What’s new with Commercial  Excellence?

Xpress regularly asks around about it. This time, Sergio Coleoni, Head of Global Sales, tells us how the pilot project implemented by PLA in Sales is progressing.

Within our teams, we have divided Commercial Excellence into different phases. In the first phase, we analyzed the current situation and asked ourselves whether we could negotiate higher prices or new quantities with our existing customers. We then developed five different analyses for the entire portfolio. These analyses are now automated and are available to all sales managers worldwide every morning in a kind of cockpit. This allows the managers and their teams to decide each morning whether to respond to the analyses by taking specific actions.

Analyses Help to Better Identify Potential 
The analyses make our work much easier. For example, thanks to a certain analysis, we can identify customers who no longer buy a certain product at the previous rate. A sales employee can now see this information at a glance. In the past, they would have had to open an Excel spreadsheet and check the relevant time periods to recognize the pattern. Today, this information is on their desk every morning, and the entire organization has exactly the same information at all levels. This is particularly helpful when it comes to medium-sized and smaller customers. Sales representatives usually know their largest customers very well, but can easily overlook the order history of smaller or medium-sized customers for a month or two. This could lead to them not calling the customer to better understand their new purchasing behavior. This is no longer the case. We can now react quickly and, ideally, reverse the trend. Considering how many small and medium-sized customers we have worldwide, there is considerable revenue potential here.

Avoiding Unexpected Outliers
Another important analysis is the margin outlier analysis. Here we’re presented with a chart of all the prices paid by customers for a particular product and can see at a glance which customers fall outside the predefined margin we expect. The margin is based on quantities, markets, applications, and much more. When the sales and marketing teams now check their cockpit, they immediately see a respective indicator. They can then dig deeper and decide whether the current price point is appropriate or not. The teams already carried out these kinds of analyses in the past. But this was extremely time-consuming and the results were often not comparable internationally due to different approaches. This means we are saving a lot of time and ensuring that we avoid unexpected outliers.

Generating New Business
Another tool that we didn’t have before at all is the cross-selling tool. This tool tracks all of our customers along with their five most important products, their end market, and their application. The tool then recommends that certain customers who only buy product A should also be offered product B or C. In doing so, the tool takes into account the number of customers in the specific end market or for the application. These recommendations from the tool provide the sales teams with ideas for potential new business with our existing customers. 

These are just a few examples of how we want to use the new tools for our business in the future. We still have a lot to do. After the training sessions, for example, the focus will be on improving service for our customers, optimizing customer segmentation, and much more. Ultimately, we want to standardize our business at the highest level. Our aim is for our teams worldwide to achieve top performance and to improve the understanding and reach of our business.  

Info-Box