Customer Centricity in the Industrial Sector
A large German industrial company wanted to be more customer-centric and work closer with key distributors to win in their markets. After one year, they were able to enter new growth sectors together which made a massive contribution to their growth in 2022-2023.
The Challenge
How might we establish Schaeffler Industrial as the preferred partner for key distributors and increase our overall market share versus competitors?
In 2021, the President of Schaeffler Industrial APAC wanted to find ways to break the status quo that had been established against key competitors. To do this, he had a strong conviction that by finding ways to become more customer-centric, they would find ways to outperform competitors.
The Industrials sector usually work with distributors to bring products and services to end customers. A customer-centric approach had not been the conventional way of strategy development in the company. Historically, the company would develop their strategy, share it with distributors, and hope that they get onboard and find ways themselves to bring the strategy to market.
This time, the company wanted to listen to key distributors and hear their thoughts on what Schaeffler needed to do to support them win in key sectors.
Our Approach
We ran internal and external workshops to answer this key question:
“If Schaeffler could help you succeed in your strategy, what could we do to contribute to your success?”
We first ran an internal workshop with their commercial teams from across APAC where we made the case for customer-centricity, introduced new frameworks to visualise customer value, and then we applied these frameworks on a key distributor in their respective markets.
Next, we brought in a key distributor to go through the same process and frameworks so we could see how well-aligned our understanding was. With new insights shared candidly from the distributor, the commercial team was then tasked with preparing a go-to-market strategy, where Schaeffler would better address their value drivers and incorporate their ideas of how the company could help them succeed overall, and in specific sectors.
A short time later, the action plan was presented and accepted by their key distributor, and the newly co-created go-to-market (GTM) strategy was implemented.
This process of internal and external workshops was run several more times within each country by the commercial teams to develop customer-centric strategies with key distributors.
The Results
Schaeffler Industrial observed record-breaking sales over the next two financial years.
They moved on to penetrate a completely new industry through strong distributor partnership, and within two years, the company became one of the top three suppliers in Asia Pacific.
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