#bwhversuscorona – Part 3

The Corona crisis at bwh Koffer naturally also has a decisive influence on the sales channels and the associated work of our area sales managers. We talked about this in an interview with Christian Maslej, area sales manager at bwh Koffer.

In this part we interview Christian Marslej, who works as area sales manager for bwh Koffer. How does he experience this situation and what plans does he have for the future?

You can find out more here:

The written interview with Christian Maslej

Since the video interview is only available in German, we took the trouble to translate the interview into written form. You can find the complete video under the written version of the interview.My name is Christian Maslej.

I am area sales manager at bwh Spezialkoffer. I am responsible for two areas: once in the Frankfurt area and then in the Hamburg area.

How has Corona changed your life?

The big change is simply that you stay at home a lot. You only do the important things. You go to the supermarket, you go to work. You learn to appreciate private contacts with family and friends. So far I try to keep in touch through video chats. And of course, relaxing in the garden over the weekend and meeting people is not possible. I try to make up for it with video chats, too.

Then we come to the professional areas. There I see it the same way with the private contacts – both with the customers, but also with the colleagues. I only see my colleague who shares an office with me via our daily video chat. And I keep in touch with customers via video conferences or telephone conferences. Unfortunately, I can’t travel at the moment. Usually I love to travel to my customers very much. But of course I have to go ahead and make the best of it.

What is it like for you to work in a home office?

A few days one part of my colleagues spent their time in the home office, and the other days my other colleagues and myself are at home.
I must also say that home office was completely new territory for me. I used to find it very difficult to work within my own four walls. But I found it very pleasant afterwards. The advantage for me is that I have no children in the house, so I can concentrate quite well.

In terms of the equipment, everything fits really well. As my colleague from the IT department said: a virtual LAN cable is laid and then we can access the data from anywhere in the world.

How do customers react to home office and video conferencing?

Basically: positive. It was a bit difficult in the beginning because you just had to give the customers time to get set up. The infrastructure simply didn’t fit there either. We had to set ourselves up first of course – webcams still had to be procured. But apart from that I have to say: simply good!

It’s also relatively easy to get appointments if you give the customers a lead-time of one or two weeks. At the moment, nearly everyone has 20 to 30 minutes to talk, maybe about new projects, or just about how things are going at the moment.

What positive things do you take away from the Corona time?

In my private life I have to say that you really notice the social cohesion, for example in the neighbourhood. If a neighbour was once in quarantine, you would ask: “What do you need? Eggs, milk – I’ll buy that for you. No problem.”

Since I have two sales areas, it’s almost impossible to combine them in a normal tour. So now I can really be in Hamburg at 11 am and in Frankfurt at 1 pm. I can’t drive that fast otherwise! (laughs)

In addition – also due to this time saving – I could use more time for research. In order to identify important customers or important new customers for us and thus to get out of the Corona crisis more effectively.

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Did you miss a part of our series?

No problem, here you can find an overview of all parts of #bwhversuscorona released so far: