Marketing and Sales

The number of challenges faced by sales & marketing organizations has risen sharply since the end of the 90s. Globalization opened the door for increased competition from formerly separate markets and the appearance and growth of competitors, especially from Asia – first from Japan and later China, India and soon other “tiger” countries – has put traditional European and American companies under massive pressure.

The first answer was to “defend” their traditional markets and customers by competing on price and product quality alone. Companies started cost restructuring programs, but soon realized that this challenge could only be answered by efforts across the entire value chain, from identifying the customer’s needs to changing and re-pricing product and service portfolios to suit their prospective clients.

Sales and marketing can no longer rely on an established and seemingly loyal customer base and need to adjust to a toughening set of requirements. Sales teams need to work closely with their innovation departments to develop the right products, “search” for new markets and customer groups, think about the make-up of their markets, customers and products, and then decide on the right approach to customers on a global level. They need to find the right channels and embrace change by transforming processes, systems, organizations, and the people at the heart of all of this.

The ultimate goal is to promote profitable growth for the medium and long term. In order to instil the required flexibility, Kienbaum has developed an approach to achieve the changes that are necessary and to give sales and marketing organizations the ability to implement further sustainable changes to cope with the challenges of the future.