ensure that our concept is implemented optimally, it is important that the teams use the customer relationship management system. We are currently in the process of developing new features for it. They will enable us to define our objectives at the customer level based on the available data and then implement them as efficiently as possible. This way, we will learn much more about our customers and the market. As a result, this expanded knowledge will not only help us, but also everyone in the other departments or even other BUs with their projects.