Global Standardization in Competitive Intelligence with Kory Weisman

Erin Pearson: Hey everyone, welcome to today’s episode of Decisions Now. We’re very excited to have you here today. I’m the host, Erin Pearson, and today our guest is Kory Weisman, who is the Director of Global Commercial Excellence at Clarios. Kory, welcome and thank you for joining us today.

Kory Weisman: Thanks for having me.

EP: Yeah, so, just to get started, could you give us a little bit of background on what is your role at Clarios and just a little bit about what Clarios does?

KW: Yeah. So, Clarios is a low-voltage battery supplier for all types of vehicles, whether it be automotive or heavy duty, marine, motorcycles, you name it. We produce around 150 million batteries per year, which is roughly one in three batteries globally produced. So, we have a number-one market share in pretty much every region globally. And we are the number-one supplier of low-voltage batteries globally. And what I do with the company is I’m responsible for a lot of our commercial and market intelligence within the company on the commercial side. So, what’s happening in the automotive market and what trends are happening to be prepared for and ensure companies are aware of, as well as leading our commercial operations from a sales management and opportunity management standpoint to ensure that our pipeline and our sales teams are taking the proper initiatives to achieve our sales targets.

EP: First, that’s very impressive and really cool stat that one of three batteries are created by Clarios. But one of the things that you had been mentioning when we had done a little bit of prep for this is that you guys were transitioning, or you’ve already transitioned from the regional structure to a global structure for your commercial intelligence. So, can you talk a little bit about why you guys went down that route and what were the main drivers behind that change?

KW: Yeah, so, transitioning from a regional structure to that global 360 view was really critical to drive standardization across our organization. Being a global low-voltage battery supplier to nearly every major OEM, we needed to be able to look at our business both globally and across regions and OEMs to really make sure we have a standard view regardless of what region or OEM you’re looking at. So, for example, whether you want to look at our total North America business or Global Volkswagen, for example, that global standardization is incredibly important to have that consistency across the OEMs or the regions. Additionally, when we look at some major global OEMs, the RFQs to bid on their business may come from multiple regions. And by having that global standardization, we’re now able to really manage our opportunities and technology choices, as well as pricing options, across all of our regions. So, if you didn’t have that standardization, you may have different regions doing different pricing and technology discussions with the OEM differently than you would in North America versus Korea, for example. So, we really need to make sure we have that standardization when we talk with customers who do cross multiple regions. So, the way that we’re structured to help address that is we’re structured in a way that we have CBUs, which are customer business units, or another way for that to think of is as an OEM. So, these CBU leaders will manage the OEM relationship globally, so across all of the regions. So, in order for them to look at their overall book of business, we wanted that global standardization process so that they’re not talking to their own account teams in different regions and having to figure out how they look at their business to try and roll it up in a customized way.

EP: So that’s actually quite interesting. I’m guessing that it’s become a growing need for that over the years as well, just as the world is naturally getting more and more global as well. So, a challenge with that is typically, especially when you’re first starting to implement this structure, is you’re starting with a lack of global standardization, especially in terms of how data is collected from the different regions. You had mentioned like the different RFQs and of course, different clients, there’s different currencies, different languages that people may be putting data in. Not to mention different formats and standard, sometimes, lack of people just putting in data in the first place. So how have you addressed this challenge and really worked on establishing a standardized approach?

KW: Yeah, so I’ll take that in a couple steps. So, the first piece is that, I mean, I think as many people who are aware of the automotive industry, whether you work in it or not, is that the automotive industry is really experiencing one of the biggest evolutions that they’ve seen in the last hundred plus years as we quickly move to this world of electrification. So, we need to be able to adapt and adopt to that changing environment as well. So, we want to be able to look at our business and the industry as a whole in that type of a way as well. So again, having that global standardization really enables us to slice across these different power trains, for example, across regions and customers to understand which region is growing the fastest, which region is a laggard, or which OEMs are leading the way. So obviously everyone’s aware of Tesla leading the way from an electrification standpoint, and really being able to understand how are different OEMs coming into the space? So, what we also then want to do is, obviously we want to ensure that we’re winning with those platforms that are growing versus declining. So, if certain OEMs are moving to electrified vehicles and getting out of ICE and ICE stop-start vehicles, we want to make sure we’re winning with those OEMs on platforms that are EV versus those that are ICE, your traditional gas engine vehicles that will soon be retired.

