“Build on the momentum we built up in 2019 to deliver further sales growth in 2020.”
That’s the challenge laid down at our 2020 ‘kick-off’ and sales conference held at the Hilton St George’s Park Hotel in Derbyshire this week.
Managing Director Stephen Ewer said: “There was great teamwork, passion and energy at this year’s conference; and a real belief that we will continue to build on an excellent 2019 performance.”
“It was very satisfying to spend some time reflecting on and celebrating our successes over the past 12 months but of course our main focus was on how we are going to take that forward to the next level and grow the business further.”
“I feel confident that the momentum we have built up and the plans we have in place for 2020 put us in a very strong position to achieve more success and achieve our ambitious goals for the year.”
The conference kicked off with video celebrating the achievements of 2019 (below).
Our Group CEO, Torsten Tuerling and Group CCO, Jan Peter Tewes attended the early sessions and took the opportunity to recognise and thank the team for an exceptional 2019 and underlined the importance of the UK&I contribution to the wider group result.
The conference then went on to cover key themes and priorities for 2020: critical success factors will be to rebuild our resources to ‘full strength’, continuing to strengthen our service proposition to support channel broadening, and to realise the benefits from our commercial transformation programme, Flywheel.
Investment in people was confirmed as the #1 management priority. Filling open positions that have been carried for some time, with emphasis being placed on the importance of this being well managed so that new colleagues are effectively onboarded and able to get up to speed quickly.
Continuation of Project Flywheel, with the introduction of Salesforce, adoption of new processes and reshaping of both internal and external team activities also creates training and support needs.
Sales Director, Andy Dennis and the Channel Directors presented their respective ‘must win’ battle plans including growth initiatives in High Rise, Regional New Build, medium and small non-residential projects, all underpinned with the support of the trade teams. Market share gain in the Republic of Ireland. These high impact initiatives leverage our strength in demand creation, and are enabled by the benefits expected from Flywheel and Salesforce.com CRM including increased customer facing time, and real time information. Channel broadening in RMI sectors will continue to penetrate e-tail (online retail), click and collect (i.e. Screwfix and Toolstation), Amazon and design-led retail sectors. Strengthening of our service proposition will be key to success in these areas.
An exciting roadmap of product launches planned for this year was also presented, including Sphero, Edit for non-residential, which has huge potential in washrooms. Launches of Atelier Collections and new ranges for Sottini – Caffaro, Rienza and Ceno – that will be launched in March at KBB support both residential and retail, with Prosys pre-wall system benefiting all channels.