ComEx Academy in the USA
More knowledge leads to more sales

Rob Castaneda reports:
The Commercial Excellence Academy focuses on growth initiatives. And there is still a lot of room for improvement. For various reasons – such as the pandemic, acquisitions and internal obstacles – LANXESS had become too focused on internal matters. Now we had to refocus on our customers. The training brought everyone together: We gathered ideas on how we could improve and work together across BUs. In my more than eight years at LANXESS, this was a first for me, and I really appreciated it.

MPP and PLA have mutual customers in the water treatment, agriculture and plastics sectors. My colleague Michael Bearer, BU PLA, and I had already noticed a year earlier that we had a very large overlap of mutual customers. At that time, we decided to work more closely together. Now we used the Academy to formalize this.

The benefits of this kind of cooperation were already apparent with a mutual customer.
This customer is important to both MPP and PLA. We knew that it still had growth potential for us. PLA is in closer contact with the contact person in the purchasing department than we are. Thanks to PLA, we now have information that we can use to generate further growth with this customer.

Specifically, we have identified five important CASE accounts in our training courses. Our goal is to coordinate these major accounts in order to discover growth opportunities and potential collaborations. Another important aspect is that customers do not try to play the BUs off against each other. Recently, there have been cases where customers have told us that MPP and PLA have made different statements about pricing structures with regard to customs duties. We want to either avoid such situations or have a good explanation in advance as to why the BUs approach certain issues differently.

Due to the specialization of our individual BUs, each of us must maintain contact with customers. However, we must convey a consistent message across all BUs. In addition, we should always look for further opportunities to offer our customers solutions beyond the current offerings of the individual BUs. We need to find ways to leverage existing relationships between the business units and customers to increase LANXESS's overall sales.

We want to create a culture where collaboration between business units becomes the norm. There are still many opportunities for growth. In fact, MPP and PLA recently had a joint meeting with an agricultural company.