The organisation

Essentia is a truly global producer of animal protein solutions for the food and beverage industry. Helping manufacturers improve nutritional and other aspects of their food products, Essentia’s raw materials originate only from beef, pork, chicken, turkey, lamb and fish. This helps producers clean up their food labelling, meeting the ever more demanding requirements of consumers.

The challenge

Starting in 2017, Essentia decided to challenge itself to become as customer centric as possible as part of its strategic review process. With extensive operations in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and thousands of customers, including some very large key accounts, this was going to take some co-ordination. Back then in 2017, the company also did not have a consistent sales approach with customers. Essentia sought a partner who could help them define a customer-centric approach and drive the necessary cultural change in multiple territories.

The solution

We recognised that change management was a very important theme in this project, and we designed the project with these characteristics:

• A core international team (the Essentia Sales DNA team) was created to define best practices and help to be ambassadors for the change globally
• Upfront, the team created a model to define how best to support Essentia’s customers using a rigorous process of analysis that was objective and help secure buy-in
• A key account planning and strategic alignment process was created and implemented to provide long term value creation
• The same team helped develop ‘The Essentia Way’ of selling which aligned with the overall customer-centricity strategy and was branded accordingly
• To ensure global consistency, this was trained via workshops using an adopt / adapt sales training that contained certain essential core practices, and room for local customisation
• The training was delivered in Hong Kong & Bangkok, Argentina and several European locations in local languages by trainers native in these territories
• Regional Directors were involved in coaching, implementation and support to ensure role-modelling

The programme enabled significant shifts in behaviour on the ground, as the Essentia Way was owned and promoted by internal staff who were involved in its creation.
The care taken to embed the key account methodology means it is now part of the annual planning and budget cycle of Essentia.
Essentia now has its own sales DNA, which means recruiting, training and coaching are more precise in the future, and customers can experience a truly customer-centric approach.

Next Steps

Going forward, Essentia now wants to work with its distribution network to help them deploy the Essentia way globally. As an organisation, Essentia continues to innovate and work on operational excellence to truly live up to its ambitions of customer centricity.