Jess Westerly at Kauflauf GmbH - Case Study Example

Jess Westerly at Kauflauf GmbH College Management Westerly was very efficient as an assistant product developer at the company. First, her primary responsibilities involved understanding the market and customers besides coming up with products that met and exceeded the needs of current and prospective clients. Her effectiveness involved overreliance with field representatives and consultants in understanding customer requests and evaluating the period for meeting these requirements to the best extent possible. Hassan (2012) observed that though value proposition in marketing has a comprehensive definition, its primary baseline include setting out values that would be delivered to customers and evaluating and managing the change that occurs in the market. As such, the marketing strategies have to be aligned with the organizational strategies towards offering the best value to customers. In this case, detailed knowledge of customer needs is important, a strategy that Westerly heavily utilized in her role to lead the development of products that meet customer needs. In addition, her product development strategy targeting larger corporations was a major prospect in the company. The development of CRM products by Dart was the gate towards making a breakthrough in dealing with larger corporations at the leadership of Westerly. The adoption of Dart’s operations globally was instrumental in her dream of making Kauflauf’s success not only regionally but also globally. The adoption marked a shift from smaller to larger accounts, a transition that Westerly had worked hard to realize. As Hassan (2012) explains, value proposition involves meeting the needs of customers through articulating their needs and developing products as per customer requests. More importantly, she was important in redeploying the time used by field consultants in allocating more time to the more profitable and larger customers. Such an approach in contrast with allocating time uniformly across all classes of customers, an important step that Westerly believed could result in increased revenues though the plan had initially faced challenges. Guang & Trotter (2012) illustrate the need to understand cultural dynamics within markets to make decisions that align with the market culture and which do not offend the prospective customers. As such, cultural differences in market communication in most cases create barriers and conflicts within market segments and the sensitivity to market cultures is the key to success in operating in global markets. Westerly’s attempts to make instrumental changes in the company seemed short of understanding the operating cultures in the market leading to conflicts with organizations and some marketing consultants. The market favored working with smaller companies and developers who were more flexible and accessible than dealing directly with large corporates, which was marked and complicated bureaucracy. As the RSD teams had correctly argued, most small and mid-sized customers had over time developed into big customers and could have been the success to the firms growth. As such shifting from these clients meant more uncertain and complicated work, thereby reducing the chances of closing in sales, which could affect the company’s growth in the market. Moreover, Wesley had failed in consulting deeply before coming up with the new approach to making sales. Any decision could have been reached after extensive consultations with the market consultants and the RSDs, considering they were in direct contact with customers and t that their responsibility was to implement the very decision that they made. Failure to consult and include them in the decision-making meant that they did not own the decisions and hence were reluctant to affect them. Westerly’s attempt to redeploy RSD’s time made much sense and was the right way towards realizing the success on a global scale. First, Westerly had realized that only 35% of the consultants’ time was spent with the most valuable customers who made about 85% of the company’s revenues, which was a major failure on the part of the consultants. As such, 65% of the time was spent with less profitable customers, a major waste in both resources and valuable time that could have been used to realize growth and profitability. Davenport, Mule and Lucker (2011) argue that the use of customer analytics is the best method of placing customers into segment that could help in establishing their wants and how best to meet them in customer mapping strategies. Similarly, Westerly had realized that by classifying customers, if the time spent with the less contributing customers could be slightly reduced in favor of the time spent with more valuable customers, the result would be a significant change in revenues. This amounted to the use of factual data in decision-making, a right step in which Westerly observed the needed changes that could have led to substantial increase in the firm’s revenues, growth, and profitability. As Westerly had correctly observed her efforts in making the market analysis was much more than the efforts made to make implementations as per the observed facts. Moreover, Westerly had earned the confidence and support of the top management such as Kristoff, who had endorsed her proposal without hesitation, goodwill in her plans and abilities to make the required changes. As such, the only goodwill that Westerly lacked was from the field consultants. Though her findings were correct and articulated the real market dynamics, Wesley failed in laying down proper channels through which the observations could have been implemented. According to Feldman and Khademian (2000), it is much difficult to control teams to implement decisions in which they have no input and which they do not share, a concept that makes management more complex and challenging for managers. As such, the best approach towards decision-making and implementation would involve encouraging the participation of the people whose role would be the implementation of these decisions. In Wesley’s case, if the field consultants could have been part of the team mandated to review how best to reallocate their time to more valuable and productive segments, they could have made their most needed input in the decision making process. Consequently, the research consultants and RSDs could have owned the entire change process and could have developed the motivation to implement these decisions with dedication. Failing to meet the targeted results could have not weighed on Westerly alone but could have been blamed on the entire team. Therefore, team approach to making and implementing decisions could have realized better results than forcing decisions on people that could not have shared similar perceptions. This would be the only key to make the next attempt to restructure time reallocation succeed, a major concept that lacked in the first attempt, leading to Wesley’s failure. The change strategy would involve first using market analytics and data to analyze the market as Westerly did in finding out areas that need better approaches and management. Second would be to have a major meeting with RSDs and market consultants to present these findings and have their input and views about the observed data. The next step would involve coming up with suggestions from all the involved parties on how best to approach the case considering that the market consultants have the mandate to implement these decisions. The fact that market consultants are in direct contact with customers, they do have the valuable information needed in the change-making process. After a common ground has been found among the team members, the next step would involve coming up with goals, the timelines in which these goals have to be achieved, and establishing measurement feedback mechanisms to gauge the entire process. This would be followed by the presentation of these findings and the detailed proposal on how to meet the expected goals to the management for approval. After the proposal is approached, the next step would be to deploy the various teams involved in the decision in the market to implement all the agreed details and report regularly on their progress. There would be a need to undertake regular analysis of the process and the results obtained to gauge the success and challenges and make any necessary changes were necessary for guiding and controlling the change process. Finally, the team involved in setting up the goals and implementing them would have to meet to edit the entire process and come up with recommendations to make the change process much better. The implementation plan would involve deploying the teams responsible for the implementation process in the market and then making regular, and constantly follow up on the process results. This would be achieved by opening communication channels to facilitate the interaction between the team members and creation of a rapport between all the team members. Such interaction would encourage sharing of information. The gauged performance has then to be paired with the expected performance as set out, and any variation noted. Moreover, the implementation plan would involve detailed research and development programs particularly concerning making the less productive customers more productive while still spending more time w with the more productive customers with an aim of leveraging the market and all customer segments and encouraging growth of the smaller and less productive sectors. References Davenport, H. T., Mule, D. L. & Lucker, J. (2011). Know What Your Customers Want Before They Do. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2011/12/know-what-your-customers-want-before-they-do Feldman, S. M. & Khademian, A. M. (2000). Managing for inclusion: balancing control and participation. International Public management Journal, 3, 149-167. Guang, T. & Trotter, D. (2012). Key issues in cross-cultural business communication: Anthropological approaches to international business. African Journal of Business Management, 6 (22), 6456-6464. Hassan, A. (2012).The value proposition concept in marketing: How customers perceive the value delivered by Journal firms. International of Marketing Studies, 4(3), 68-87. Read More