1to1 - Spring 2009 - (Page 46) EXPERT INSIGHT customer advocate Herb Baer CMO and Vice President, Consumer Sales, Water-Jel A Marketer Who Owns the Sales Process Water-Jel’s Herb Baer discusses his unique title, and how cross-functional integration is driving the company’s new go-to-market strategy. By Eric Krell After 20 years with Fuji Photo Film USA, Herb Baer joined Water-Jel Technologies last September and took on two titles: chief marketing officer and vice president, consumer sales. After 45 days on the job, Baer discussed how his dual role, which bridges two groups that in many companies are often at odds, will help to create powerful and effective cross-functional integration and drive the company’s new go-to-market strategy. He also explained how he and his team are conceiving and executing a new retail sales and marketing strategy for a company that had led the burn care industry for the past 25 years and is still growing. someone with retail experience to craft a branding program and then go into retailers with manufacturing representatives…. I’m laying out the new product development and marketing strategy for the company and then I’m going to go out and execute it on the retail side. 1to1: The CMO title has a bit of a curse lately— does that concern you? Baer: No, it doesn’t concern me at all. I like it because in a smaller organization, I think marketing and sales have to work very tightly. And it can only help to have a single person who can make decisions over both groups. I think it helps leverage and strengthen our company’s agility. 1to1 Magazine: How and why did you get your dual title? Herb Baer: First, they needed someone to serve as chief marketing officer to build up consumer awareness through three channels: industrial, direct to consumer, and retail. Second, they needed 1to1: What’s your primary mission? Baer: While Water-Jel has been extremely strong on the industrial side, we only have one product, Burn-Jel Plus, that we sell to four U.S. retailers—Walgreens, Rite Aid, CVS, and Wal-Mart—right now. Our goal is to take more of our burn care products, hand sanitizers, sterile eye washes, and other industrial products over to retail, and to greatly increase the number of retailers we sell to. We intend to sell to more big-box retailers as well as to supermarket chains and homeimprovement stores. Three Keys to Customer Centricity Herb Baer values: + Complete honesty: The retail business changes constantly, so trust is crucial. “Your customer trusts you so much more if you tell it exactly like it is,” he says. 1to1: Do you have concerns about launching a new consumer strategy during this economic climate? Baer: Not really. We’ve made some slight financial adjustments given the recent turmoil. But we’re in a category where if someone burns themselves, they need aid; the economic climate does not dictate that too much.… In general, while we’re not necessarily recession-proof, we’re probably better off than other types of business. + Frequent and direct communications: Baer consistently engages numerous individuals within a customer organization, including the buyer, the buyer’s boss, the marketing person, and the accounts payable manager among others. + Caring about the customer’s customer: “We’re going to sell something differently to Home Depot than we sell it to Walgreens,” he says. “We might sell hand sanitizer to both but it will be in different forms—different bottle sizes and maybe different labels—and marketed differently.” 1to1: What excites you about the opportunity? Baer: We’re a thought leader in burn care. Open any first aid kit in an industrial factory and chances are you will find our products in there. Emergency medical technicians around the world use our products, and we’re the exclusive provider of burn blankets to the military. I’m also excited that I have all of the foundational building blocks 46 1to1 magazine www.1to1media.com http://www.waterjel.com/keymanagement.cfm http://www.waterjel.com/ http://www.waterjel.com/ http://www.1to1media.com
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