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Best of Consulting 2021
There is time for celebration and there is time for analysis.
Our awarded project was a strategic growth initiative in the automotive industry.
The challenge
An automotive brand contacted us with an ambitious target: they wanted to increase their share in a Western European market by 40% within 2 years.
The competitive landscape
The market was saturated. Electrification was only beginning to gain traction. Differentiation possibilities for the brand in terms of product portfolio or pricing were limited.
Our approach
We thoroughly analysed potential strategic levers for the brand to gain market share. We prioritised these levers and defined growth accelerators. What was new for our client was, that we did not (only) define directly beneficial measures, but also some very long-term actions with an indirect effect on sales performance.
When the COVID-19 crisis started, we did not stop any measures, but adapted every action to make it executable in any Corona-related setting and focused every sub-project on potential competitive gains in the current environment. Needless to say that innovative digital solutions played a crucial part.
A winning factor
Our client! The responsible managers followed our long-term, hands-on and optimistic approach and did not get nervous along the way due to potentially slow improvements or roadblocks. At least not too nervous.
The result
Our client was able to register a record year 2019 and outperform the market by 35% in terms of sales evolution in the Corona-struck year 2020. The overall target of improving the market share by 40% was reached and the market was named as the brand’s best worldwide market in terms of innovation.
Do you have an ambitious goal for your organisation and are you looking for ways to reach it? Get in touch with us to discuss.
Best of Consulting 2021
We are still very humbled and delighted to have had the chance to receive an award last week in WirtschaftsWoche’s 2021 Best of Consulting contest.
What makes this extremely special is that the Best of Consulting Award is the only consulting contest in Germany that only focuses on the actual consulting work and success in one or several concrete projects. A jury from Wirtschaftswoche assesses the accomplished work and the impact of the consultancy. Next to the jury’s verdict the actual client’s feedback plays a vital part in the final score.
This year we participated with one project and did so in probably one of the most sought-after categories: Marketing / Sales.
Our winning project was a strategic growth initiative in the saturated and extremely competitive automotive industry.
We will present the project in more detail next week.
Photo ©️ by Frank Beer
The Best of Consulting Awards 2021 by WirtschaftsWoche
Yes, we did it again! We are extremely proud to have been selected by WirtschaftsWoche for a second time in a row in their prestigious consulting industry contest: the Best of Consulting Awards. A big thank you goes out to our client and to everyone who made this happen. Details to follow.
The hunter-farmer sales model
The hunter-farmer sales model was invented and first put in place in the American insurance industry in the 1870s. As a subscription model at the time, insurance sales executives had to find new customers as well as collect monthly subscription fees from existing customers. Over time this led to less and less time invested in new customer acquisition. To combat this, two distinct sales roles, a “hunting” sales executive and a “farming” sales executive were implemented. The hunters were chasing new customers, whereas the farmers were collecting monthly subscription fees from insurance customers.
In today’s world, a hunter-farmer differentiation is still regularly used and even more often discussed.
The attractiveness of the hunter-farmer sales model lies in its potentially easy solution for a complex and ever-present challenge: creating high-performing new customer acquisition activities and combining them with the systematic development of existing customer relations.
A big problem of the hunter-farmer model lies in its low motivational value for the sales executives. The hunters’ objective is to work on (often ice-cold) prospects, make them aware of the company’s services and products, get them interested and move them towards some kind of purchasing volition. However, once the hunters are successful, they move back to the starting point and have to start from scratch. To keep hunters motivated, sales organisations try to use monetary incentives. Nevertheless, in the long run most hunters lose motivation and either quit the company or move on to other sales roles.
Farmers on the other side tend to develop an expectation of being “fed” with nicely developed leads and tend to show a limited degree of dynamism.
The hunter-farmer sales model’s biggest shortcoming, however, is its lack of customer centricity. A prospected customer, who (after some time) agrees to put his/her confidence in the sales executive (the hunter), only to then find out that that sales executive is no longer responsible for his/her business, will hardly be delighted by the customer experience.
Alternative
Our recommendation for the prospecting & account management dilemma is a combination of the hunting farmer and the farming hunter.
If you are interested to find out more, get in touch with us.
Best of Consulting Award 2020
We are extremely proud to have been chosen as a winner among a total of 167 consultancies in this year’s Best of Consulting Awards by Germany’s biggest business magazine WirtschaftsWoche
In our first participation in the contest, our successful project helped our client partner in the development of a cloud-based IT system. Our role was to take care of the conception of the final user interface, the project management and the optimisation of the business / IT / integrator interface.
Apart from the excellent system itself, what was outstanding about the project, was the fact that both deadline and budget were beaten.
Thanks a lot to everyone at the client partner and all other stakeholders involved.
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