Capital goods industry: trends in sales targets 2019
The latest expert barometer from sales consultants Peter Schreiber & Partner shows that Most companies want to achieve better prices in their current markets and with their existing customers in 2019. This points to increased competition.
"Which sales targets have the highest priority in your company in 2019?" This is what the management and sales consultancy Peter Schreiber & Partner (PS&P), Ilsfeld near Heilbronn, which specializes in the capital goods industry, wanted to know. For this purpose, it conducted an online survey of sales managers in the DACH region in the 1st quarter of 2019, called Expert Barometer. Each of the 204 participants was able to name three of 13 specified sales targets.
Grant fewer discounts
The expert barometer revealed that the most frequently named sales goal for 2019 is "Achieve better prices, grant fewer discounts" - in other words, achieve a good profit margin (48 percent). In second place comes the goal "Acquire new or competitor customers" (39 percent), just ahead of "Exploit existing markets/customers" (38 percent).
If you compare the 2019 survey results with those of 2016, the last time PS&P conducted an expert barometer with the same question, you will notice: The sales goals "Achieve better prices" and "Acquire new customers" have swapped places. This is mainly due to the fact that in 2019, only 39 percent of respondents named the topic of acquiring new customers as one of their top three sales goals instead of 60 percent previously, while the goal of "achieving better prices" shows a strong increase in importance ( 2016: only 39 percent; 2019: 48 percent).
The price in focus again
Peter Schreiber, owner of PS&P, sees the reason for this in the fact that it was quite easy for the companies to acquire new customers due to the booming markets in the past years. Currently, however, the market environment is "rather difficult" in many sectors, such as the German industrial pillars automotive and mechanical and plant engineering - as evidence of this, only the keywords "trade war between the USA and China", Iran, Brexit and technology change are mentioned here. According to Schreiber, many companies are therefore pursuing manufacturers of industrial and capital goods are currently "pursuing a defensive, consolidating rather than growth-oriented sales strategy". This assumption is supported by the fact that the sales objective "Make greater use of existing markets/customers" also shows a fairly high percentage increase compared with 2016 (from 32 to 38 percent).
Better exploit existing markets
The survey results also partly reveal how the companies intend to achieve the goals of achieving a high profit margin and "Exploit existing markets/customers more fully" - among other things by stepping up sales of spare parts and services. This sales goal was named by 24 percent of the sales chiefs surveyed as one of their top 3 sales goals in 2019 (only 18 percent in 2016).
In addition, 21 percent want to push "Web aided selling" in B2B sales, i.e., make greater use of customer and company data that is already available or can be generated with the help of modern information and communications technology to win new, follow-up and additional orders.
Make better use of enterprise data
According to Peter Schreiber, this shows that "the trend topics of Big Data and digital transformation do not stop at B2B sales," and they will become all the more important as companies face the need to rethink their sales strategies due to changing market conditions. This is why, Schreiber suspects, companies will increasingly train their employees in the areas of "selling services" and "web aided selling," among others, in the coming years - as they are still largely uncharted territory for many sales employees.
Source: www.schreiber-training.de