EP: So, when you put this standardized approach in place, how does it really benefit your ability to pressure test, especially customer analytics and metrics, like the pipeline that you’re bringing in from different regions?

KW: Yeah, it’s been really, really important. The standardized approach has really allowed us to accurately look at different aspects of our business, such as our segment share, our pipeline, how we’re performing as planned, and so on in a real-time way that can be leveraged across regions, OEM levels, or even across various pieces of the organization. So, whether you’re a leader of the company, part of our C-suite, or you’re an account team trying to figure out what’s happening with your own specific account in a region, we’ve been able to leverage Power BI to do a lot of that work. So, within Clarios, we have Power BI, that’s kind of our global visualization tool that has allowed us to connect all of our various ERPs, CRMs, and everything into one centralized visualization to be able to do a lot of this slicing and dicing, which then not only allows different teams to quickly and accurately be able to see their business, but we can also answer a lot of questions very, very quickly by just doing a couple filters within a dashboard versus having to go pull multiple Excel reports from different systems and consolidate it, build it, analyze it, and send it out, who knows, a couple of days or a week later, for example.

EP: So just a side question on that one: In particular with something like a Power BI, is that something that your team is primarily leading, or does each team individually go in and build their own reports, or do you build the reports for them?

KW: Yeah, so we, within my team globally, again, to drive that standardization of consistent views across the entire commercial organization, our team leads the development and maintenance of those dashboards so that we’re able to really drive what’s happening and what one region may think is valuable. In China, let’s say, our North America team may not realize that that’s a great way to look at it. So being able to have this global view and having a central focus on maintenance of the dashboards, we’re able to drive a lot more best business practices across multiple regions and OEMs.

EP: And then when you’re actually getting them to input the data, I mean, any report is just as good as the data is, right? So how do you actually get them to consistently put it in? Like, are you motivating them in some way? Or do you have any incentives? Or, I guess they talk a lot about a carrot or a stick to get people to do things. So, what have you done that’s really been effective?

KW: Yeah. So, when we look at the strategies and incentives that we’ve kind of done here, we really didn’t implement too many incentives to drive the compliance. I would say it was probably more of the stick approach versus the carrot. Our leadership team really helped push this because, I mean, a lot of these types of change management where you’re telling sales teams to go in and start maintaining their book of business and their opportunities in a system where they may have historically done it in Excel or offline, you get a lot of different pushback based on different regions or backgrounds of the teams, because you’re telling them to change how they’ve historically always managed their business. And, in general, one of the big challenges there is you get the pushback of ‘Big Brother is watching’ type of thing. Oh, that’s the only reason you want me to do this. So, what we’ve really done is we’ve really educated them on the value and the importance of this for our business. So, one example of that is every year we refresh our midterm strategic plan that looks at the business about five, 10 years out. And that takes a considerable amount of time. You’re talking about a month plus to do all that work. So, what we transitioned by doing this and looking at our business more real-time on a monthly basis this way, it was able to take that process from over a month to just be a couple of weeks. So, it made it more efficient, and we were able to get a full bottoms-up build of our strategic business, of our five-year plan very, very quickly versus it taking a lot of time and focus away from the sales teams. The one true incentive that we really made to the sales organization is that we changed our annual bonus and commission process to be based off of the data that’s in our CRM. So, it’s specifically tied to their opportunities they’re putting in the system. One, they know exactly what they’re accountable for and what they’re driving for their own incentive plans throughout the year. But then ultimately from a leadership and total reward standpoint, that’s something that can be audited at the end of the year. This was the business you were supposed to close, did you close it or not? And we have a system that can track all of that for us.

EP: I mean, that’s quite smart to being able to track those individual details there. I think it also helps them long term once they, I guess, once they get used to the process, just being able to know where they can find it once they understand the reports and also once they can go in and, you know, do things in, you know, whether it’s minutes to a couple days versus what could have taken like weeks or months previously to just find out what’s going on, especially the regional leaders, I bet, particularly like that as well.

