Last week, Daman’s sales team gathered for their annual review. This is a time of sharing with the company updates and progress reports related to the joint field sales and marketing efforts.
The context of the meeting was centered around Daman’s evolution toward developing a customer orientation. Being customer oriented as an organization means centering all individual sales, marketing, service, engineering and operational tasks around meeting specific customer needs in order to advance relationships to high-value partnerships. This goes beyond having great customer service. Rather, being customer oriented requires awareness of each individual customer’s needs and defining processes to develop specific products and services that meet those needs as identified in the steps below.
Awareness of the results (goals of services) and the means or ways to achieve results.
Identifying and defining customer needs.
Customer participation at the earliest possible time.
Determining consumer expectations of services.
Daman’s focus on meeting distributors’ needs through operational excellence has been the focus of initiatives such as The Daman Trigger System, customer partnership incentives, the Creative Team new product developments and Daman’s 2019 marketing focus.
An essential development that Daman has recently achieved toward having a customer orientation is establishing a team of Regional Account Managers who focus daily on developing individual distributor relationships to assist with problem-solving specific project and OEM opportunities. Here are some 2019 highlights reported this month on this team’s overall and regional achievements.
Historically, Daman’s sales growth has been driven by repeat sales rather than new business. In recent years, the goal of the Creative Team has been to develop specific new products that will continue to grow and counterbalance the volatility of industry fluctuations. While many new developments are relatively lower volume, products such as stainless steel and integrated solutions are gaining momentum and showing a steady growth trend. Additionally, Account Manager relationship building over the past year has been extremely successful, proving that being available and present in the market is a catalyst for revenue growth that Daman would not otherwise have known exists.
The eastern region, led by Luke Pietrucha, is meeting sales goals by increasing new business by a whopping 21% over the past three years. Luke continues to focus in on specific account opportunities and leverage Daman’s responsiveness to gain new accounts and projects with advanced distributor partnerships.
While the southwest region is down due to lagging oil and gas sales, other industry segments continue to grow as Stevie Treece develops key relationships to focus on industry diversification. With big plans for her region, Stevie will continue to diversify industries in her territory in 2020.
The densely populated and diverse midwest region led by Todd Crocker continues to experience consolidations and provide opportunities for close engineering-based partnerships to assist with winning custom manifold business. This is proving to be advantageous to distributors by allowing them to advance into higher-volume partnerships and gain new business.
Gordon Weiler’s efforts in the western region demonstrate how developing a solid track record and knowledge of OEM-level activity has achieved increasing mutually-set 2020 distributor sales goals by 100-400% for many OEM accounts. In 2019, conversations have developed into tracking specific OEM needs and knowing how to better strategically partner and meet high-impact goals in the coming year.
As these progress reports were shared, one of the most significant takeaways was how the discipline of using and managing information in Salesforce and the Daman Analytics platform is paying off.
Knowledge is power, and for the first time all Account Managers were able to consistently report information and share evidence-based stories that demonstrate how using data to make informed, factually-driven decisions with distributor partners is directly correlated to sales growth.
In 2019, Daman achieved its most successful year of overall performance through acknowledging and responding to market realities. Unlike past years of being blind to market realities, the Daman team could collectively tell an accurate story about how success was achieved—and how they are making course corrections to achieve further growth in the coming year.
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