Synopsis: International Pump Manufacturer — OEM Market Entry Strategies for Markets in Europe
Our client’s need was simple: to learn how to grow business outside their home market. While the client had operations in each major market in Europe, their share was minimal and their marketing organization fragmented from country to country. We started the study by spending time with country managers to develop an understanding of their product lines, distribution and markets. We then conducted research into the buying behavior of OEMs who could be, or were, their customers in each country to identify the best segments for our client, based on their product capabilities and the competitive landscape.
A key finding of our research in talking with OEMS and the client’s country based sales teams was that the OEM targeting was performed randomly, and luck had more to do with success than strategy. The research had identified the highest priority markets and the customer requirements for our client to win the business. The fact that different customer segments required significantly different marketing support meant that our client would have to target customer segments both on opportunity and marketing requirements, as they did not have the resources to provide the unique needs of each customer segment.
The led to the development of an opportunity matrix that aligned the size of the opportunity with the customer’s marketing requirement. From this matrix our client could determine how much of the market opportunity he could address based on the resources it would take to compete in selected customer segments.
The result or our work was our client had the ability to become a much more focused and effective marketer in each country. Using our research the company could target customer segments that had similar needs across multiple countries and address these needs with a highly targeted, efficient set of resources thereby dramatically increasing their sales and sales effectiveness.