How setting clear priorities with KPI’s helped Terminal to keep growing [Case Study]
I am honored to present Terminal Oil, its CEO Jörgen Õigus and Head of Marketing, Kristjan Kirsimäe. Having met and worked with Jörgen and Kristjan it is evidently clear why Terminal Oil is such a success story. They are both very hard working and are constantly looking for ways to grow and get better.
Company: AS Terminal
Industry: Fuel supplier
Team: 200+ people
Location: Estonia
Services Ott provided: Establish Terminal Vision, Strategy and KPI’s + Jobs To Be Done interviewing method
Terminal does something that every person and company needs - provide them with fuel so people and goods can get to where they need to be. Their main activities are oil storage, wholesale and retail. They have 45 fuel stations all over Estonia and are one of the most active companies in giving back. Starting from building playgrounds to sponsoring numerous sports.
Jörgen Õigus - CEO
Jörgen is a very analytical person and at the same time knows how to inspire people. Making him a perfect CEO for Terminal.
Jörgen, an old friend of mine, has been leading and building Terminal Oil for years now and the results speak for themselves. Him and the Raudsepp family (founders) have created a family atmosphere, which makes it a great place to work.
Kristjan also has an analytical mind coupled with the ambition to grow and learn. His curiosity and hard work have helped him to come through the ranks quite fast and in the process master all aspects of marketing.
Kristjan Kirsimäe - Head of Marketing
Kristjan is ambitious, hard working and above all curious to learn and grow.
Why Terminal needed help with their Vision and Strategy in Marketing?
“Number one thing we were lacking in marketing was focus. We spent a lot of money and did a lot of activities in marketing, but hadn’t clearly defined our target group and what exactly do we want get out of all our efforts” said the CEO of Terminal, Jörgen Õigus.
Kristjan added: “We have been growing really fast - opened up numerous gas stations and hired a lot of people. With such rapid growth, old ways of working tend to break down.”
In addition, Kristjan wanted to understand:
What is the effect that marketing activities have on the business results?
What activities are useful and which ones are not?
Where are the growth opportunities and on which customer segment should they focus on more?
Terminal team runs a cost-efficient operation and they had a gut feeling that there was more room to optimize.
When I interviewed Kristjan and Jörgen, I quickly realised that the marketing team was working very hard while achieving a lot. Nevertheless, all their energy went to coping with rapid growth and executing tasks. There was no time to zoom out, look at the big picture and ask themselves - Why do we do what we do?
Having identified the core challenge we sat down with Jörgen and Kristjan to pinpoint their needs:
Establish a clear vision for Terminal marketing - How does Terminal look in 1 year?
Have a marketing strategy that states the key areas to fulfill their vision - priorities.
Set KPI’s and metrics that actually reflect how marketing activities impact sales results.
Propose a marketing channel efficiency test to verify the effectiveness of each individual marketing channel.
Define growth opportunities and which target group to focus on
Feedback on the workshop
Both remember the workshop as an intense day identifying key focus areas and finding metrics to measure their success.
“I was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t expect us to be so data driven. I thought we would have a more general discussion about our direction and structure in marketing. In reality, we first pinpointed the most important areas of marketing. Then, we set a target group that we will focus on and finally we found KPI’s that help to validate our marketing activities” said Kristjan.
Jörgen was also impressed that we took such a data driven approach to our workshop. “I am personally a very numbers oriented person and I think that in general marketing has more of a soft approach without focusing on the numbers too much” said Jörgen.
Jörgen also said that the workshop was in a positive way, a sobering experience. “There were moments where me and Kristjan tried to explain to Ott that some things can’t be measured, but Ott stubbornly kept pushing us until we had a KPI’s behind our goals. Now, the new KPI’s include specifics which help us to eliminate external factors, thus giving us a detailed picture of how marketing campaigns have an effect to our overall business results. ” said Jörgen
Want clear priorities with KPI’s?
The value of having a clear vision, strategy, priorities and KPI’s
Before, the Terminal marketing team was doing a lot of different marketing activities simultaneously. Now, they have clear priorities and are moving towards a defined goal.
“We now know what to track, what to pay attention to, and more importantly what not to do. Before, we were buried under mountains of data. Ott helped us to find the data and metrics that matter” said Kristjan.
“I really like the direction, which we established at Ott's workshop. Today, we clearly distinguish our focus areas and target groups. It is evident in the campaigns that the image, message, and value offer have become much clearer. I also conveyed this approach to the rest of the company.” - said Jörgen
When I asked Kristjan and Jörgen for some detailed examples how this new approach has helped them, they gave me the following use cases:
Focus on defined target groups: “For example, we used to gather information randomly, but now we differentiate between what we do for private clients and what we do for business clients” said Jörgen.
Finding bottlenecks: “Thanks to the workshop, we discovered an error in our results reporting program” said Jörgen.
Benefits of having a clear goal: “Now in our daily work, we can always ask ourselves whether this particular activity helps us to increase sales or not? It helps us to quickly make daily decisions. Whether a particular outdoor media billboard is worth it or whether some channel optimization is needed. It also helped us to stop doing some sponsor projects that did not align with our priorities” said Kristjan.
“Being focused is our new mantra." - said Kristjan
How Terminal implemented the insights from the workshop?
“The workshop helped us to pinpoint the target group that has the most potential. We realized that we had spent too much time on the wrong target group and did not notice the importance of one of our customer segments. This freed up a lot of our time and made sure the financial resources went to the right place.” said Kristjan.
Kristjan also added that the workshop helped him to discover new opportunities.
”The media channel effectiveness test that Ott suggested made us think about the overall effectiveness of our marketing channels. Which in turn initiated further actions that may make us even more efficient and give us new opportunities for scaling” - said Kristjan.
For Jörgen, the workshop helped to understand the importance of marketing and took the following actions to relay that to the rest of the company. “Every year there is an end-of-year meeting with the board and the department heads. This year, I also included Kristjan and marketing. I think a lot of the people in our company were thinking that marketing is about neat badges on shirts and cool posters by the road, but the potential of marketing is much greater” said Jörgen.
Furthermore, he sent a clear message to the team that this year they are now focusing more on 1 customer segment and are monitoring closely how many customers and revenue they can get from there. Which in turn meant that marketing could say NO more easily to random requests and have a calmer work environment where they can focus on set goals.
Improvements in the marketing team
For Kristjan, the improvement of the marketing team is an ongoing process. “I conveyed all the info I got from the workshop to the rest of the team, so we would all be aligned. “I asked them to re-think all of our activities according to our goals and KPI’s. This has enabled them to make daily decisions by themselves” said Kristjan.
Jörgen said that the cooperation between him and Kristjan has improved.
“Since Ott suggested some bold ideas to test, Kristjan has also gained more confidence to experiment and come up with some very interesting ideas. Also, our collaboration is now more concise and productive. There is no micromanagement anymore. All our discussions are based on goals and numbers” said Jörgen proudly.
Jörgen and Kristjan, what is the single biggest reason you would recommend Ott to other companies?
Jörgen: “Marketing can be a nice furnace to throw money into, but what you get out of it, many don't know.”
“Ott helped us to remove the unknown and really made us focus on our key priorities and more importantly gave us a way to measure our success. Plus, he is a nice person to work with”
Kristjan: “If you haven't defined your goals, they tend to go vague quickly. In your daily work life, you no longer see goals, you're putting out fires.”
“It is good to have somebody like Ott who helps you get focused. Now, thanks to Ott I have clear priorities and a way to measure them, I can always ask myself or others - Does it align with our priorities?”
