Teamwork makes the dream work
In the process of creating new structures and processes, great emphasis was thus placed on building a strong marketing team. R2K, which has become the internal name for the trio (Robin, Robin and Karin), all have a humble, non-prestigious and transparent approach to the various tasks and challenges the team faces.
“Working with the team at HERE is characterized by a mutual and natural exchange where everyone complements each other incredibly well. Team building is the cornerstone of everything, we set goals and reach them with joint efforts, each with what they are best at. The commitment of the guys easily makes them feel like your best colleagues!”
Karin Gustafsson, Marketing Communicator, TRUMPF
Together, the marketing department has also set up new control and follow-up documents to create an efficient way of working and a clearer overview of what needs to be done. Weekly meetings are interspersed with operational workshops where the goal is to constantly make everything a little better, one step at a time.
The collaboration began in 2021
The wholly owned Swedish subsidiary with offices in Alingsås outside Gothenburg had experienced strong growth with good profitability in the Nordic markets in recent years. When Anssi Jansson took over as CEO in 2020, there were therefore several departments that suffered from a lack of resources and the marketing department was no exception.
The organization had grown and thus also the requirement for the marketing department as operational support for the salespeople, at the same time they wanted to develop the marketing department towards more actively generating qualitative leads. For Karin Gustafsson, who has worked as a marketing communicator at TRUMPF Sweden for the past ten years, the first step towards a solution was to bring in external reinforcement in the form of Robin Pettersson and Robin Olsen from HERE, who since early 2021 are now acting as marketing manager and marketing assistant respectively on a consulting basis.
“The first thing we did was to sit down together and look through the current situation, what has been done historically? What do you measure? What costs do you have? We also discussed what skills we possessed in the newly developed team and listed strengths and weaknesses as well as what you thought was the absolute most fun to work with. We then worked out a strategy that we were all convinced would elevate TRUMPF as a brand while also aiming to more effectively generate leads. After that, it was easy to identify and distribute work tasks and recruit additional consultants for the tasks that could not be handled within the group.”
Robin Pettersson, Digital Growth Specialist, HERE
A proven and successful strategy
Early in the collaboration, the marketing department agreed on a central strategy that would pervade all work and which also aligned with the expectations from the head office in Germany; the successes that TRUMPF's customers experience must be highlighted through well-written customer reports and then marketed in relevant channels for TRUMPF's target groups.
“The customer journey in B2B and the industrial sector is complex and the products and services are difficult to explain with a few simple lines, customer stories thus felt like an obvious way forward as it gives a broader picture of what a company can actually deliver. We then advertise these customer stories via, among other things, LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads to name a few, and already after a couple of months we got a huge response to our strategy from both sellers and customers, even though we were still a long way from the goal”
Robin Olsen, Digital Growth Specialist, HERE
During the journey, the strategy was continuously evaluated and, as the lessons learned, also optimized channel selection, ad design, tonality in writing and much more.
Follow-up and results
In close dialogue with CEO Anssi Jansson, the marketing department regularly reports valuable insights and results to the management team. Something which, however, was problematic at first as the growing sales organization lacked a functioning follow-up work in the CRM system assigned to them from the head office in Germany, this made it difficult to follow up if a lead from the marketing department ever resulted in a deal.
The sales manager Stefan Wallén had previously identified that they lacked an inside salesperson who could relieve the administrative aspects and both support and train the salespeople in the CRM system, while the marketing department was in need of a person who could act as a bridge between sales and market and at the same time assist with valuable insights about the leads that had been generated.
"With the support of our CEO Anssi, together with those in charge at head office, we identified a role that could solve both our and the sales department's problems, a Lead Manager whose task would be to work for both the sales and marketing departments. Shortly afterwards, we succeeded in recruiting Jenni Kantvik, who previously had a similar role at Bosch, and it didn't take long before we had together developed a completely new routine for the follow-up work," says Pettersson happily.
With Jenni in place in the team, 50% in marketing and 50% in sales, the long-awaited bridge had been created and the opportunities to optimize marketing quickly reached new heights. It was now possible to track and report everything from leads generated using marketing, to quote value, to actual deals.
"With the help of Google Looker Studio, we have collected and visualized key figures and other relevant data from both advertising accounts, CRM systems and business systems, which means that we can now follow the entire process connected to Leads. Everything from an initial request all the way to a quote and finally to a deal. With this, we can now also follow important metrics such as cost per lead, average order value per lead and thus calculate the return we get on our marketing budget," continues Olsen.
Thanks to Jenni, you now work closely with the sales department and the sales manager and have individual contact with the salespeople to ensure that the marketing efforts are supportive. Something that gives insights into how qualitative the leads you generate via the marketing efforts actually are, at the same time as you get ongoing feedback from the salespeople about how their customers perceive TRUMPF's presence in the various digital channels. Part of it is also about understanding the soft values that are sometimes difficult to measure. The information is then used to develop the way of working in a relevant direction where the goal is to generate more and better business at all times.
“The team from HERE have done an amazing job in creating a marketing department that now fuels our sales organization with qualified leads. While Robin and Robin are great strategists, they also have a great team of specialists behind them making it all possible”
Anssi Jansson, CEO, TRUMPF Scandinavia
