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Customer Centricity – Next Generation Sales

The CWS employee magazine
01/2021
CWS Hygiene Next Generation Sales

Next Generation Sales – that is the name of the award given to Sales staff who have completed a four-week training course on hybrid sales in which digital and analogue contact options are interlinked in the best possible way. “It still takes some time getting used to that we ask new customers to go into the washroom and describe what it smells like there,” says Heike Seltmann, Group Sales Director New Business Hygiene. “My team and I used to do that ourselves before the pandemic. Nowadays we ask customers whether it smells more like violets or actually rather unpleasant.” We are thus adapting our own sales model to the prevailing market situation.

Heike Seltmann, Group Sales Director New Business Hygiene
Heike Seltmann, Group Sales Director New Business CWS Hygiene
CWS Hygiene Next Generation Sales Award

Besides the topic of making digital contact with prospective customers, the four-week training course also deals with the handling of objections and problems. The course ends with the issue of virtual contract negotiation. The success is impressive: the colleagues with the NGS award are 50 percent more successful than those who have not yet taken the course.

CWS Hygiene Full-Service visualisation service industry
CWS Hygiene Full-Service visualisation office solutions

CO2 savings make for sustainable sales operations

The project is also an impressive success in the area of sustainability: whereas each salesperson at times clocked up around 30,000 kilometres per year, the switch to online sales can save around 24,000 kilometres of travel. That equates to around 80 percent less mileage and means that the car trips thus saved can cut the emission of CO2 by a cumulative total of around 4 tonnes by 2023.