Salut Romandie! Interview with Michael May on market expansion

Interview intro

Hello Michael, Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. A market expansion means a lot of effort for a company: Investments have to be made to expand brand awareness, employees have to be (re)trained and marketing strategies have to be adapted and built up. So why did s-peers AG decide to expand into French-speaking Switzerland and what does this entail? To approach this question, I'm going to ask you three questions today. So it will be a so-called espresso interview

At the beginning it is important to understand the meaning of the decision:

Question 1: What does it even mean to be active in French-speaking Switzerland?

We see ourselves as ananalytics consultancy from Switzerland and for Switzerland. As a German-speaking Swiss company, it is obvious that we successfully advise customers between Bern - Basel - Zurich and St. Gallen. However, it is a strategic concern for us to offer our analytics expertise to customers throughout Switzerland - as is well known, digitization and the associated cloud transformation affect all companies. The French-speaking part of Switzerland is therefore not only a highly interesting market for us: the chemical sector is booming, the watch industry has doubled its exports since 2000, and half of the global coffee trade takes place here. SAP Analytics consultants are needed by these companies, which is why we want to position ourselves more strongly here and offer an excellent option.

Question 2: How long have we been active in the French-speaking market?

When the company was founded in 2015 , we defined our target market as Switzerland and have since made every effort to position ourselves successfully in this market as an SAP Analytics consulting firm. In this context, it was important for us to be perceived by SAP Switzerland itself and also in the ecosystem as a niche or expert consulting firm for analytics (data management | reporting | planning). We have demonstrably succeeded in this: Finally, we were awarded as SAP Gold Partner and Cloud Focus Partner of SAP Switzerland and also won an SAP Partner Excellence Award in 2020. From the beginning, we have focused our market development on offering our analytics services to Swiss companies - across all industries. In recent years, we have been able to win over customers in German-speaking Switzerland in particular, especially thanks to our cloud strategy. Nevertheless, even before the Corona pandemic, we had already succeeded in winning one customer each in French-speaking Switzerland and Ticino. In French-speaking Switzerland in particular, we still see a lot of potential for adding value to our expertise with companies in French-speaking Switzerland.

Question 3: Does being active in French-speaking Switzerland entail any special requirements?

For us, it is important that we also deliberately focus our market development on French-speaking Switzerland. For example, we have created and published our website and content in French . In addition, online marketing campaigns are also being played specifically for French-speaking Switzerland. In addition, in the future - post-pandemic - we will also participate more physically in trade fairs and congresses in French-speaking Switzerland. It is also important that some of our analytics consultants also speak French, which definitely facilitates interpersonal interaction in projects, even if the project language might be English.