We spoke with Stefan Mohrlang, sales controller at Vichy, about how his company uses the geomarketing software application DISTRICT as a rejuvenating force for sales territory planning in the cosmetics sector.

Mr. Mohrlang, what are your company's and divison's goals for this year?

Our goals are the classic sales goals: increase turnover, improve customer service and, as a means of achieving these ends, optimize the use of resources with regard to our external sales force.

Describe the characteristics of your product line with regard to sales territory planning and your external sales force?

In contrast to other sales lines that utilize the pharmacy network but are concentrated primarily in urban areas, we strive for a nationwide presence for Vichy products. Louis Vuitton bags can only be purchased in Berlin or Munich. By contrast, Vichy cosmetics are not targeted to a niche market, but rather a large body of distinguishing consumers. In order to achieve this nationwide presence, we have to steer clear of focusing solely on urban areas, particularly in eastern Germany, where our customers are distributed more evenly throughout the region. This must be taken into account in our sales territory planning.

How long has your company been using DISTRICT?

Vichy has been using DISTRICT since 2003. We take care of the preliminary steps in-house, such as the preparation of the company data. We then use the services of a GfK GeoMarketing consultant to carry out the planning and evaluation steps with DISTRICT here on-site. We have an enormous amount of respect for the experience and expertise offered by your consultants - such as Michael Büttcher - who are highly skilled at planning and restructuring sales territory networks.

What was the specific task that had to be accomplished? What were the details and conditions concerning the sales territory restructuring?

From both the standpoint of the market and our company, the time was right for a restructuring. This restructuring needed to take into account both personnel- and region-specific challenges and characteristics. We tried as much as possible to align the new sales territories with our existing structure. But even when the boundaries of certain regions remained relatively the same, there was a need to optimize them. Here we had to take numerous factors into account, including the location of customers, employees' places of residence, the customer-sales force network as a whole, the division of various sales territories into overarching sales regions, etc.

What approach was taken to achieve these goals - what were the most important phases? Were there regional differences that had to be taken into account?

First we used DISTRICT to visualize the existing sales structure. We then defined relevant factors for the planned restructuring and used the software to automatically generate a restructuring suggestion. We then discussed the restructuring model with our sales force, taking their expertise and experience into account. Then Mr. Büttcher used DISTRICT to manually adapt the proposed restructuring to our company's precise specifications. Finally, the results were distributed to all employees in the form of maps and reports.

Please tell us a bit about the implementation of the restructuring - is it already completed?

Yes, the new structure was implemented very quickly and was entirely successful. Things have continued to develop in a positive direction ever since.

To what extent has geomarketing contributed to L'Oréal/ Vichy's success? And what is your assessment of DISTRICT?

DISTRICT is an immensely helpful tool for sales territory planning due to, among other things, its speed and flexibility. DISTRICT allows us to specify our company-specific criteria and use these as guiding parameters for any restructurings. Using this information, DISTRICT can then generate the optimal solution. We also really value the feature that allows us to manually make changes and immediately have them taken into account and visualized. I'm very enthusiastic about how attractive and easy-to-understand the generated results are, despite the complexity of the theme.

Many thanks for the interview and best wishes for your continued success!

Visit Vichy at www.vichy.com.

For more information on how DISTRICT 10 can help you with your sales territory planning, visit www.gfk-geomarketing.com/territoryplanning.