KW: Yeah, I mean, and exactly to that point, that was part of the challenge. Let’s go back a little bit to that change management piece. Getting here has been a big challenge. And this wasn’t something that was done overnight. I’ve been in this role for about a little over five years now, and this has been a constant, I don’t want to say battle, but a challenge to show them the value of this. So really what we’ve done is with this undertaking is to continue to work with them and show them the value that this brings, but, one of the things that I always go back to that really helped push this with our teams is that one of our former leaders of our business would always state that if it isn’t in the CRM, it doesn’t exist. So, to help drive this importance and the value of putting this into our CRM and into Power BI, for example, that really spoke volumes, because historically you would just compile a bunch of Excel spreadsheets and that’s your number, where now you’re basically requiring the teams to put into a system that can be reviewed and is coming directly from that system. So, if the number doesn’t look right, we’ll make sure you get it in the system to show what the true business is.

EP: Yeah, like one of the other things that we’ve done, similar to that, like if it’s not in the CRM, it doesn’t exist, is if the sales team in particular, like wants to travel somewhere, they want to go into a new market or they want to invest in a certain event, then you can look at all of that data and say, what’s our overall like close rate within this, whether it’s an industry or from this event, or from all of this spend. So, you can track all of that better and essentially say, if you want the company to invest more in things that you say are successful, you have to prove to us that it has been successful as well.

KW: Exactly.

EP: Yeah. So outside of team adoption, are there other common challenges or risks that you’ve encountered, and how have you gone around them?

KW: Yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest challenges that we faced throughout this process is that OEMs don’t always award business the same. So, some may award business by a specific nameplate, such as a Chevy bull, for example, or others may award business by their own production plans, among some other different nuances. So, this really adds complexity into our operating management process. So, when we talk about driving everyone into a system and developing a global standardized tool that works for everyone, developing that one-size-fits-all tool was definitely a challenge, because the sales process isn’t one-size-fits-all. So, working through that was a challenge, but through the partnerships with the teams has been really able to improve the process and we’re never done. We’re constantly looking at ways to enhance our tool and our systems to work with how our account teams best can use the tool. So then, when you look at a second option is how to handle managing those opportunities that occur in different regions where the RFQ is awarded. So, talking about the global OEMs and we have different people in different regions who may handle the same OEM. VW, for example, may do a global RFQ and that relationship is managed in Europe, but there’s production in Mexico that is being handled by the local team in Mexico. So, who manages what, and how do you ensure that everything’s being done accurately when the team in Mexico may not be responsible for the RFQ that’s being handled in Europe. So, we’ve been really able to circumvent that through developing sales processes, guidelines, and policies to ensure everyone’s very clear on how these are handled. Because obviously, if you’re relying on the tool, you don’t want to have double counting of the same volumes, or even missing a completely of — I thought you were doing it. Oh, I thought you were doing it. And then from a risk standpoint, really realistically, the biggest risk that we have is we’re fully dependent on account team input. So, the data in the system is only as good as what the account teams enter into the CRM, and that is really why it’s so important for us to have regular pipeline reviews where we really review the data in the CRM and ensuring it’s accurate, It’s aligned to what’s happening in the market, and so on. Because if you don’t, then you really run into that challenge of how trustworthy is the data, and then it all really starts to fall apart. And putting it all on the account teams is very complex and it’s time-consuming. And it may not be what the account teams want to do, because you don’t want them spending two, three days managing their data in the system when they should be out talking with customers. So, when we look at that, that’s kind of some of the challenges, but ultimately, we’ve been able to circumvent that in a few different ways. The first is that we’ve been able to become more self-sufficient with leadership and investors. For a lot of people probably on the call, they’re aware that leadership or investors or whoever it may be, you get calls or requests of questions that need to get answered right now. And by having this data in the system, we’re really able to go pull the data and answer that question real-time or very quickly versus having to go talk to 20, 30 different account owners, consolidate answers, try and figure out if it makes sense, ask questions back and forth, and then finally get the answer back to the leader, whoever may be asking that question. So, it really saves a lot of time, but also frustration on the account team side because they’d constantly be answering emails or fire drills to get those answers. And then, we’re obviously global and we cross multiple time zones, that’s a challenge that we needed to address. The second is that we’ve really driven the tool – I think this is really important – to be more pull versus push. And what I mean by that is that we want the account teams to really see the tool as something that they get value out of, so we want them to be able to pull data out of the tool, out of the dashboards, so they can look at their business better, they can understand what’s happened with their customers quickly and effectively, and they’re able to get value out of it. It’s not just, hey, push your data into the system for someone else to use it and you get no value out of it. And we think that’s really, really important, because if they don’t see the value in it, they don’t put the focus and priority on it, and then ultimately it all becomes garbage in, garbage out.

