30. September 2022
This was the Sales Summit 2022
The transformation in sales continues to be a major challenge in the monetization of digital products and services. This became evident at our Sales Summit 2022, which took place under the motto “Pricing goes Marketing” on 20.09.2022 in Aachen. Our members such as Fresenius Medical Care, Viessmann or Worldline, project partners from the various consortium projects such as AGCO, Phoenix Contact or TLT-Turbo, but also new faces such as Findustrial, TOMRA Sorting or the Vaillant Group and others came together to exchange ideas on the sale of digital products. In addition, we were able to provide insights from our innovation projects and consortium benchmarking.
After an introductory impulse on the topic of sales by Dr. Lennard Holst, Regina Schrank went into the topic of pricing of digital products and presented options for action from the areas of customer analysis, price strategy, pricing and market launch as well as associated successful practices. First quantitative results of the consortium benchmarking study “Monetizing Smart Products” were presented by Justus Benning from FIR. Here it became clear how top performers differ from followers in the area of monetization. Finally, Alisa Friedrich highlighted the challenges in multi-level sales and presented solutions for the successful sale of digital products via a partner network, which should lead to “win-win-win” situations for manufacturers, partners and customers. The topics of our current projects were complemented by presentations from our industry speakers.
Aljoscha Mallmann, Head of Group Service Solutions at Vaillant Group, has presented the current approach to value-based design and pricing for service products in heating technology. The digital products enable remote monitoring, energy optimization and other functions that can be used to offer new profitable service contracts and save costs. Johannes Parensen, Director Sales & Marketing at GMS Development, highlighted the importance of also empowering service technicians at the customer site as salespeople. These are often the personal link to the brand and have the trust of the customers. Stefan Petritsch, Head of the Global Business & Innnovation segment at AVL, came all the way from Graz to give a presentation on how they design multi-level sales of digital products with their affiliates. Flexible business models increase the acceptance of partners and local subsidiaries and support economic planning.
In the joint exchange around the challenges and possible solutions in sales, it became clear that the challenges in the sale of digital products are consistent across industries.
This is an insight that we, as the Center Smart Services, will be addressing together with the FIR at RWTH Aachen University starting in December, and will guide interested companies to “sales excellence” in six months.
Next date: Sales Summit 19.09.2023