Client Overview
This is a case study of our earlier project sales channel review in South Korea for a European Heavy Machinery Manufacturer.
Customer is a major brand in rock/stone crushing with global reach and own subsidiaries in many Asian countries. The customer has been in Korean markets for decades, first with their own sales organisation and currently many years through distributor supported by one own senior salesperson in country, APAC sales team and market intelligence unit in the HQ.
Customer used to sell in Korea through its own organisation but long time ago dissolved it’s own sales organisation and assigned a “big and the best” distributor in Korea for their main brand. For years, the customers own organisation, both APAC and HQ, had a feeling that sales are slowing down even though market data from the distributor showed a steady market share. The customer’s own market intelligence unit was not able to produce reliable market information due to language issues. The customers Korean distributor has EUR 200 million turnover as is the best performing distributor of global top brands in heavy machinery.
The customer asked us to complete a Sales channel review in South Korea for them. We have earlier completed similar project for the same customer in Thailand.
Our Solution
We completed a fairly standard sales channel review in South Korea, where we gathered reliable market data, engaged in ten high level interviews among the customer’s end-users, and organised a workshop between our customer, distributor and one of the key-clients theirs. All these were facilitated in English and in Korean to minimize any potential misunderstandings arising from language barriers.
Gathering market data started with evaluating addressable market size for the customer’s offering in Korea. Even though the customer had been in Korean markets for decades, they lacked a clear understanding of the market size and ‘where’ it was located. This provided the customer a clear understanding of their position in the market and evaluate how accurate the current distributor’s data was.
Following the quantitative work, we completed ten expert interviews among key stakeholders related to the customers business in Korea. Most of the interviews were done with either current or potential end-customers’ top management, owners or other decision makers. Understanding how the end-customer views our customer’s offering and how they prefer to make purchasing decisions gave a clear understanding to the customer what needs to be done in Korea to improve their sales performance.
On top of providing the customer a clear set of reports, we also organised a few workshops for the top management of the current distributor and our customers APAC organisation. Additionally, we gave full briefing of our findings to the customer’s top management in the HQ.
Some of the key skills we brought to the table were:
- Communication skills in several key languages (including Korean and English)
- Communication skills on several key topics (including sales, strategy, and legal topics)
- Access to any level (from technical to owner) discussions relevant to the customer’s case.
- Strategical and practical thinking, focusing on developing successful sales channels.
- Cross-cultural understanding and inter-personal skills.
Results
The customer decided, after several failed rounds of discussion with their distributor to revitalise sales, to change their Korea distributor. One of their key-clients in Korea is a conglomerate who had expressed their interest to become the new distributor for the customer’s machinery. Facing this type of major decision was “easy to be confident when we are supported this high-quality details Asian Insiders provided”.
“The discussion on all the issues we were facing in Korea took a huge positive turn once Asian Insiders joined the team”.
The active involvement of our customer’s APAC team was important to the success of the project. These types of projects are always the customer’s internal decision, where our role is more towards facilitating the decision and providing data and market insights to support the decision. The customer knows their offering and organisation the best, while we know the Korean markets and business extremely well. Today, the customer, is in much better position in evaluating their distributors or sales partners in APAC.
Following the sales channel review in South Korea, the customer assigned us to complete similar assignment in Japan. Discussion is on the way for similar projects in Taiwan and the Philippines.
