CRM in B-to-B at Deutsche Post

World Net

Deutsche Post World Net (DPWN) is a fast-growing international logistics service provider. Its
portfolio of companies includes its European B to B parcel service Euro Express, its express
delivery service across the globe DHL, and its global logistics provider (air, sea, and road
transportation) DANZAS. Revenues for the three divisions in 2001 were approximately €15.5bn
with an increasing portion (45%) coming from outside its home market Germany. The central
problem of DPWN was that the three companies served in many cases the same customers
without knowing this. Each company has its own sales force and was calling simultaneously on
many identical clients, for example virtually all of the large companies in Europe. As one would
expect, the organizational structures and systems support (IT) was quite different for the three
companies.
DPWN felt that the group of individual companies could achieve much better results by
coordinating their sales efforts, specifically, be being able to systematically cross-sell its various
products and services to the many existing clients. Therefore, the company set out to leverage the
entire customer base across the three companies and to build an integrated customer management
approach. Specifically, DPWN wanted to first create a key account management system that
allows the three companies to coordinate their offerings and sales communication to the most
important business clients. Given that the three individual companies offered complementary
services, the objective was to present «one-face to the customer» with the idea to provide
complete logistics solutions for these clients regardless of the type of desired service. The
challenges that would lie ahead of DPWN were to (a) create transparency across customer
relationships and customer potentials, (b) to design cooperation processes across the three
companies, and to (c) develop sales support tools.

1. How would one define and measure the potential for cross selling in this context?

2. If DPWN creates an integrated key account management system, which key processes need to
be integrated across the three companies?

3. What are the barriers to increased cooperation between the companies and thus effective
CRM?
46