EP: I mean, that’s brilliant, really, because it’s all about what they get. They’re not going to put in the work if they’re not going to get any return out of it. I think what you said in the beginning of that also is quite pertinent, which is there’s not a one-size-fits-all report, or there’s not a one-size-fits-all method. I mean, the reality is goals change, data changes, the market changes. You have to constantly adapt. And the first point that you made on how you’re circumventing it, which is, you’re wanting your executives to come in and be able to make decisions in real-time based on this data, I think is, I mean, that’s really like the root of what this podcast is even named with Decisions Now is how can you actually enable people to make data-backed decisions on demand. But one of the key things to that is when it comes to sharing the insights and the reports with your stakeholders, what are those different types of reports that your stakeholders are actually using, and what are the views that they’re getting that they find valuable? Like, how are they, how do they cater to the executives vs. the account teams, product teams, et cetera?

KW: Yeah, I think you hit it right there on that second part, is that it highly depends on the stakeholder you’re referring to. And that’s really what we’ve tried to do, is that we’ve developed dashboards and reports that can be used by the account teams, that can be used by different departments within the organization, whether it be procurement or the supply chain team, to understand what’s coming up, what they should be aware of when they’re talking with suppliers and trying to purchase materials, to really understand the business is that we’re doing work with commercial data, but it’s being used by more than just the commercial team. So, whether it’s different parts of the organization, regional leadership, the C-suite, or even helping support our investor relations organization, to get them the data to talk to investors in the street. We’ve been able to develop dashboards that can support all these different levels of the organization by having, again, all the data within a central, standardized tool.

EP: Yeah. And then what’s been the value and the return on the investment that you’ve seen after implementing this, especially from a global perspective?

KW: Yeah, so when we look at the value that comes from implementing these actions, first and foremost is alignment on a single source of truth. When you mentioned earlier, the data-backed decisions, this really helps us have confidence in the data we’re looking at and making decisions off of that data. So, you have confidence in what you’re looking at and a mutual understanding as well, of the reliability of the data. Instead of getting sidetracked on trying to explain the data, what it says, you can make decisions on looking at data and going right into decision-making versus, oh, that number seems strange — where did you get that number from? Tell me what number that is. So, you’re saving a lot of time on that decision-making process. What we call it is decision-making versus data validation. And then when we look at the ROI, just to touch base quick on the ROI piece, an example there is that we’ve been able to improve our forecast accuracy with our supply chain team of upcoming orders because we’ve ingrained this pipeline process and aligning it to real-time market movements with our S&OP processes on the demand side. So, having more liability in upcoming orders has allowed our operations supply chain teams to become more efficient and improve the accuracy of their production, because then obviously you’re supporting, one, your inventory levels, but then also most importantly, your trade working capital.

EP: I think that last part is also something that a lot of people gloss over oftentimes when they’re looking at things, because especially in the past couple of years with the hit on supply chain for many, it’s so critical to be able to assess what inventory do you have, where is it going to be best sent, how much does it cost to produce it and to transport it to different areas as well. So being able to centrally manage that is a really essential piece as well. So, it sounds like the program has been going really well, but as with anything, there’s typically still gaps in where you want to take this going forward. So, what are some of those gaps that you would still say that you’re trying to fill, and what’s your vision for this?

