In our management meetings the other week, we talked about what we want our teams to look like.  Running our commercial organization, my ideal team needs to reflect the needs of the market and be able to help our customers win using our technology.

The heavy industrial technology we sell:

• Is complex
• Takes time for customers to understand
• Has global demand
• Is very valuable once proven
• Enables our customers next generation products (often their highest margin SKUs)

That means that individually, my team members need:

• Good judgment to tell if an opportunity is real (and to get rid of ones that aren’t)
• Persistence to pursue big opportunities that may take time to develop
• Excellent inter-cultural and interpersonal skills to deal with the diversity of our own team and those at our customers
• Discipline and poise to deal with situations that can be high stress with significant capital on the line
• The right amount of attention to detail to map our capabilities to our customers needs and also master the intricacies of our legal and commercial agreements

As a team, I need them to be able to:

• Address three core industrial applications
• Be able to field unconventional / opportunistic inquiries beyond those three focused fields
• Be able to cover the following languages fluently: English, Czech, German, Russian and Mandarin (and get by in several others including Spanish, Portugeuse and Italian)

Lastly, since we’re in materials science, we face a long adoption curve.  We must be both aggressive and patient, covering all of these areas with minimal costs and maximum impact.  Building the right team in such an environment makes our own business and that of our customers successful.