Enabling B2B sales team to deliver tailored value solutions to strategic accounts of a leading MNC brand in industrial consumables segments

BACKGROUND

unlocking value beyond products

Delivering customized value solutions to strategic customers in B2B space

We worked with the B2B team of industrial consumables business of a leading global energy giant headquartered in UK. This division caters to various industrial businesses like aerospace, automotive, construction, metals, mining, machine manufacturing, sugar production and wind energy.

The solutions provided by our client to their customers were fluid consumables for various applications in the process of manufacturing or equipment maintenance such as industrial coolants, industrial cleaners, rust preventives, deforming agents, hydraulic fluids & general lubricating oils.

Our client wanted to develop a digital tool that could enable the sales teams comprising of key account managers and technical service managers to engage with their strategic accounts, help unlock mutual value & also communicate it in a professional way. The key idea was to take the customer offers beyond product & pricing to value discussions ensuring business sustenance, upgrading to higher performance products and providing a premium experience to customers

CHALLENGE

deliver & communicate incremental value

KAMs solution primarily focused on product, pricing & commercial terms

  • Value added activities delivered during the engagement period are not captured and presented; as a result customers perceive lower value addition from sales teams
  • During negotiations or renewal of contracts KAMs fail to leverage these value drivers as trading variables resulting in lower price realization
  • Strategic accounts are very demanding and expect high level of service from the KAM. Most of their time and bandwidth is consumed in managing day to day transactions and troubleshooting with limited attention to building incremental value for the customer.

Opportunities to spot or deliver value missed

  • KAMs are more focused on the deals and fail to spot opportunities to add and showcase value to customers
  • The nature of business being technical & B2B, value sources are complex to compute & present, KAMs especially new to business are not well equipped or confident to execute this and hence do not make a good attempt
  • Even if the KAMs are competent the sheer number of possible value sources for combinations of industry sector, applications, metallurgy involved & products recommended can be huge & hence spotting them in the first place itself can be easily missed

Value communication was non-standardized

  • Communication of value addition was not standardized often based on KAMs ability to create the right presentations
  • A defined structure for making an impactful presentation or customizing it to the sector, application and the customer was missing
  • Formal value measurement and realization process was absent
  • Having delivered value a process to track and measure value was absent
  • Value delivered over multiple engagements, projects & periods for a client were in silos and projecting the complete picture was not achievable
  • The customer also did not realize the big picture of value delivered

SOLUTION

smart digital tool for KAMs

As we started to develop a digital tool for the B2B sales team we realized that the business context was quite diverse and complex with multiple segments, strategic clients with high business impact, highly technical applications and multiple product alternatives to address them. We also sensed that initial discussions on scope did not do full justice to the business requirements that had many more finer layers to analyze to develop a holistic product.

The Contextual Enquiry

  • We conducted a contextual enquiry covering internal and external stakeholders to mine some first hand information helping us deliver a business solution packaged in the form of a digital tool.
  • The exercise was done over 40 days on around 23 B2B customers in diverse segments & applications, spending an entire day or two at their factories or sites to get in depth insights.
  • The outcome was a clear mapping of how the value delivery mechanism could work in a B2B industrial business environment right from capturing customer needs to measurement & communication of value delivered.

Value Selling Process

  • Customer need identification: This includes profiling of customers and capturing their baseline data. Mapping applications for which solutions can be designed. Identifying the sources of value that can be proposed.
  • Value Computation: In this stage we look at computing value that can be unlocked for the customer. The value can be both tangible or monetary as well as intangible benefits that can be delivered to the customers.
  • Value Realisation: Finally it is equally important to get customer buy-in and hence value delivery, measurement and communication play a very crucial role.

The Tool Construct

  • The tool is a digital web-based application that enables the KAM to manage the entire value selling engagement with the customer.
  • Tool is equipped with formats to capture the right information at each stage, algorithms to recommend solutions & compute potential value that can be unlocked. It has the ability to measure value delivered over time.
  • KAM is navigated through each step of the value selling process in a guided manner to ensure standardisation in offer as well as communication.

Customer Need Identification

  • The first step is to profile the customers based on industry sector, size of operations, decision making process & people involved and baseline data of machines and equipment. A repository of close to 161 machines are already pre populated into the tool for user convenience.
  • Next is to look at the manufacturing process, map applications and other key factors such as metallurgy used, consumption patterns, performance of current solutions and set benchmarks.
  • Based on the above two factors spot gaps or enhancements that can become sources of value that can be addressed by us.
  • The tool has over 81 potential sources of values pre mapped over close to 29 unique applications over multiple industrial manufacturing sectors.

Value Computation

  • Value sources are classified using the 3P model. Product, process & people related values sources. Based on the selected value sources the tool generates custom input forms from a set of 160 possible parameters.
  • Value sources can be tangible and benefits can be computed in monetary terms or they can be intangible where the output would be more descriptive or comparative. The tool has close to 650+ products with predefined value paths linking them to applications & value sources.
  • The KAM on capturing the input parameters has to just hit the compute button & the tool will compute the value at an instant. Comparisons to benchmark & justification of value computations are also provided.
  • The tool also generates value output in visualised formats using bar charts, waterfall diagrams as well as smart infographics for easy interpretation.

Value Realization

  • The focus here is on communication of value proposed or delivered to the customer. The tool has preset communication templates to help create professional presentations to customers in a standardized way.
  • These templates are contextual to customer business segments and allow flexibility to users to customize to each customer. Tool allows KAMs to communicate directly to the customers and collaborate with them.
  • The tool provides for tracking & measuring the actual value delivered to the customer over time and compares performance to promise made. It also captures the customer lifetime value over multiple value generation projects executed till date.

IMPACT

unlocked over 6 months and counting

Fortifying strategic accounts: 82 strategic accounts

KAMs delivered value proposals to around 82 top customers in industry sectors such as automotive, metals, aerospace, sugar, wind energy and quarrying & mining. These were strategic customers with high volume at stake and by showcasing additional value delivered helped secure our business with them.

Adding value to customers: 113 value proposals were delivered

Delivering close to 1.5 value proposals per customer over 6 months indicates the level of engagement. The process does not stop here as value delivery projects progress, customers keep realizing incremental value over time.

Quantifying value to customers: 4 Cr + Incrementally delivered

4Cr is incremental value delivered to customers, which is over and above the business transactions. Which means every customer gained approximately 49Lacs in this period through the value projects executed by KAMs

Impact on business: Exponential bottomline multiplier

At a transaction level the impact was even higher as these value addition helped seal transactions between 20-100 times the incremental value delivered. This helped counter competitive offers, negotiate better commercial terms and up trade customers to more premium products.

CONTACT

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