Interview with Andreas Kluß, Head of Business Development & Marketing, RSM Germany

The current economic climate has resulted in marketing teams within professional services being forced to adapt their strategy, hiring, budgets and plans for the rest of this year. We wanted to find out how businesses are being impacted.  

Dirk Lohberg, Associate Director at Carter Murray in Germany, conducted a number of short interviews with experts and senior managers from the professional services sector which will be published over the coming weeks. In the second interview of the series, Dirk spoke with Andreas Kluß, Head of Business Development & Marketing, RSM Germany to understand how his team is dealing with this current situation and the challanges that lie ahead. 

What has your team/organisations approach been to working from home since the start of the outbreak – when did WFH start, did you notice a change in output from your team?

We quickly adopted new ways of working, e.g. using Microsoft Teams which was quite new for us. It works very well and so far there has been no change in the output. 

How is your team functioning under the current circumstances? Are you shifting your marketing/BD focus towards a certain direction?

The teamwork is incredible and motivation is still very high. Our focus in BD/marketing is now on helping our clients to find the relevant information with regards to all those stimulus packages that have been set up by the federal government and the federal states. We have implemented a Corona Resource Center on our website as a kind of ‚one stop shop‘ for all  information. We also publish newsletters on a regular basis to keep our clients informed.

Have you had to make any changes within your team? Are you still hiring into your team? If so, are they new or replacement roles?

The team size has stayed the same, at least for the remainder of this year. We will have a new joiner on-board in July (Content Manager), but this was approved last year.

Has your marketing budget been affected, and if so, how? 

We have a budget freeze, but will decide on a regular basis and depending on the economic developments how to handle that.

With the cancellation of events, have you shifted to webinars? What has the appetite been for these?

We´ve been quite slow in the usage of webinars so far but I can see that this is going to change, not only due to the crisis but also because we see how powerful webinars can be, if you use them in the right way.