ATEK starts direct sales

From a sales point of view, gearboxes from ATEK, which is based in Rellingen, are characterised by something that many quality products from German medium-sized companies have in common: they require a lot of consultation with the customer. "This became even more important when we established the product segment of special gearboxes," says Sebastian Sturm. In the future, ATEK wants to develop products in connection with brakes and motors, "so we become a provider of complete drive solutions," Sturm says. That sounds good, but leads to even more complex products that require even more sales advice.

So, with its own sales team, ATEK is expanding customer loyalty and advisory competence within the company even more. "This allows us to manage our sales activities much more precisely, to implement our strategy even more consistently, and to expand and develop our customer base," Sturm explains.

In the course of this conversion, ATEK also invested in an update of the content and goods management systems as well as in the further development of reporting and quotation tracking. This involved extensive digitisation of internal data; for example, images, renderings, dimensional drawings, marketing documents and product data. These are now generated in a uniform graphic format and stored and organised in a media asset management (MAM) system. More than 400,000 data sets were created and can now be used in all conceivable derivations for further analyses and services. In concrete terms, this data is used, e.g., for ATEK's new product configurator, which customers can now use to configure gearbox solutions themselves on ATEK's website.

Further investments were necessary due to the temporary parallel work of the new sales staff and the previous sales representatives, because of the notice periods. The change to direct sales began with the development of a sales structure and the implementation of a demand analysis. ATEK defined five sales sectors for the German market; in the future, these are to be finely granulated into even smaller structures.

By the end of the year, the sales team will also pass on valuable feedback from customers to ATEK's product development. "We need this stronger feedback with the market to gather customers' experiences with our products and to understand their needs even better," says Sebastian Sturm.