The digital experience Atlas Copco has built
Atlas Copco’s digital experience is being braided together, front to back. It started with marketing and sales, and now they’re addressing service by making it more visible for both customers and salespeople.
It’s a pragmatic admission many manufacturers share. “Often, the service offers are less standardized than the product offers,” Thomas says. “But I think if you review your service, you will see that it’s actually way more standardized than you would think.”
On growth, the dial is finally moving. New customer sales attribution varies by market and method. Still, targets are up, and momentum is real. The precise metric matters less than the direction of travel, as there will never be an agreed-upon, perfect digital-led sales.
“But we don’t care,” he says. “We go for the growth.”
What makes Atlas Copco’s digital experience memorable
Differentiation hinges on channel reality and procurement preferences. “I think that’s where having 100% ecommerce penetration with your distributors becomes really crucial because then you share the lead,” Thomas says. “That way, you’re able to follow the money through the distribution.”
At the same time, companies like Atlas Copco must meet their customers where they are — and how they want to procure. Each customer has different needs and ways of doing business. “The differences are just as big between customers within an industry as they are between industries,” Thomas says.
That’s why adopting a CRM was such a game-changer for digital marketing. But tooling alone isn’t the story. “We added the CRM and two new roles and new sales processes when we revamped our CRM, and I think that is critical,” Thomas says. Without the CRM backbone, you cannot close the loop between ecommerce and working with distribution.
Leadership supports the CRM backbone by focusing on operations and adoption. “If you lose the adoption of Salesforce, you lose your heart in driving any sort of digital efforts,” Thomas says.
Simplicity over sprawl in the org chart
Digital serves multiple divisions and brands at Atlas Copco, with teams split along the funnel: web and digital marketing, ecommerce, CRM, service. The anchor is one authorized CX function. “And then, I think most importantly, we have — and we’ve had from the start — a strong customer experience team,” Thomas says. “I think having the customer experience in the lead makes you really customer-centric.”
When managing change, Thomas says do the unglamorous work first. “I think it’s to make people understand that you need to go basic before you can go advanced.” His sequence is crisp: Start basic, work agile, have small MVPs, and take it all step by step. Funding follows the same principle. “Invest at the level that you can afford long-term,” he says.
It’s about durability over drama to avoid the stop-start cycles that kill momentum.
We started to walk, and it was slow. And now we’re running, and it’s growing really well.
Thomas Areskoug, VP of Digital Sales, Marketing & Service, Atlas Copco Industrial Technique
The tooling
Tool agnosticism with standards: that’s the frame. Thomas is less concerned with the tech itself and much more focused on connectivity issues, agile ways of working and high standards for how the company connects systems. “That works really well for us,” he says.
AI has dual jobs, and it is just as important to make it help you improve your data. “AI can already make great advances in how we collect data from sales or service, asking the right questions, making sure we get the right information without it taking more time to log that issue.” The loop closes with content.
But it’s a long game. “I think using AI to improve operations is only as good as your data, but having it also improve your data makes its value increase over time, but it’s also not a three-month or one-year project,” Thomas says. “It’s going to be an iterative process that makes it better and better all the time.”
On sales execution, AI is already coaching deals. “We tested it, and the AI solution was way, way, way better than the sales engineer at estimating the likelihood of the opportunity being won or lost.”
The point isn’t just forecast accuracy. It’s behavior change. It’s nudging the salespeople to take one further step to close a deal by indicating what actions they must take to increase the likelihood of a win. “The value from just implementing something as simple as that has definitely helped our business significantly,” he says.
