What characterizes Novozymes' marketing and sales?
This company has made a significant commitment over the past few years to becoming more customer-centred. Yes, that sounds like a cliche, but for us it is the main reason why Novozymes has become an independent company.
The old structure, where we were a business division of Novo Nordisk, made sense as long as the challenge was to exploit a common production technology to the maximum. But the business has changed, and our new structure gives us far more freedom to find strategic partners, something that affects our marketing and sales profoundly.
The way we carry out marketing and sales is different from our competitors. Our approach emphasizes long-term commitment. You can see it in the way we launched this company on the stock exchange, and you can see it in the way we send a technical representative along with our products. We aren't kidding when we talk about partnering.
Why do you work for Novozymes?
A lot of people will tell you that this company was the first to sell enzymes over the Internet. But not many people know that within a year of launching our online detergent sales website we launched online sales for two new industries, fuel and starch - and our own employees did it, with almost no help from outside consultants. That's learning by doing. And by developing skills.
Actually, one of the main reasons why we are so involved with e-commerce has to do with making the culture of this company much more customer-oriented. I want everybody here - including production and R&D - to understand that serving customers is why we are all here. e-commerce helps everybody inside get involved with the people outside.
I like working for Novozymes because I like building teams, because I share the passion for enzymes, because we are always breaking new ground with our technologies and finding new ways of improving.