2.2.3 Challenges in MTPRO account management

Before going into the challenges of account management it needs to be highlighted that virtually all MTPRO market organisations have a territorial sales force structure. That means every sales engineer covers the whole product portfolio for all industry segments within a designated sales territory. The individual territories have revenue targets in terms of a percentage growth versus previous year. There are almost no particular growth targets on key customers with high revenue or sales potential.

Lack of consistent focus on larger accounts

Typically, customers at MTPRO market organisations are classified into three groups, namely [A], [B] and [C]. The [A] customers (classification criteria can be seen in chapter 2.3.1, figure 7) are the ones with the biggest potential. It is the market organisation’s intention to devote more time to them by calling on them more frequently than to [B] and [C] customers. However, due to scarce resources of our sales forces this strategy is not applied consistently in many countries. The [A] customers are randomly targeted without a special focus on narrowing the base to the most profitable ones. Sales engineers usually consider it easier to chase [B] and [C] customers in order to meet their overall revenue targets.

Sales call distribution across [A/B/C] customer groups

Following the above-mentioned intention or strategy of having a higher frequency of sales calls for [A] customers most active selling time should be devoted to this customer group. However, according to some interviews with Business Area Manager of MTPRO the resource allocation of sales engineers is not in line with the market organisation’s strategy. Table 2 gives an overview of a common time allocation with a sales engineer from MTPRO in Germany.

Table 2: Sales call distribution (Source: Interview with Michaela Lichtner, Sales Manager MTPRO Germany – appendix 1)

Lack of coverage of entire buying centre with [A] customers

There has been a strong assumption that MTPRO sales forces spend much time on dwelling on technical features with Instrumentation & Maintenance people across all customer groups (A/B/C). These customer contacts undoubtedly belong to the buying centre and have a certain influence on the decision making process. However, in order to present economical benefits such as Total cost of ownership there is also a need to stay in close contact with procurement and management people. Table 3 shows the face to face time allocation of a sales engineer in terms of various customer contacts with an individual [A] account.

Table 3: Face to Face allocation across various customer contacts (Source: Interview with Michaela Lichtner, Sales manager MTPRO Germany – appendix 1)

The outcome of this analysis proves that our sales engineers only spend one fifth of their face to face time to management level. This is rather modest considering the fact that management has a strong influence on capital investment decisions.

Lack of special treatment and solution packages to larger accounts

Since MTPRO is renowned for its superior performance and durability of its products sales engineers tend to place the emphasis on technical consultation for critical measurement loops. In applying this approach they can appear as a problem-solver with these maintenance & instrumentation people with our customers. There is nothing wrong with this approach. The issue is they stop chasing the big number of remaining loops after they have converted some or most of the critical loops to MTPRO. They face difficulties to position themselves not only as a problem-solver but also a strategic supplier to get a higher share of the customer’s total purchase volume for analytical instrumentation. A high share of wallet can only be accomplished by demonstrating the benefits of, for instance, total cost of ownership and productivity increases.

Sales force size of main competitor outnumbers the sales force of MTPRO

Our main competitor has, beside analytical instrumentation, a more comprehensive product portfolio than MTPRO has. They also offer physical instrumentation such as Flow-, Level-, Temperature- and Pressure- measurement instrumentation. Hence their sales force size to cover all instrumentation solutions in the most lucrative countries outnumbers the one from MTPRO, which in turn means they can make more frequent sales calls to customers, especially to [A] customers.