Oracle Customer Case Study

Bayer CropScience Addresses Individual

Customer Needs across the Globe

“A campaign response rate of almost 50% is remarkable in any

market situation….Siebel Pharma played a major role in
helping us achieve these impressive results.”—Udo Klein, CRM
Manager, Bayer CropScience

To maintain market leadership in the fiercely competitive global

Bayer Crop Science
Monheim, Germany crop protection market, Bayer CropScience needed to cultivate
www.bayercropscience.com
relationships with all key market participants. Traditionally, the
Industry: company’s trade channel contacts had formed the backbone of the
Chemicals business; however, Bayer CropScience saw the need to broaden
Annual Revenue: the focus of its activities to encompass all relevant stakeholders in
More than US$1 billion the market. Some of the important questions that needed to be
Employees: answered were: Which farmers were using the company’s crop
19,400 protection products? On which crops? In what quantities? Who
were the powerful communities that influenced farmers in their
Oracle Products & Services: choice of crop protection products? It was difficult to tell. Using
Siebel Pharma Oracle's Siebel Pharma, Bayer CropScience has created a
customer relationwship management (CRM) solution that enables
individual country subsidiaries to form a single, unified view of
Oracle Partner:
the company’s entire audience—the channel, farmers, agricultural
Deloitte Consulting advisors, food suppliers, and food processors. This CRM solution,
Monheim, Germany together with the business strategies that surround it, have
www.deloitte.com increased organizational flexibility, improved sales effectiveness,
focused marketing campaigns, and ultimately increased customer
satisfaction.
Bayer CropScience AG is headquartered in Monheim, Germany,
and has extensive experience in the global crop protection market.
The company is the result of the acquisition by Bayer AG of
Aventis CropScience. Bayer CropScience holds leading market
positions in its core business areas and has now created two new
divisions: BioScience and Environmental Science. The company
is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bayer AG, a leading German
healthcare, material science, and crop science company, which
recorded sales in 2003 of 27.6 billion euros and has 115,000
employees.

Copyright © 2006 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Published June 2006
 Oracle Customer Case Study
Key Benefits:
Doubled sales against forecast
in Cordoba Region, Argentina
Created more than 35%
marketing campaign response
rate in UK
Achieved 47% response rate
for targeted mailing/telephone
campaign in Germany
Boosted campaign response
rate in Germany from previous
norm of 5% to more than 12%
Enhanced customer satisfaction
Improved sales forecasting
accuracy
Copyright © 2006 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
During its life cycle, a crop will encounter many enemies,
including pests, weeds, and fungi that can ultimately destroy the
harvest. Bayer CropScience is committed to helping farmers
combat these threats by supplying leading-quality crop protection
products and services that are in balance with the environment
and enable a sustainable approach to agriculture. In recent years,
the company has encountered its own threatening challenge:
fierce, global competition. In almost every one of the geographic
markets in which the company operates, it faces powerful
competition from both other international research-based
companies and an increasing number of so-called “generic
producers” entering the market with similar products. At the same
time, the crop protection market is becoming much more
complex: Farmers need guidance to understand the multitude of
different solutions available to them, and they want products that
focus on specific problems, while leaving beneficial fauna and
flora unharmed.
To combat these global threats and to increase its competitive
position, Bayer CropScience needed to understand more about the
different market participants, from the channel through the end
consumer. Although its reliance on a channel distribution model
led to well documented, transaction-only relationships with
distributors and retailers, it needed to improve its contacts with
the other stakeholders, such as farmers and growers in each
country that comprised its end user community. Another area that
needed to be strengthened was the company’s relationships with
the increasingly powerful influencers who were shaping the
market, including agricultural advisors, food processors,
government departments, contractors, NGOs, and the media. The
result was that Bayer CropScience saw the need to respond more
quickly to customer requirements and create compelling, tailored
products and services and information.
Tailoring Products to Customer Needs
“The trade channel remains our key partner for growth, but we
saw the need to support their actions through direct, continuous,
and consistent customer and influencer information,” says Udo
Klein, CRM Manager, Bayer CropScience. “We needed to replace
the many unlinked systems used by the field sales and marketing
teams to manage customer relationships within Bayer
CropScience with a single, unified system. By creating a
Published June 2006
 Oracle Customer Case Study

“The ample sales, service, companywide, shared view of all the participants in the customer
and campaign mix, Bayer CropScience would improve its market knowledge
management functionality through stringent market analysis and the early recognition of
of Siebel Pharma enables market trends. The company would segment target markets,
Bayer CropScience to distinguish customer groups, and tailor products to customer
maximize sales needs. And it would be in a position to coordinate sales, technical,
effectiveness, optimize and marketing actions and events. In summary, Bayer
processes, plan CropScience would be in a position to ‘treat different customers
marketing activities, and differently.’”
manage marketing
So which CRM system did Bayer CropScience choose to
campaigns.”
understand how many of its Spanish farming customers grow
Udo Klein
oranges? The number of farms in Chile with more than 500
CRM Manager
Bayer CropScience hectares? Or the number of British farmers growing organic
potatoes? The answer: Siebel Pharma. According to Klein, this
prepackaged, industry-tailored CRM system was chosen because
it was the most advanced, the most proven, and the most easy-to-
use of all the systems the company evaluated. The decision was
also influenced by the fact that the parent company, Bayer AG,
had also standardized on Siebel CRM applications. “The ample
sales, service, and campaign management functionality of Siebel
Pharma enables Bayer CropScience to maximize sales
effectiveness, optimize processes, plan marketing activities, and
manage marketing campaigns,” says Klein.

