For selected large customers with little or no resources available to drive development projects themselves, Ørsted has, moreover, offered to take on the project and help its customers through the process from establishing a business case, selling the project internally, analysing and discovering potential all the way to building the implementation plan. In short, Ørsted’s Climate Partnership concept bundles the best of its offerings to include sourcing, energy savings, financial solutions and project management into a customised value proposition that responds accurately to customers’ new climate challenges, helping them reduce costs and meet a new type of market demand.
"To us, it was fundamental to be very clear on who was going to use the new approach, and that it would only be for certain opportunities."
Well-defined customer segment
From the beginning, it was clear that Climate Partnerships would not be for every market or every company. In order to identify the ideal customers to target, Ørsted put together a simple customer prioritisation model. First of all, they realised that in order for the concept to be interesting from a business perspective, the target company should spend a reasonable amount of their total costs on energy.
In other words, the company should be relatively energy intensive. If not, the case experience showed that it often proved more valuable for the partner to carry out initiatives related to other typical elements of the CSR agenda such as ethical trade or improving the work environment.
The second criterion was that the company should have a large potential value of differentiating through a renewable profile. This, for instance, included companies exposed to large and strategically important customers with tough demands for a renewable supply chain (including subcontractors).
Together these two criteria highlighted the customers for whom a Climate Partnership would be especially interesting and to whom the market approach should be directed.
One of the key ambitions when Ørsted launched the Climate Partnership concept was to obtain a strategic differentiation in the business market, but also to some degree in the consumer market, compared to traditional energy providers. By helping businesses, municipalities and other organisations reduce their energy consumption and establish a sustainable profile, Ørsted aimed at tapping into the growing sustainable consumer trend through intensive marketing of the partnerships’ positive effects on both the climate and the business value obtained by the partner.
In a business to business context, the task of differentiation is not merely a marketing exercise. It also involves dramatic changes in organisation, processes and competences.
A more complex sales process required new competences and customer involvement
Ørsted realised that positioning the idea of a Climate Partnership concept to organisations would impose great changes on the sales process. They understood that they would have to target an entire set of new and more business-oriented stakeholders than what they were used to from selling electricity and gas.
Through initial learning as well as three intensive pilot projects spread out on Denmark and Germany, Ørsted found that the customers’ decision to enter the partnership was being pushed to the executive level. This was due to the large investment of company resources and the high potential business value the concept was offering. Because of this, the decision process grew longer and more complex.
The broader and higher involvement of the customer organisation in the sales process meant that Ørsted’s internal sales processes as well as management and sales competences had to be much more focused on selling based on business value in order to meet these needs. Based on this insight, a value-oriented sales process, including tools for i) creating interest, ii) mapping stakeholder value, iii) establishing an initial value analysis with the customer, iv) designing the final proposal and v) preparing for final negotiations at executive level, was developed by a small project group involving the people who would actually have to lead and perform the sales themselves.
In order to ensure reinforcement, a management structure, including goals and meeting agendas, was developed and implemented.
"It is my experience that in the cases where we successfully have applied a solution-centric approach, we have more focus on what the solution does for the customer and quite often even for the customer of the customer."
From silos to cross-functional teams
Running the pilots and actually starting the delivery of Climate Partnerships to customers soon proved to pose a significant need for working in diverse cross-functional teams. Over the years, Ørsted has put a great deal of effort into optimising the processes around sales and delivery. One of the drawbacks experienced when launching the Climate Partnerships was that a great deal of the optimisation had been done independently across functions and with too little attention to interaction between processes and functions. The Climate Partnership concept quickly forced new ways of combining internal resources to be able to deliver what was being promised by marketing campaigns and sales.
A new setup around delivery of Climate Partnerships was necessary because of the need for experienced people from a range of different functional areas and to ensure a competence match with customers. The team delivering a Climate Partnership would obviously not only consist of a sales person, but also of an energy adviser consultant, a communication and marketing adviser, a project manager and a set of energy specialists. Combining people with such diverse professional backgrounds and competences and having them deliver robust and comprehensive Climate Partnerships for customers have been a key challenge throughout the process.