Seeing the Customer Journey from a Fresh Angle

According to Nikolaj, preparing for meetings really comes down to the sort of customer you’re visiting and what sort of relationship Ellab has with the customer. Luckily, there’s an abundance of information to use and help to receive from veteran sales reps.:

“When you start at Ellab, there is so much help that you can get, and there’s a lot of information if you decide to seek it. Which means that, even though you don’t know the industry that well yet, you can arrive really well prepared for a meeting with a customer,” said Nikolaj.

He informed us that you can never be 100% prepared for a meeting, as there will always be curveballs. But as long as you get an overview of the direction you expect the meeting to go beforehand, you can always maneuver your way to the appropriate solution:

“There’s always going to be curveballs, even more so now as it is an industry that is still quite new to me. But I feel the preparation has been right and nothing has gone in a completely different direction.”

“They’re not looking for a product, they’re looking for a solution,” were among the first words spoken by Nikolaj when asked what he believes potential Ellab customers deem important. To him, the value is to be a part of something bigger and help the customer reach their ultimate goal: producing a high quality product.

“It is important to provide our customers with something that has to function in a process, not just a product by itself, but a solution. This means that we’re talking value instead of things like cost and maintenance,” said Nikolaj when elaborating on his sales mentality.

When asked how he hones in on a solution, Nikolaj explained his approach of letting the customer explain all their needs, instead of presenting a lot of solutions all at once:

“We offer solutions from one end of the spectrum to the other, but we have to allow the customer to open with their range of issues to figure out where we match and how we can best make a difference.”

When asked what he learned, Nikolaj pointed to some specific examples from the hospitals he had visited – proving that there is no single solution to a problem:

“It was funny to see the differences in how hospitals worked, even though they were close to one another. They had a different validation approach, one hospital was like ‘we don’t want to do it ourselves’ and wanted to get others to perform the validation, while another hospital was very hands-on and went really deep into the details and cared a lot about what it meant for their process.”

A lot of the cases Nikolaj was working on at the time of the interview are still on-going. But there was one case that, even though it had been put on pause for a while, ended up resulting in a sale:

“There was an existing case that had halted, but after the meeting it turned into a service, calibration and validation agreement.”

Ultimately, the experiences and results had been positive, and the learning curve had been steep but manageable – and Nikolaj will continue to deploy his value-first mentality with customers.