Birkenstock Consolidates Meetings And Travel Program
<H1> Birkenstock Consolidates Meetings And Travel Program</H1>By Lauren Bielski
A</B>s part of its efforts to showcase a brand identity that isn't about crunchy granola anymore, Birkenstock Footprint Sandals Inc. recently combined its meetings and travel programs to become more efficient and better champion its marketing effort for multiple product lines.
Meeting and travel planner Courtney Hill estimates that in her first six months of handling transient in addition to meetings-partnering with Irvine, Calif.-based Sundance Travel-she has trimmed the overall sales administration budget by 10 percent.
The Novato, Calif., company-the exclusive U.S. importer and distributor of original "footbed contoured" shoes-estimates that it spends about $250,000 on meetings and $200,000 on transient travel annually. While recent budgets have been in line with company goals, trimming costs through the development of a preferred vendor program will be a priority, Hill said.
Her goal is to find a single air carrier, and she is still evaluating the economies of group discounts and preferred vendor agreements versus simply using carriers offering the best deals in each city. Brand managers, purchasing managers and senior-level officers travel to Germany frequently, but most of the group movement is domestic.
Another priority is to find a new home for the intensive, four-day sales meetings that the company holds four times annually. "We have 126 employees in the U.S. office, 25 of whom are field sales reps, and we're getting too large to hold the national meetings at headquarters," Hill said. She is considering a nearby Embassy Suites property for the meetings, having worked with the hotel chain successfully in the past.
Hill also has been working closely with the accounts payable department to determine compliance with allowable expenses based on the travel policy she developed, and has drawn up a travel profile of each company executive.
Birkenstock already has a corporate card program with American Express (which reconciles airline costs and generates monthly reports on this activity) and preferred rental car arrangements in place with National and Hertz. "For the next year, we'll see where we can save money, but what we are more concerned about at this point is simply achieving even greater procedural efficiencies," Hill said.
Hill took over transient travel from Inka Mayfield, when the latter began managing the company's Birki shoe line. When meetings were her only responsibility, Hill often shared tasks with Mayfield. "We would trade off responsibilities, depending on the schedules involved," Hill explained. "When Inka moved into the brand management position, we both determined it would be a natural fit for me to handle both travel and meetings." (Both meetings and travel expenses fall under sales administration.)
Senior-level management approved, and the company began booking all of its transient travel (plus hotel reservations) through Sundance, an agency that Mayfield chose before leaving the position. It also switched to a fee-based structure after the commission cap.
The U.S. importer of Birkenstock-with a mission statement alluding to creating positive, harmonious relations with customers, employees, vendors and the environment-takes its cue on broad, strategic marketing from its German parent company, although it is entirely independent. As in Germany, the U.S. company is decentralized, with each salesperson handling an average of 125 accounts.
National meetings are the linchpin of Birkenstock's selling strategy. "I'm given a fair degree of latitude to do what works best in terms of travel policy or establishing vendor relations, but I never forget that it has to come second to overall sales and marketing objectives," Hill said. "Sales training and motivation sessions are designed to give field sales a chance to touch base with Birkenstock's brand managers and corporate leadership."
Both the field salespeople and sales staff hold training sessions on the road with sales teams at department and independent shoe stores to reinforce brand presence. That is often more involved than simply checking stock and visual presentation in the store; it involves communication that fosters partnering with stores' sales teams. The four annual meetings held at headquarters help to define and direct these initiatives.
The change in the meetings and, ultimately, travel policy was brought about by an overall repositioning of the product line in 1992. That's when Birkenstock took the basic design of its famous, ergonomically correct shoe and expanded its line to include a greater range of styles than the basic variations it had offered since bringing the shoes to the United States in the late 1960s.
To support the new brand identity, the organization created dedicated manager positions for the different product lines. "It was about this time that meetings became even more critical to our organization," Hill said. "We had to teach our salespeople to emphasize the stylistic variations of the shoe, while pointing out the Birkenstock shoe had some common, beneficial characteristics."
The marketing challenge was obvious: Take a line of shoes that are known for their practical attributes such as heel cups and raised arch structures, and develop a sales team that could sell all of the stylistic variations. The meetings began evolving to best facilitate this approach.
"Since brand managers had developed selling strategies and were looked to for guidance, bringing managers and sales staff together was even more critical with the development of the brand," Hill said.