Increased Sales Effectiveness

Currently subsidiaries in 12 countries in which Bayer
CropScience operates are gradually replacing their existing
marketing and sales systems with Siebel Pharma. Using this
unified approach to customer information, the sales teams in each
country are now able to plan their sales activities with
significantly greater accuracy and effectiveness. Klein explains:
“Each of our country organizations operates in distinct and
different markets. For this reason, we created a tool box of
different functionalities that can be chosen by the implement-ting
countries according to their needs.” In addition to the detailed
profile of each customer this approach provides, sales teams know
the potential for each farmer, the crop yields, the Bayer
CropScience products their customers are either using or have
expressed an interest in, the status of any outstanding complaints,
and whether or not a Bayer advisor has recently visited the
customer. If they are visiting an official advisor, they also know

Copyright © 2006 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Published June 2006
 Oracle Customer Case Study

the number of farms the individual is providing advisory services

to. If required, sales teams are able to capture and process sales
orders and complaints—although customers can also place orders
directly with Bayer CropScience over the telephone, and these are
synchronized with all other sales information.
According to Klein, this detailed, up-to-the-minute view of
customer and market information is increasing not only sales
effectiveness and management reporting, but also customer
satisfaction. “Our sales teams will be in a position to offer farmers
advance warning of disease or pest infestations based on the types
of crops they grow and according to their local conditions. If they
are facing problems and don’t expect to achieve their yield
forecasts, we actively participate with them to introduce crop
protection solutions aimed at increasing harvest—while
maintaining a balanced and sustainable approach to the
environment. Alternatively, if the Bayer sales representative is
meeting a crop protection retailer, the representative will be able
to share information on sales potentials with the retailer based on
localized market information. By viewing the potential of each
customer, the representative and retailer can collaborate to
optimize sales.”

Marketing Campaign Contributes to Double Sales

Compelling evidence of the success of this global CRM strategy
lies in recent marketing campaigns. Time after time, throughout
the world, Bayer CropScience has used Siebel Pharma to identify
the most valuable customers, target these customers based on their
needs, and implement highly effective closed-loop marketing
campaigns. In Argentina, Bayer CropScience used Siebel Pharma
to manage a marketing campaign aimed at increasing sales of
fungicide products in two target regions, Cordoba and South East
Buenos Aires. The software identified the relevant potato growers
in these regions and enabled the company to understand and
communicate the critical issues the farmers were facing. A
sequence of five mailings to 500 target customers was launched in
January 2003. Due to climatic reasons, the campaign did not have
much influence in the SE Buenos Aires region. In Cordoba,
though, the sales more than doubled in comparison to the forecast.
In the UK, Siebel Pharma was used to execute an outbound, five-
stage direct mail campaign promoting a cereal fungicide to a
target group of 10,500 cereal farmers. Between February and

Copyright © 2006 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Published June 2006
 Oracle Customer Case Study

April 2002, the response rate was more than 35%. Besides
providing the company with valuable customer data, the
marketing campaign response information from Siebel Pharma is
helping Bayer CropScience to further segment this market, based
on product preferences, varieties, and yield expectations. There is
corresponding success in Germany as well. Here, Bayer
CropScience undertook a three-stage direct mail and follow-up
telephone/fax marketing campaign to promote the launch of a new
herbicide formulation. Prior to the adoption of Siebel Pharma, a
5% response rate was considered satisfactory for comparable
campaigns. The enhanced targeting provided by Siebel led to the
campaign response rate reaching 12%.
During March and April 2002, Bayer CropScience undertook
another sales promotion campaign in Germany aimed at
increasing its market share in wheat crop protection. Siebel
Pharma was used to manage a three –stage campaign comprising
nonpersonalized direct mail and a follow-up telephone campaign
accompanied by a second, personalized mailer. The response rate
for the initial direct mail was 8%., and the follow-up telephone
calls resulted in a response rate of 47%. "A campaign response
rate of almost 50% is remarkable in any market situation," says
Klein, "but even more so in today's economic conditions. Siebel
Pharma played a major role in helping us achieve these
impressive results."

Controlled CRM Strategy, Locally Controlled

The adoption of a centrally initiated but locally owned CRM
rollout has enabled Bayer CropScience to quickly establish strong
buy-in from each country that is introducing the system. The
company is operating a common global CRM strategy, with
standard core processes. Using the toolbox approach, each
country is able to fine-tune the system according to its local
needs. Close partnerships with the integration partners Deloitte
Consulting and Siebel Expert Services are also helping to
accelerate the global rollout. “During our user workshops, we use
the marketing campaign results as tangible proof of the power of
the system,” Klein concludes. “Our staff quickly realizes that
Oracle's Siebel Pharma is a good catalyst for understanding
customer needs and treating each customer as an individual.”

Bayer CropScience provides millions of farmers worldwide with safe, reliable

crop protection solutions.
Copyright © 2006 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Published June 2006