A number of employees in General Industry Sales were honored for their performance as well, and Bryan Anderson even won two awards for his impressive sales success last year.
During the spring, General Industry (GI) Sales paid tribute to staff for extraordinary sales success in 2021, presenting them with sales awards in five categories. The winners were Rossano Lazzaro, Mauro Lasagno, Matthew van Dam, William Blocher, Galenn Sekulich, John Wagner (†) and Bryan Anderson.
Anderson falls into a special category: He actually received two prizes, the “New Customer Acquisition Award” and the “100 Million Dollar Award.” It should be noted that the two major orders came from the aviation industry, which the pandemic had sent into a tailspin in 2020 and 2021. Many of the sales discussions also had to take place virtually. That basically made prospecting for new customers tougher, especially if their decision-makers were not personally known to Freudenberg-NOK Sealing Technologies (FNST).
Success Squared
First of all, as the names of the awards suggest, Anderson still managed to bring an important new customer on board. Secondly, he was able to land a long-term mega-order – an exclusive contract in the three-figure-million range. In sectors beyond the automotive industry, an order of this size is highly unusual.
In both cases, teamwork led to sales success. The order for which Anderson received the “New Customer Acquisition Award” includes a new program for aircraft fire seals. It was a new fabric that the Lead Center in Tillsonburg, Canada, developed for fire-protection applications that won the customer over. “We previously had no sales history or direct relationship with the company,” Anderson said. With the help of continual communication, he was able to forge ties with a key decision-making network and build trust in FNST’s technologies.
When a current, strategically important customer places an order worth more than 100 million dollars or euros, it is definitely impressed with the supplier’s quality and delivery performance. In this case as well, the Lead Center in Tillsonburg earned a vote of confidence with its technical expertise. “The customer was seeking a long-term supplier-partner who was willing to agree to complex contract terms,” Anderson said. The contract negotiations were underway for about two years. At FNST’s end, effective cooperation between operations, sales and the legal department paid off.
