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Briefly

Finnish company Nikolai Sourcing partners with its client businesses in their Asian sourcing endeavors. In addition to its Finnish office, the company has local offices in China, India, and Bangladesh. Leveraging its strong local knowledge and country-specific responsibility experts, Nikolai Sourcing ensures transparency across entire supply chains. This enables clients to select responsible parties for all production stages, thus manufacturing their designed products with quality, cost-effectiveness, and responsibility.

The collaboration helps Nikolai Sourcing’s clients improve product-specific margins by enabling effortless and cost-effective manufacturing in Asia without significant investments in gathering country-specific information, risk mapping, and multilingual communication.

Success Metrics from Aamu’s Team

The partnership with Aamu began when Nikolai Sourcing applied for development assistance from ELY (a Finnish funding agency). This was also a time of internal change, marked by the appointment of a new commercial director. The aim of the collaboration was, among other things, to help this new responsible person quickly take charge and propel Nikolai Sourcing onto a growth path.

At the beginning of the partnership, several areas for development were identified: there was practically no new customer acquisition in sales, and customer-specific profitability was unclear. Previously, only customer-specific revenue and the value of transactions were measured without understanding the differences in staff costs and labor time requirements. Customer satisfaction was also not actively monitored. With Aamu’s coaching, Nikolai Sourcing began to analyze customer-specific profitability, revealing that even some of its larger clients were weak in terms of profitability.

In the strategy created with Aamu, it was defined which customers the company should focus on in the coming years, both in new customer acquisition and in customer relationship management. The company’s billing model was also seen to need development, as a large portion of the customer base was found to be poorly profitable. Consequently, it was decided to move to minimum billing for customers by 2023.

Clarity in New Customer Acquisition

Along with customer profitability, new customer acquisition emerged as a key development target and was restructured. Previously, revenue growth relied on upselling to existing customers, but at Aamu’s suggestion, the focus shifted to outbound sales. For this, the company drafted lead lists and defined a clearer ideal customer profile.

The end result was a clearer sales strategy and precise monitoring metrics for business development.

Future Prospects

“There is now more strategic structure,” says Edvard Krogius, CEO of Nikolai Sourcing.

Following the changes proposed by Aamu, with outbound sales and growth in current client accounts, the company’s revenue is set to significantly increase from 2023 onwards. The profitability of individual customer accounts also improved, particularly with large accounts.