Grow your business internationally with a demand gen strategy

To market a premium product, the high priority that has always been given to design and branding still proves to be successful for Mosa. Although the last economic crisis hit the Dutch construction market hard, Royal Mosa managed to remain profitable - even in those years.

However, as housing associations put pressure on prices, revenues did decrease slightly for Mosa. This was an important turning point. It was around 2014 when Mosa set course to grow revenue by increasing export. In order to generate demand for premium ceramic products, Mosa needed to unroll her strong Dutch brand internationally, putting the USA, France, Germany, the UK and Switzerland in the center of this strategy.

Mosa was very aware of the fact that her brand was not as strong internationally as it was in the Netherlands. Apart from that, Mosa realized that the way customers buy today has changed. Not only in B2C but also in B2B. Architects, the most important target audience for Mosa tiles, search the internet to solve problems and get inspiration for their new designs. Another important signpost for Mosa was the decreasing interest of exhibitors as well as visitors in trade fairs. When a few other big companies waved the trade fair goodbye, Mosa realized it was time for a change of strategy.

This case study shows a snapshot between 2014 and march 2018: how Royal Mosa transforms Sales, Marketing and Customer Care to generate demand for their premium products and grows her business internationally.

To drive worldwide demand for ceramic tiles, Mosa needed to look at her current commercial approach and how visible they were internationally; on- and offline. Fortunately, the board of Mosa was aware that not only Sales, but also Marketing and Customer Care play a crucial role here.

At that time, those three disciplines were not yet aligned. Bas Urlings, Senior Online Marketeer at Mosa: “There were no processes in place between Marketing, Sales and Customer Care to nurture leads all the way from the initial contact up to the sale. Every new lead that came in via our website was qualified and followed up on in a different way. 'Is this a good lead?' and 'Can we hand it over to sales?' Were questions we had difficulty with to answer. Goals between Marketing and Sales were often not aligned. With as a result, that Marketing could not prove the ROI of certain campaigns.

We realized that we needed to shift from offline to online, and from design-driven to a more results-driven approach. We trusted we could hold on to our strengths like superior design, service and sustainability, while shifting to new international markets and generate demand for our products.”

Bas knew what his team was up to: increase demand for products, provide building project information to sales and gain insight in the ROI of marketing campaigns. They decided the organizational change could be divided into 3 phases:

2014: Attract prospects (via SEO, SEA, Blogging, online and offline media, social media and by improving their website) and generate and convert leads (with call to actions, landing pages, Email marketing and forms.)

2015 - 2016: Nurture leads and close customers (with lead management, webcare and marketing automation)

2016 - 2017: Work towards closed loop analytics (with NPS, Analytics and thorough Reporting)

In order to achieve those goals, there needed to be a shift in processes. A close alignment between Marketing, Sales and Customer Care was crucial. Many leads talk to the Customer Care department first, because they identify direct requests from potential customers and assign those leads to the right team. Marketing needed to increase their responsibility and overlap more of their activities with the sales process. They had to find a way to generate qualified leads; something marketing had not done before in international markets. Their most important assignment was to identify new building projects in which architects might want to place Mosa tiles. Last but not least, Sales needed to take care of proper follow-up of opportunities when Marketing had identified them.

When it came to people and skills, Mosa wanted to set up a new Marketing team. Experience and service are important, so Customer Care needed to be rearranged as well. Last but not least was the tooling. The tools Marketing and Sales were using were selected by the IT team and not from a commercial point of view. Software was not integrated with one another, so important data was scattered. On top of that, many colleagues from the Sales team worked in their own personal Excel sheets, isolating important customer information from the rest of the organization. This needed to change, too.

Bas: “It was very important to us to get buy-in for our plans throughout the entire organization. To increase visibility, we changed the organogram and made sure everyone was aware of this new structure. This was a very conscious choice. Another important guideline was the Inbound Marketing philosophy: attracting customers with your solutions, instead of pushing them towards your products.”