Last year, Malcolm staff resigned his post as sales and marketing
director of Danfoss Motion Controls for the managing directorship of
Halifax Fan. The new man got his feet under the desk at the beginning of
the year. Les Hunt asks Tony Pickering how he hopes to grow Danfoss's
share of the systems drives market at a time when pricing policy
seemingly has more clout than technical muscle
Tony Pickering joins Danfoss as sales and marketing director for the
group's motion controls division at an interesting time. The product
portfolio received a major boost last year with the launch of the FC300
'AutomationDrive' (see DPA November 2003 page 21) - a strategic new
platform upon which the company is pinning a lot of hopes for the future.
The highly modular FC300 was designed to fulfil the wish lists of a very
broad user group, and can rightly be hailed as something of a technical
triumph. But selling in the drives market today is not as focused on the
technical requirements of the application as it should be. There is
currently a price war - some observers claim that unit prices are falling
by as much as 1% per month and, consequently, even the major players such
as Danfoss have a challenge to achieve a return on their not
inconsiderable product development investments.
Mr Pickering is no stranger to the drives market. For over 25 years he
has pursued a career with a number of market leaders, including ABB, IMO
and Alstom, from the early days of ac drives. He thus has an intimate
knowledge of the business of selling in this sector but is less than
happy about current trends. A buyers' market might seem like good news to
customers but, says Mr Pickering, do they know what they are buying, and
will the support be there when they need it? He feels that the technical
competence of many sales employees within the industry is at an all-time
low, with many being recruited for their foot-in-the-door talents rather
than their drives applications experience.
It is fundamentally essential to have a knowledge of the customer's
business and to develop an understanding of his or her technical
requirements, says Mr Pickering, but this does require investment in time
and resources. Customers appreciate technical input from their suppliers
- surveys repeatedly reveal this to be the case. A technically competent
salesman is in a position to offer valuable advice to a customer with
little or no in-house engineering resources.
What Mr Pickering wants to see at Danfoss Motion Controls is not just a
more broadly technically competent sales force, but also one that isn't
averse to carrying the goods around with it in suitcases! As the
traditional vacuum cleaner salesman might once have said, there is no
better way of familiarising your customers with the product than by
bringing it to them, switching it on and showing them how it functions.
Demonstrator cases are likely to become a familiar tool-of-trade for the
Danfoss drives sales team.
More importantly, Mr Pickering's plans for the structure of his sales
operation, his chosen routes to market and the way these are to be
managed and serviced, are going to be the acid test of his strategy. At
one level, the plan is to establish an essentially flat organisation with
separate teams covering on the one hand, customer services and training,
and on the other, technical sales and product management with useful
advice available to customers via helplines. The 'Motion Control
University', which currently is an internal technical training resource
for Danfoss personnel, will be brought into the public domain via the web
site to strengthen the company's customer service offering.
Strategic business development will continue to concentrate on vertical
markets, following the model successfully deployed in the HVAC sector
where Danfoss enjoys market leadership. Other strategically important
sectors include the food and b