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FINLAND GROWS IN
A STATIC MARKET
Selling more effectively
Marko Tarkiainen has been Finland’s country manager for two years. He reflects on a
successful 2017 and his aspirations for the
business in 2018.
Another critical element that affects both winning
new business and customer retention is the way
we develop sales and service skills. This is not
simply a one sided equation: more effective sales
offers efficiency gains to customers as it helps
them crystallise their needs and make decisions
faster. A more effective sales force benefits both
buyer and seller.
By any yardstick, our business did well in 2017.
This is the market where 3 Step IT started in
1997. It is a mature market for 3 Step IT. It is
also a mature market for IT devices: 2017 sales
of PCs, Laptops and smartphones were more or
less flat compared to 2016.
We are building ‘Sales Culture 3.0’ to suit the
evolving way customers make their purchases
and stay ahead of our competition. Sales Culture
3.0 enhances solution selling skills, influences
the buying process and offers insight into the
motivations and interests of decision makers. As
the program runs its course it should help us win
more business, and also build our reputation as
an industry leader.
Against that background, 3 Step IT showed
healthy growth. We managed 238,000 new IT
assets, growth of 19%. We won 100 new service
customers, spread across private and public sectors, our life cycle service message continues to
be well received.
Continuous service improvement
Increasing sustainable IT
While new business is important, in a mature
market it is customer retention that is critical.
As a management team, the way we service
our customers is a continuous focus. To anticipate emerging customer concerns we started a
regular customer satisfaction survey, asking for
suggestions as well as a satisfaction rating. We
used this feedback to remove several dissatisfiers from our service delivery.
Last year remarketing production grew 15% to
over 170k units. With peak capacity constrained,
our remarketing team began preparing a move
to a new production facility, opening early in 2018.
When it is up to speed, this will double our remarketing production capacity, helping to deliver
our promise of more sustainable IT on a larger
scale. The new facility has state of the art security when handling returned assets. This comes
just in time to offer the extra reassurance that
clients will seek as new data privacy laws come
into force.
Hansel has been a customer since 2013. In 2017
we renewed their IT Leasing and Asset Management Service contract. The new contract has a
total value of about a quarter of a billion Euros,
spread over 5 years. Not surprisingly a customer
of this scale has requirements which anticipate
the needs of the market generally. So the negotiation process also made short term demands
on the service we offer. As we deliver these improvements for Hansel, we will be able to offer
them to all our customers and prospects to help
us improve our service generally.
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