Maersk Line Achieves 350% ROI in 11 Months

The Challenge

Maersk Line is a Danish international container shipping company and the largest operating subsidiary of the Maersk Group, a Danish business conglomerate. It is the world’s largest container shipping company by both fleet size and cargo capacity, offering regular services to 374 ports in 116 countries. They realized that the industry’s 50-year-old protocol was letting customers down. Containers arrived late as often as they were on time. The market was eroding, and shipping was commoditized to the point where companies were competing at the lowest price without regard for good service. Maersk introduced a solution where ships would leave the same port at the same time every day, with a 95 percent guarantee that products will arrive on schedule. Unfortunately, the company’s salespeople were not able to effectively articulate the value Maersk could bring to their customers or build the relationships needed to move deals forward. Maersk engaged Richardson Sales Performance to help change their customer conversations.

Our Approach

Maersk Line was looking to achieve a 5% EBIT over the competition, maintain market share, and improve their industry segment mix. In order to do so, they needed to fundamentally change the selling behavior of 2,000 reps from commodity and price-based to value-based solution selling to allow them to secure a premium over the competition and fuel organic growth. Richardson Sales Performance partnered with their Sales Excellence & Learning and Development teams to design, rollout, and implement a sales training curriculum that focused on structured preparation, understanding customer’s pain points, identifying and engaging with more senior-level stakeholders, and presenting a differentiated value proposition.

From the start of the initiative, an approach to measuring impact was built-in. This provided insight into areas of success and the need for improvement. Within 8 months evidence was collected that over 5,000 sales meetings were thoroughly improved through preparation and over 3,200 quantifiable value propositions were created together with the customers. Within 11 months this resulted in having sold 500,000 containers with an average premium price over competition and fuelling an overall growth of USD $320M.