A portrait of Christian Schiele: ROBIOTIC’s strategist for marketing and business development

Christian Schiele is our No. 1 in the portrait series in 2020: The experienced manager recently joined the ROBIOTIC management team as Director Marketing & Business Development. With his many years of experience, he is expected to sharpen the strategic focus of the company and expand its business potential in the long term.

Schiele began his basic studies of economics at the University of Ulm, Germany, in 2001 and successfully completed them in 2003. He then continued his studies at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where he received his diploma in business administration in 2007 with a focus on international management, marketing and banking. During his main studies he already completed his first internships at DaimlerChrysler Bank AG in Stuttgart and Generali-Versicherung AG in Munich. His professional future, however, did not continue in this environment: "After my very theoretical business studies in Nuremberg, I thought deeply about what to do. Actually I wanted to join the financial sector, but then I was convinced by a Vodafone presentation at an applicants' fair that now is the time for the technical revolution," he describes the step that was to have a decisive influence on his life.

 

Formative first years in B2B sales at Vodafone

According to his own assessment, Schiele made one of the most important decisions for his professional future at this time: "I decided to work on my social skills, go into sales and learn from scratch on B2B sales, which is a science in itself. This was a completely new and exciting field for me." In 2007, he started at Vodafone D2 GmbH in Stuttgart as an Account Manager in B2B direct sales for small and medium-sized companies and will be promoted to Senior Account Manager by 2011. A time he wouldn't want to miss: "Four years of direct sales for small and medium-sized businesses: You sit together with all kinds of people in a wide variety of positions, from managing director to purchasing manager to IT manager and executive secretary. And you learn that it always depends on what interests and goals your counterpart has - classic principal agent theory". After all, everyone has an interest in implementing the most important expectations from their job profile: A purchasing manager wants to save money, an IT manager wants maximum availability and as few calls as possible from his boss to things that don't work. "Balancing all these interest concepts with what you can offer as a service provider has simply been mega exciting and formative. I've developed a very different service mindset over the years."

 

Introduction to the topics of digitalization and IoT

In the same year, he moved to Vodafone's German headquarters in Düsseldorf as Sales Manager for IOT & ICT. "I learned a lot about the industry requirements for machine-to-machine communication there. And especially about what a company has to do to meet such requirements in the area of digitalization and IoT and thus ultimately to do business properly".

In 2013, he is drawn to Heidelberg: At Verivox GmbH, he starts in Product Management & Business Development for Telecommunications to develop new comparison computers for DSL and mobile phone tariffs. In 2015, he moves up the career ladder as Head of Product Management Banking & Telecommunications and in 2016 becomes the overall head of the Telecommunications division. In 2017, he will also take up the position of Managing Director of the Verivox subsidiary Preis24.de GmbH. During this time, Christian Schiele shifts his operational focus: "At Verivox, I did the exact opposite compared to my job at Vodafone: to focus less on personal interests in conversations, but to provide very good telecommunications services in purely digital form to a broad mass of private individuals, who can complete them as intuitively and directly as possible. The premise has always been: "How can we make it as easy as possible for customers?

 

ROBIOTIC: The vision for successful digitalization processes

The connection to ROBIOTIC starts exactly during this time at Verivox, where he meets TK-World AG and Kai-Uwe Flormann. First contacts to Ralf Krippner and his company Hoffmann+Krippner also develop during this time. In the course of several, longer conversations, Schiele and Flormann discover that they tick similarly in many areas and that their interests and expectations of the global key topic IoT overlap in many points. "We share a vision of how to help medium-sized companies and also larger global players to successfully implement the big issue of digitalization," says Schiele. Often these companies would have excellent specialists in their workforce, but lack the manpower to tackle the digital challenge without external support. This is where, according to Schiele, ROBIOTIC comes in: "We provide them with the necessary expertise to develop IoT business cases and new business areas as well as billing models or even offer new subscription models. This is the only way they can take the next step to keep up in a digitalized global economy. Because one thing is clear: If you don't make your products better now - the Chinese competitor will make them better! In order to maintain the current premium lead, every company must also become better and better; good craftsmanship and good technology in the classic sense is no longer enough. "You have to combine this knowledge with digital knowledge in order to drive your business forward," emphasizes Schiele. "To show this to our customers - that's what I'm here for!”

According to Schiele's vision, ROBIOTIC's target group is on the one hand the classic medium-sized businesses with a massive need for consulting, but also larger companies which, due to their complex structures, cannot quickly realize proof of concepts for new business ideas. "It is precisely these companies that need a new view of their markets from the outside every now and then: everyone becomes professionally blinkered in their own area at some point. A good example of this is the service industry, which has been addressing similar issues for years, but has never made the leap to new billing models, for example. It's not only about technology, but also about business management issues - new leasing models for machines etc." There would be an unbelievable number of possibilities in the areas of gastronomy, energy sector, security etc. 

 

ROBIOTIC - the complete package for successful IoT projects

For Christian Schiele, ROBIOTIC has a very special strength as a service provider: "The company comes from the medium-sized business sector and at the same time can point to many years of experience and implementation competence. ROBIOTIC is a joint venture of strong partners with decades of experience in the areas of sensor technology, hardware and telecommunications; this is exactly why we can provide our customers with credible advice. We are not a pure consulting company, but we can implement hardware topics, services, operations and billing ourselves.” A USP that no other competitor in the IoT service provider market can boast and which puts ROBIOTIC in the fortunate position of being able to implement projects extremely quickly.

"The challenge and also the goal of ROBIOTIC will be, in the medium and long term, to convert the knowledge gained from successful individual projects into functioning products and product lines," says Schiele, outlining his strategic approach. For example, it is absolutely conceivable to use hardware developed in-house in other scenarios in order to gain more industrial partners in this way. "We as ROBIOTIC do not start from scratch with the appropriate projects like other service providers, but already at 80 percent and individualize the remaining 20 percent as required with a view to the needs of the partner. This is the ideal way for us to find a fast and cost-efficient solution! The need for this is becoming ever stronger among our potential customers and therefore I see us on a strong future growth course."

In his private life, Christian Schiele confirms his character as an open, communicative and integrative type: He likes to travel with friends, is interested in history, politics, literature, weight training, music and new technical developments and likes to play FIFA. Already during his studies he financed a part of his living by organizing parties and as a DJ. For him this was an important first communicative experience, because it was in this field that he met many different people, whose needs he had to adapt to. Coupled with the subsequent skills from his professional life, he has built up an enormous wealth of experience over the years, from which he can ideally draw in his position as Director Marketing & Business Development.