Partner Search: Contacting Potential Partners
Our client was a supplier of consumables, with manufacturing in the Nordics and sales offices and sales partners localized on many global markets. The company operates in 4 segments, two of which bringing majority of revenues, hence being priority segments. Sales happens through direct B2B relations, hence on foreign markets the company has either own sales offices or sales partners.
Sales partner in Poland
The company has a sales partner in Poland for long years. The partner is an importer type of a company, whose task is to sell to all Client segments. For some years already it has became clear that, although well performing in one of the priority segments, the partner cannot make it successful in another segment.
Situation in the underperforming priority segment in Polish market was not easy for the Client, whose volume products, although of superior quality are a commodity good and face a harsh price-based competition. Additionally the Partner lacked solid value proposition that would augment the Client product and create an attractive offer. Hence the Partner position in the underperforming segment was not strong enough to get successful.
After testing few different possibilities the Client decided to take over control on sales channels in the underperforming segment. The company used its contacts to identify alternative partners and contacted those. The contact was in English language, which is a rare skill among personel of locally operating distributors. As a result only two companies replied.
Direct contacting of potential partners
Then the Client contacted us for support in reaching the right people and initiating the relations. Market.Open complemented the longlist with several additional companies, along with their size, location (mapping) and current portfolio information. Together with the Client we prioritized 13 companies for contacting. Then on behalf we contacted the companies and 8 of the companies were actually interested to be contacted. Our contacts were quickly followed up by the client and one month later the client was visiting the most potential partners.
The service was based on our partner search methodology, however the client had already its’ preferences so our initial research was supplementary to the client actual knowledge, whereas the effective, direct cold call contacting was the enabling factor of the service.