Digital Sales & Marketing is focused on customers. Freudenberg Sealing Technologies (FST) is aiming to attract new customers with digital services. These offerings are expected to provide both new and existing customers with the best possible experience from the very first click to the delivery of the product – and even beyond.
Purchasing behavior has fundamentally changed. And the transformation process is ongoing. “Online” has long been more than just a trend. It is a reality that we live and breathe, in our personal lives and in the corporate world’s business-to-business (B2B) segment. “Growing numbers of B2B customers want to buy products digitally. B2B customers also do extensive research on companies and their products before they even consider turning to a sales representative,” said Daniel Blender, Manager, Digital Sales & Marketing.
This applies to the sealing business as well. The claim of being wherever the customer is, has another (online) aspect. FST is preparing for this new reality in marketing, business development and sales. For example, the EASY ordering platform already makes it easy and convenient for more than 12,000 FST customers to select and order more than a half million Freudenberg and Dichtomatik products. More than 400,000 order items were received at FST via EASY in 2021. This is a growing trend.
The launch of the latest EASY generation has been underway since mid-July, first in Austria and soon in the entire FST world. It includes the latest technologies and an improved user interface, with real-time information on pricing and availability. It is also faster and more secure than ever, even from mobile end-devices. There is delivery status tracing and an improved search function. The system is also open to more product configurators. Since August, the e-catalog has been directly integrated into the EASY platform for the first time. The virtual assistant Carla fields questions.
Customers can initiate orders aasily and efficiently with a mouse click
“These days, it is important to offer customers a high degree of user-friendliness. The customers themselves have the best idea of what they want. So we arranged for the feedback from our regular customer surveys to flow into the EASY update,” Blender said. And the EASY Business Connector offers customers – especially those who order very often – the chance to connect their inventory management systems directly into the FST platform. This allows them to initiate orders conveniently and efficiently in their own system with the click of a mouse.
At Digital Sales & Marketing, Christophe Meyer and his Digital Business Development team handle digital customer solutions such as EASY. “We want to use digital tools to optimize the user experience across the entire ‘customer journey,’ from the first click on our website to after-sales service. To make the journey as easy and convenient as possible for the customer, we put on our ‘customer glasses,’” Meyer said. The best way to do that is direct contact with customers and the local sales teams most familiar with the customers’ needs.
Qualified contacts to generate sales
Led by Jakob Kwiatkowski, the second team, Marketing & Lead Generation, has the job of attracting potential and current customers to FST. The goal is to generate the maximum number of qualified contacts – or leads – and pass them on to sales. The team uses a variety of marketing tools to accomplish this. The starting point is the customer friendly design of the website www.fst.com, followed by continuous search engine optimization and advertising, and finally conventional trade fairs and virtual events. Campaigns on social media such as LinkedIn are proving to be key drivers. Currently, more than 75,000 followers on the platform follow news from Freudenberg Sealing Technologies. “Our marketing activities go wherever our customers are. For example, with our marketing on LinkedIn, we were able to reach more than 5.5 million users in our target group with well over 100 campaigns in the past 12 months,” Kwiatkowski said.
Again and again, the virtual and real worlds are able to interact with one another. The dividing line between analog and digital is being blurred. For example, if perspective customers download a sales sheet or detailed information in a white paper, they not only receive additional information or reminders automatically via email. The appropriate sales representatives are informed about the actions and can personally contact the parties. Ideally, an automated data transfer to the customer relationship management (CRM) system takes place simultaneously. Not all of this is a reality yet. But it will soon come to pass.
To sum up: the activities of the Marketing & Lead Generation team are basically designed to attract new and existing customers to FST, its products and its services. The goal is to awaken interest, inform, and pave the way for new business. The Digital Business Development team has another job: making the customers’ business relationship with FST as straightforward as possible with the help of digitalized services. “The task is ongoing. It requires ever closer and more intensive cooperation with sales channels, the divisions and IT. We jointly define what we want to achieve,” Blender said. The direction has been set: the goal is to generate business with digital support and increase customer satisfaction.
