Professionalize sales process and enhance virtual communication skills. The client’s challenge was to professionalize the sales team in terms of market cultivation in the form of new customer acquisition and existing customer expansion in such a way that, on the one hand, new customer acquisition is pushed via new media and, at the same time, customer communication runs “hybrid”. In this context, hybrid also means the target-oriented combination of on-site communication and virtual contact with decision-makers.

Increase in new customer sales in the machine class up to 40 tons. The specific task was to profitably increase the market share in this particular machine class in the double-digit percentage range, i.e. not through aggressive pricing, but through new customer acquisition, competitive displacement and value-added arguments. This was done in an extremely competitive market environment with high market transparency and machines with highly comparable specifications.

Increasing sales efficiency by, among other things, expanding the ability to communicate virtually with the customer. Virtual communication with customers is a challenge, especially for companies with traditional sales organizations. The requirement in this project was that in a rustic market environment, sales staff had to set standards in terms of digital communication with the customer. The goal was to significantly increase the number of contacts with decision-makers using the same sales team, while at the same time reducing travel costs and increasing closing ratios. In addition, there was the requirement that, especially in large projects, the customer’s purchasing committee, consisting of various decision-makers, could be better addressed through appealing video conferences than exclusively via telephone or on-site appointments.

Task: Highly trained scientists, most of them with doctorates, were empowered in this project to sell highly sophisticated technological solutions to business customers on an equal footing and, ultimately, to push through a justified price for them. For this purpose, the cost-based pricing approach was replaced by a value-based pricing approach. Employees were empowered to visualize the tangible benefits of the sophisticated solution, ultimately generating significantly higher sales revenue.

Passing on increased purchasing costs to customers despite existing contracts was the task in this project. Concrete and intensive needs analysis were just as much a part of the training scope as a dedicated offer presentation geared to the customer. The participants were prepared for price negotiations by means of intensive simulations in order to successfully counter price reduction attempts on the part of the purchasing department.