Agristo is a Belgian producer of frozen potato products. With the private label market as its main focus, Agristo currently serves customers in 144 countries around the world. The company’s customer base consists of retailers, food service distributors, and restaurant chains. Agristo produces over 950.000 tons of finished products every year and achieved a 1.2-billion-euro turnover in 2023.
Sales reorganization
With impressive double-digit growth since the start of the century, Agristo has always been a company in transition. In addition to a digital transformation the company is going through, Agristo has also recently been re-organizing its global sales team for more efficiency and to prepare itself for a future of sustained customer value growth.
Agristo’s customer service team is strategically developing towards a customer experience approach. In that role, the CX team is able to take over many of the operational tasks formerly attributed to the sales organization. This enables the sales and account management team to focus on more strategic, long-term aspects of the customer relation.
From reactive to proactive sales
In the past, our sales approach was often too reactive. Although our sales numbers have been great over the past few years, we still wanted to be prepared for a future where market conditions are more dynamic. This required a more proactive approach from our sales people.
says Sofie Sercu, International Sales Director at Agristo.
The need of the Agristo team was threefold:
- To increase customer value, the sales team needed to focus more on the right activities. This means spending the appropriate time with the right customers, and focusing more on accounts with the biggest growth potential.
- The sales team needed to have more effective business discussions. By considering the long term, focusing more on value instead of price during sales conversations, and by assessing the full potential for each customer, the team could be more prepared for difficult negotiations.
- To ensure ongoing sales excellence, the organization needed to embed the new way of working in functional sales processes that could be embraced by the entire sales team.
The Agristo sales team has always been successful thanks to an SME mindset that is promoting entrepreneurship and freedom. However, today, we want to continue our growth, and scale our business globally. This requires a more professionalized approach and more efficient sales processes.
says Sofie Sercu
Maximize potential of key accounts
Agristo called upon the expertise of Perpetos to guide the sales team to a new way of working. First, Perpetos carried out an Account Development Audit, mapping out each sales team member’s time spent on different types of activities, as well as the time lost on valueless activities.
Based on the team audit, Perpetos proposed to implement a key account practice, providing the team with practical guidelines on how to deepen relationships and grow customer value with their highest-potential accounts.
The key account practice encouraged the team to think about everything they needed to better understand their customers and to continuously maximize the success of its customers: the right points of contact, the sponsors, and the customer’s most important value drivers. It also allowed the team to set priorities and define concrete actions based on breakthrough goals.
To further systematize their focus on key accounts, Perpetos helped the Agristo team to install quarterly business review meetings, which focus on the most important developments of the 50 largest customers. Any hurdle to achieve customer success should be handled there.
Along with the practical organization and setting up processes, Perpetos also helped us to grow a mindset of proactive growth. This includes continuously thinking ahead, setting the highest possible goals, clearly defining what we need from the organization to get there, and then rigorously following up the defined actions to reach our common goals with our customer.
says Sofie Sercu
Pragmatic and tailored approach
Perpetos used a pragmatic and mixed approach to prepare the team for this new way of working. The team was not only offered a tailored methodology, but there was also plenty of attention given to skill development and adoption. Every sales team member was proposed to work on their two biggest accounts. Supported by intense coaching from Perpetos, the team gradually learned how to put the new approach into practice, and acquired skills to have more valuable conversations with customers. Perpetos offered a customized mix of workshops, coaching sessions, mentoring, and practical guidance for setting up a governance structure.
The Agristo team has proven to quickly adopt a proactive sales mindset, which will enable them to better focus on the customer’s value drivers, have richer sales conversations, and maximize the customer’s potential, even in volatile market conditions.
What I appreciate about Perpetos is that they are not stubbornly pushing a standardized methodology. Instead, they start by listening to our needs as a sales organization, and then offer a tailored approach that works for us. Having someone from Perpetos in your team is like having an experienced colleague who has actually walked the talk. Their approach is lean and agile, and they are not afraid to constantly question everything they do. I haven’t seen this with many other business partners.
says Sofie Sercu.
Perpetos goes beyond other sales consultancy agencies, because they make sure that their knowledge and methodologies are implemented and adopted by the customer. Their seasoned professionals follow a pragmatic approach with step-by-step processes, and they adapt their methods to the unique environment of Agristo. This makes sure our team can better implement the learned strategies into their daily operations.
says Sofie Sercu
