The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down, and there is a lot of talk about when things will go “back to normal,” or whether this is the “new normal.” 

Christoph Schell, the Chief Commercial Officer at HP, is spending a lot of time thinking about what this new world will look like. He’s responsible for setting the company’s path and making sure HP is ready to go-to-market in the best ways possible. How he does that is by looking at emerging consumer behaviors and combining that information with hard data, which leads him to design strategies and solutions that, recently, have needed to be deployed faster than anticipated. 

The pace of change is quicker than ever before, and the five-year roadmap that companies had previously planned for are now taking place in a matter of months. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Christoph explains how this acceleration has forced a change in HP’s roadmap and sales model, and discusses why the new plan is so focused on subscription-based services, supply chain resiliency, and data.

Main Takeaways:

• The Rise of the Prosumer: A new customer segment has emerged in recent months — the prosumer, who is a professional who is now working from home but requires enterprise-level capabilities and technology. Companies like HP have had to pivot to meet the needs of this new group, who are being guided by CIOs investing heavily in workflows and increased security for new work environments.   
• Everybody is an Inside Sales Rep: With much of the world forced to work from home, how business gets done needed to change. This was especially true for sales, which now had to be done fully remote through digital interactions. But working with many retail partners and revamping an entire sales model is no easy task.
• All About Supply Chains: Creating a resilient supply chain is one of the biggest challenges companies face today. For global companies, that challenge is made trickier by things like tariffs and other cultural and legal issues that may arise. To become antifragile in the supply chain means to have the ability to assess all your partners from every angle in order to see where roadblocks may occur and if they are surmountable.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today on the show, we have Christoph Schell, the Chief Commercial Officer at HP Inc.

Stephanie:

Cristoph, welcome.

Christoph:

Thanks for having me.

Stephanie:

If it was any other time, I would have you in studio, I'd have you walk down the street to come here but here we are, on Zoom, even though we're basically neighbors.

Christoph:

That's true.

Stephanie:

So I want to hear a little bit about your journey. I saw that you have been at HP for more than 21 years which I was like, "Whoa." That's a long time. So I want to hear a little bit about how you came to HP and what that journey looked like to becoming a Chief Commercial Officer, which is where you are now.

Christoph:

Yeah. So look, you probably can hear this. I'm German. I started with HP in Germany, in '95, as an intern. I did a six month internship in the business school that I went to and I worked with HP as a business analyst and then back for another year to school. And yeah, then actually graduated and I wanted a job at HP but HP had a hiring freeze back then and so I went to P&G in Germany as well. And then one a half years into it, went back to HP. Moved with HP to the middle east. I was eight years in Dubai and then Australia, Singapore, San Diego, back to Singapore. Then I left HP again. I went to a company called [Phillips] and I stayed there for close to two years. And then in 2014, came back to HP. This time, in Palo Alto. And yeah, since then I've been with HP here in Palo Alto.

Stephanie:

That's amazing. So what does your current role look like now?

Christoph:

Look, it's a new role. I mean for all these years that I was in HP, there was a lot of change. But actually, one thing that never changed, we always had the globe organized into three regions. These regions were the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and Asia, Pacific, and Japan. And we decided last year that we will change that and we did away with the three regions and moved to ten markets. These ten markets are reporting now into a central structure that we call The Commercial Organization and I'm heading the team of The Commercial Organization.

Christoph:

And we're basically responsible for all go-to-market, and from category management, we do the product management. We're responsible for basically the revenue and the margin and positioning the products correctly to get with our marketing teams and global business units. So in a classic marketing term, you would say we manage the four P's, the four P's of marketing. And we do that globally.

Stephanie:

Got it. So tell me a little bit about behind the scenes of why you moved the org structure to the ten markets instead of the three regional one. Like what was the driving force behind that?

Christoph:

The driving force to me, and I was leading that project from the get-go when we designed this new structure, was a change that we saw in how our customers wanted to consume our technology and how they went shopping. And actually it's interesting to see that COVID-19 has accelerated a lot of this.

Christoph:

So a lot of our go-to-market has moved online. Either to marketplaces or to online businesses, these can be partners or even our own store. And customers go back and forth between these. They get some of their information during the journey, on the marketplace, on HP, with the partners. Some of them go obviously to publications, they listen to podcasts. And they form an opinion. And when you want to be there with them all the way, you need to be very consistent. Very consistent in how you show up, very consistent in how you manage additional assets. And very consistent in how you get your value proposition across, globally, internationally. And we thought that the structure that we had of three independent regions resulted in too much decentralized decision taking when it came to four P management but also basically, basic definitions of value proposition.

Christoph:

And so, we centralized this a lot more. We took a lot more control in how we manage it. And that was the big, driving force behind the structural change. There is, hand-in-hand with this, a move to go more and more into subscription-based engagement with customers. And we can talk about this a little bit later. And that's also a lot easier to do in a digital go-to-market, and digitally engage with customers.

Stephanie:

Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned COVID earlier and I've heard from quite a few guests that their tech or product roadmaps that were maybe for three years to come, that sped up into three months. So what kind of changes has HP seen when it comes to COVID?

Christoph:

Yeah, look, I will echo that. I really believe that what we've seen now happening in five months is what our plan, our roadmap had to schedule to happen in five years. So there was a huge acceleration. Basically, the way I would summarize it is this move to digital has been accelerated, the move from transactional engagements to subscription-based engagements has accelerated. The request of customers to have more personalized experiences has increased. And that has a profound impact on how we design products. It has a major impact on our roadmap that has clearly changed if I compare from February to now.

Christoph:

But it also has a significant impact in how we think about talent, how we think about culture that we want to build within HP. It's actually very exciting. The core of our business is around personal systems and printing. And there are categories within personal systems and printing that have become essential during COVID-19. You know, the good-old PC is very hip right now. A lot of people need it to work from home or to learn from home and even home printing which a lot of people stopped even looking at as a desirable purchase, has been coming back in attractiveness. And it's essential, again, for people that work from home and that learn from home.

Christoph:

And so that helps us a lot to offset some of the headwinds that we see clearly in an office environment with people working from home. Obviously the office business is a little bit neutered right now. So those are the big changes.

Stephanie:

So how are you guys handling these big changes? Like what were some of the biggest pivots that you had to make over these past couple months and how are you aligning team members and everyone around a big cause like that that is probably shifting a lot of the plans, like you had mentioned, and condensing them into a very short time.

Christoph:

I'm going to answer this across a couple of headlines. So the first one is really, roadmap. So if you stay with these essential categories of working from home and learning from home, what is really interesti