At the international Automotive Sales meetings in San Diego and Barcelona, participants shared views and information on the transformation of the auto business and the goals and strategies of Freudenberg Sealing Technologies (FST).
No one is closer to customers than sales organizations. Like a seismograph, the Automotive Sales staff picked up the looming upheaval in the auto business early on and passed the information on to colleagues inside the company. The industry has been busy dealing with trends such as emissions-free, battery-electric propulsion and autonomous driving. So have large swaths of FST.
The “gold fever” that has seized the market is not expected to subside any time soon. It is equal parts pressure and momentum. The participants at the two Automotive Sales meetings over the summer, one in San Diego and the other in Barcelona, were unanimous on that point.
FST is seeing the rapid transformation of many products and applications. Entirely new players are now on the scene. In many cases, Automotive Sales is dealing with different contact persons as new e-mobility teams emerge. In some areas of application, such as battery technology, FST even competes with former customers at times.
“The new applications are forcing us to become a learning organization. We have to listen to our customers more closely than ever before, treat their problems as a challenge, and take them home with us,” said Melanie Schneider, Vice President, Automotive Sales.
It happens again and again: The new e-mobility projects are turning out to be more time-consuming and require greater cooperation among all the parties than in the past.
Combining Forces And Learning
In keeping with the idea of cooperation, the current Automotive Sales campaign motto is “Together we grow.” The shared goal is to reshape the company’s portfolio and develop employees to make FST’s transformation of its automotive business a success. Schneider describes “Together we grow” as an initiative to “acquire experience, communicate and learn from one another. We have a great team at FST, and if we combine our forces. we have a brilliant future ahead of us.”
FST can already report excellent examples of new business in totally new applications. It has filled its innovation pipeline as well. The focus was on incubator projects at both Automotive Sales meetings in early summer. They are nurtured with extraordinary care like premature infants during their very first phase of life (see more on the topic on this page).
Aside from business issues that came up in presentations by FST managers and other activities, colleagues introduced themselves, got to know one another, forged contacts and shared their knowledge and experience – all key activities in a meeting of this kind. A total of 30 new team members were attending for the first time. The meeting was designed to be interactive and to promote as many interesting discussions as possible, along with the rapid integration of the new employees.
At Automotive Sales meetings in Europe and the Americas, it is a tradition to honor employees for their sales successes the previous year. The award-winners for 2022 are:
Enabler Award 2022
Rachel Black
Execution Award 2022
Sandip Shinganapurkar
Uwe Klohr
Michael Yash
Mike Sampson
Martin Strauch
Leadership Award 2022
Brad Henderson
Open Minded Award 2022
Dr. Peter Kritzer
Ownership Award 2022
Christian Kudlek
Kazuya Tera
Carina Nykiel
Guilherme Monteiro
Eiji Narita
Sales Performance Award 2022
Agnes Spohn
Success Award 2022
Daniel Aschermann
Ann Schauerte
Grant Hedges
