A consumer goods company seeks growth from renewing its digital sales strategy

Challenge

A global consumer goods company had made several digital sales launches, but the digital sales maturity level varied between regions. In addition, the company lacked a coherent big picture and had clearly been postponing decision making in this area. There was a need to identify key questions to be tackled and find knowledge and capability gaps regarding digital sales. Finally, the roles and responsibilities of headquarters and regions needed clarification.

Brave the future

The project started by engaging key people globally to identify the hot topics and open questions in different parts of the organization. In addition, we analyzed the starting points also regarding current digital sales maturity in different channels and regions. Key questions to be addressed more thoroughly were related to, for example, how strongly the company should aim to establish direct consumer relationships and how they should deal with Amazon.

The second phase focused on finding answers in a co-creation mode. August worked with the global group and the regions to form the strategic guidelines needed to go forward. The new digital sales strategy defined a clear structure for topics decided on a group level and where regions have the freedom to act themselves.  Once the big picture was clear, August continued to work with the company on one drill-down topic: forming a consumer data strategy.

Impact

The revised digital sales strategy gave the company and its regions a common direction for future: a raditional B2B company started its journey to become a B2B2C company¹. The high-level investments needed were now also defined and the responsibilities between the group and regions settled.

1) A company that consumers will recognize even though the company offers its products to the market via another business.