Industrial Packaging Company Improves Market Share with PMG Customer Satisfaction

Greif Inc., a world leader in industrial packaging and services, formulates a specific sales strategy for each individual client as part of their overall account planning process. To further strengthen this process, the company decided that a customer needs analysis based on ‘The Voice of the Customer’ could accomplish this. Greif would, in turn, use this data to aggressively create opportunity for itself rather than waiting on opportunity to appear.

The company chose PMG’s data-driven methods into the customer’s mindset to improve their current strategies to achieve a positive ROI. PMG’s approach to data analysis differentiated our process from other research companies’ survey platforms.

PMG’s strategy for this customer analysis was to pair our Customer Insight approach with Greif’s customer sales approach. Customer Insight is a custom designed survey project that:

 

• Determines expectations of product & service performance among current customers
• Measures performance, as perceived by current customers
• Identifies those aspects of product & service that are important to customers, focusing on those aspects where the client is not performing to expectations
• Determines competitive positon among customers
• Identifies specific opportunities for product and service differentiation

PMG's analysis of the survey data provided a Performance Improvement Map for each customer based on their individual responses. The project identified specific areas where the company’s performance was good and specific areas where the company needed improvement.

Increasing the human element is the most important factor in a supplier-customer relationship, and the insights from this project allowed Greif to make sales calls with a defined strategy.

The Performance Improvement Maps were introduced into the client’s account planning process, which enabled them to conduct strong discussions around matters pertaining to each customer. Every discussion led to the set-up of a perfectly designed sales call, which was an excellent catalyst for a direct and productive conversation between supplier and customer—a conversation that was profitable for both parties.

PMG observed that a few key customers indicated that Greif could partner with them to improve their internal operations, so Grief worked with these companies to increase throughput, energy savings, and reduce waste. As a result, Greif picked up about three million dollars more in volume in very attractive markets—at a cost to them of about $150,000 to $160,000. By increasing their value proposition across the board, Greif took business from a major competitor and improved their overall market share.