DIGITALTRANSFER – Strategy and Organisational Development

DIGITALTRANSFER helps companies and executives to strategically seize the opportunities offered by digitalisation and implement them in their organisation.

von Dirk Otten

All Results

Result

Product Relaunch: from a “stand-alone machine” to a standard system

The Company

Internationally active mechanical engineering company based in the DACH region. 1,500 employees, several production sites worldwide. Sales and service in more than 30 countries, controlled by regional companies.

 
The Challenge

The company has launched a new product – its first new development in many years and of great strategic importance for the company’s positioning. The technical concept fills a niche in the market, the technical implementation is promising, the planned sales figures are high.
However, after two years on the market, the targets are nowhere near being met, with sales significantly below their forecast. An internal investigation of the possible causes has not produced any results. DIGITALTRANSFER is commissioned to analyse the reasons for the failure so far and thus create the basis for a successful relaunch of the product.

 
The Performance

The root cause analysis for the failure of the product should focus on the area of marketing: An internal survey has shown that the sales department has hardly requested or used any marketing materials in the past 24 months. 

After reviewing all the available documents (positioning and marketing strategy, sales training and materials, technical documents, SWOT analysis), it becomes clear that all the business areas involved, and above all the customers, need to be consulted. This results in the following procedure:

Qualitative Analysis

  • 15 one-hour qualitative interviews with internal experts from development, marketing, sales and service (including the Chief Technical Officer, sales directors of the most important international regions, “super-sellers” with good sales figures for the product, head of development, responsible marketing managers)
  • 15 qualitative interviews with customers who have bought the new product in the past 24 months
  • Merging of internal and external perspectives and crystallisation of the focus areas for the relaunch 

Quantitative Analysis

  • Review and weighting of the qualitatively determined focus areas for the relaunch in an online survey of all sales employees

The analysis – especially the customer perspective – shows that the previous sales approach for the product does not work and leads to considerable problems for the customer:

  • Up to now, the product – like the rest of the portfolio – has been sold as a “stand-alone machine” that performs its function independently without being connected to a higher-level system
  • However, the new product logic requires intelligent embedding in the customer’s process landscape, especially in the software environment 
  • If this embedding is not anticipated at the planning stage, the customer can experience massive problems, even leading to machine failure
  • These problems have been attributed by the installation team and service personnel to technical issues with the product, which could not be satisfactorily localised and resolved
  • The resulting loss of confidence in the product on the part of the sales staff has led to the regional sales companies no longer implementing head office marketing campaigns in order to avert further damage and not to jeopardise the company’s reputation through further defective installations

The relaunch concept therefore focuses on enabling the sales staff to sell the new product successfully in both the short and long term:

  • Step 1: Pilot project with top salesperson, responsible sales director, and customer to develop a scenario for a prototypical system embedding including an integrated service offer 
  • Step 2: International roll-out as the first standard system 
  • Step 3: Medium and long-term repositioning in sales and marketing
    • Establishment of standard system sales guilds as “Communities of Practice” for the sale of standard systems
      • Development of a personality requirement profile for system consulting and sales
      • Internal and external call for applications for the guild
      • Establishment of system sales guilds in all sales companies
    • Realignment of market intelligence and marketing strategy 
      • Improved segmentation of new customers: It is not an industry per se that is meaningful, but the degree of maturity of an industry; because the new product can only be successfully used once a certain degree of maturity has been reached which makes automation economically viable
  • Step 4: Measurement of success and adjustment

The Result

  • The standard system was successfully launched onto the market within three months
  • Sales of the product doubled within six months
  • Long-term restructuring of the sales organisation for standard system sales successfully implemented within 12 months

Keywords

Product Launch, Product Relaunch, Customer Insights, Market Intelligence, Standard System Sales, Guilds, Community of Practice

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