KW: Yeah, so the biggest gap today that we’re really trying to fill is that we’ve added a lot of complexity into our opportunity management process by trying to look at the business in multiple different dimensions, similar to what I mentioned earlier, whether it be by region, by OEM, specific nameplates, the powertrain evolution. So, looking at a powertrain level or a battery technology, et cetera. So historically, when we first built a lot of this work, we were looking at the business by nameplate and OEM within regions. So, it was very simple and a lot, I shouldn’t say simple, but it was a lot more straightforward, but now you’re starting to look at our pipeline and our opportunities at a technology and a powertrain level. Well, each time you add a different layer, you’re adding exponentially the number of complexities into the system. And that really then increases the amount of workload that goes out of the team. So instead of looking at using… If we use the Ford Escape, for example, the challenge there is that historically you would map your Ford Escape opportunity of what’s coming up. Well, now if we look at the Ford Escape that has four different powertrains, well, now your one opportunity now became four. And if you multiply that for the Ford account by 30 or 40 nameplates times four power trains, now your 30 or 40 total opportunities just became 160. So that is really, really complex on the teams. So that would get me back to what we’re really trying to do here is having our biggest initiative be to improve the sales team experience and really creating and managing opportunities in a more automated, seamless, and systemic way. Because we want to reduce the amount of time that they’re spending in the system while also reducing the potential for manual errors. And then more importantly, the more time you can free them up from doing data entry, the more time you’ve opened for them to be out with customers. And with the data being only as good as what the team has put into the system, just that we talked about, this experience that they have in the tool, it is extremely critical. So, the sales owner experience is incredibly important to us.

EP: So, with that, I mean, one of the main stakeholders is naturally your account teams, your sales teams that are using this. Would you say that the data that you’re inputting to them, is that more geared towards day-to-day activities and day-to-day decisions? Or would you say it’s more on a strategic work and strategic vision side?

KW: So, I would say it’s more going to be on the strategic side, but ultimately, we want the day-to-day process to feed the strategic work so that you’re doing both of those in the same place versus in separate silos and separate processes. So, if they’re able to do their day-to-day work that can feed the strategic processes, then you’re saving time and effort because you’re driving those synergies across the work that’s being done and by having their day-to-day work be put into the system. And then the system is what helps support driving the more strategic work when I talk about that five-year plan that the account teams do. By turning the day-to-day work into the system, we saved the amount of time that they had to do on the strategic work significantly because their day-to-day work was feeding it. So, it was already done when it came time to do a five-year plan, for example.

EP: Yeah, well, that makes sense. And when you do have that as your vision, what is, in order to actually reach that, what type of intelligence do you really need to have them input in order to reach those goals?

KW: Yeah. So, the type of intelligence we need them to really enter in is: what is happening with your customer. So, no one knows what’s happening with the OEMs at our company more than those account teams and our technical teams that talk with the customer every day. So, we really want to be a partner with them and understand where are they taking their vehicles, the electrification of their power trains in a longer-term perspective so that we have the products and technology to understand where they’re going and we have a project to support them and serve their needs. Because ultimately, being a strategic partner with our customers allows us to not only be a preferred supplier but also to partner in their success and give them products that they need to support the electrification of their vehicles.

EP: So, I guess my last question for you, Kory, is for those who are really wanting to implement something similar in structure to what you’ve done, can you provide some insights to the team structure and how you as the global commercial leader and regional VPs work together to push down this message and how you actually leverage the leadership team to help you guys make this vision come to life?

KW: Yeah, that’s really important, because collaboration both up and down the various levels of the organization, as well as even across the organization from a global and regional structure, is critical for success. Everyone needs to be bought in on this. So, although we’re really a regional structure, where each of our regions is managing their own business, because the OEMs are global, as we’ve been talking about, our OE regional vice presidents will report directly to the commercial leader with a data line into the regional presidents. What that really does is it drives a consistent message across the OE organization. So, with many of our OE customers being global, we needed to ensure that we’re partnering with them consistently, regardless of the region, while still having regional alignment with our local leadership. So that collaboration is incredibly important. And then looking personally within the Commercial Excellence Organization, it’s a little bit different because we want to have local boots on the ground that partner with our OEVPs, our regional commercial teams, and so on to really ensure that there’s close collaboration locally and that the regional teams aren’t just waiting for our global team to support them with what they need, they have a contact who’s local with them to partner and support them with their market intelligence. So, this structure has really helped us ensure success of the initiatives, as we’re able to get global and regional leadership buy-in, while at the same time execute and partner with our commercial teams locally.

EP: I mean, I think honestly what you said is collaboration is key, and isn’t that true for pretty much everything, too? Well, Kory, it was great talking to you today. I really appreciate you sharing all the insights, and I think that there’s a lot of value in everything that you said. It’s a really cool structure that you guys have going, and I’m glad it’s brought you a lot of success at Clarios as well.

KW: Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.