Rockwell Automation has quietly grown into market leader status by embedding its products into virtually every aspect of American life. Offering solutions that integrate industrial machinery with newer “information” technology to provide more efficient, flexible, inexpensive and higher quality manufacturing and processing, Rockwell Automation serves such diverse industries as transportation, pharmaceuticals, petroleum and chemicals, food processing, mining and metals, material handling and entertainment. A few of the company’s thousands of solutions include the motion controlsystems that operate the moveable props in Phantom of the Opera and other stage productions, the programmable logic controllers that make Chrysler’s new cars and trucks sleeker and less wind resistant and even the energy-efficient ventilation system motors that protect the Louvre Museum’s collection of priceless art treasures from fluctuating seasonal temperatures and changes in air moisture.

In January 1998 Jeff Banaszynski was named senior vice president of Rockwell Automation’s Global Sales Group. After a few tumultuous years of restructuring, division sell-offs and acquisitions, Rockwell Automation emerged as the largest division of parent company Rockwell. In 1995 Rockwell acquired Reliance Electric, a leader in industry motor technology, to complement Allen-Bradley, the company’s market-leading automation controls supplier. Banaszynski, who has been with Allen-Bradley since joining the company as a sales trainee in 1972, says that while the two combined divisions put Rockwell Automation in a strong position to capitalize on a growing global market, this type of merger has presented challenges to the sales organization’s continued effectiveness.

The customers, they are a-changin’

When asked how his sales organization has stayed successful, Banaszynski says, “We bought Reliance in 1995 and we kept the two sales organizations separate for about a year. But then we realized that the two organizations’ salespeople were calling on some of the same customers. We also recognized that the customers themselves were changing – they were downsizing, reducing the number of vendors and looking for partners to provide solutions to business problems, not just sell them components. We said, ‘Hey, we need to respond to what customers are looking for from us.’

“So we spent about 12 months benchmarking competitors, peer companies and partners; we talked to our customers and to our channel partners – systems integrators and distributors from both the Allen-Bradley and Reliance sides. As a result of that we folded the two separate, geographically based sales organizations into one. We also changed the exclusively geographic concentration by adding a focus on the industries we were both serving – metals, petrochemicals and mining, forest products, transportation and consumers.”

In practice, this has meant concentrating Rockwell Automation’s salespeople’s attention on applying their expertise to very specific applications within the industries they know best.

“For example,” explains Banaszynski, “you can apply the basic technology of motion control to consumer products and high-speed packaging as well as to transfer lines for making engines and automotive products. However, the technology you have to apply at 500 to 10,000 pieces per minute in the consumer industry you may have to apply at just 60 pieces per hour in the automotive industry. The whole thought process and the value you add in applying it is much different. So you need to make sure you have the resources focused appropriately to those applications. You can’t take someone who’s good at applying it at low speeds and assume they can do it on a high-speed cigarette machine.”

No fear of intimacy

Banaszynski says that at Rockwell Automation, the challenge today involves seeing success through the eyes of the customer and creating solutions based on that assessment. He refers to this as “customer intimacy.”

“This means looking first at our customers’ key business drivers,” Banaszynski explains. “Are they trying to increase production capacity with fewer fixed investments? Are they trying to make their manufacturing more flexible? Are they looking for higher quality? In the past you would come in and say, ‘I’d like to talk to you about my PLC.’ Today you don’t know if that’s what’s on their mind. When you understand their business drivers, instead of leading with a product you lead with a business solution. And that solution typically involves a combination of technologies.”

To maintain customer intimacy while increasing Rockwell salespeople’s understanding of customers’ business drivers is the goal. Banaszynski says that the company is at the forefront in developing the new selling skills that will help serve customers’ future needs.

“We’ve now taken our people’s skills and refined them in very meaningful ways,” he says. “In the past, typical sales training would have involved such professional skills as sales presentations, territory planning and management, along with teaching them what a PLC does and what a drive does, what a motor starter does and what a push-button does. Today we’ve added business training such as understanding returns on investment, supply chain management, project management and the program management that’s required to make these capital projects successful. Plus we’re now teaching them application knowledge to answer such questions as ‘What are the drivers on process applications?’ and ‘What are the drivers on discrete applications?’ So we have doubled the number of performance areas where they have to be experts from two to four: to the professional and technology areas we have added the business and application areas also. And that’s made our salespeople more valuable assets to the customer.”

As a result of this new approach, Banaszynski says Rockwell has been able to create solutions that provide customers with tangible bottom-line results – always the objective in today’s hypercompetitive global marketplace.

“When we show a company that manufactures 50 billion diapers a year how they can save a fraction of a penny per diaper, that adds real value,” he says. “When you show a customer how you can increase tire production by adapting new technology, so that they can make more tires with the same capital investment because now they don’t have to build a $250 million plant to get that added capacity, that’s a lot. Or maybe 10 more Suburbans roll off the line per shift because our process people and embedded engineers show the customer how to improve their plant’s production. Now that’s real value. And it requires a customer intimacy, where you act just like a private consultant or an extension of the customer’s staff. Today you have to be able to show a customer a tangible value that you deliver. It can’t just feel good and it can’t be just baseball tickets and dinners. That won’t cut it with customers anymore.”

Rockwell’s hire power

According to Banaszynski, salespeople fill in the final puzzle piece. He believes Rockwell Automation is more aggressive than anyone else in the industry at finding, recruiting, hiring, training and promoting the best sales executives. And since the company’s sales representatives are all graduate engineers, the competition for their services is particularly stiff. The secret to hiring the best people, he says, is to incorporate existing sales staff members in the selection process.

“The number one trait we look for is common sense,” he says, “which is something you just can’t train. The second would be problem-solving abilities and a good thought process, which usually go along with the engineering background. To pinpoint these traits, we have a world-class round-robin process. It starts with campus interviewing during students’ junior year, as well as summer internships, to start to identify these people early on. Before they graduate, the round-robin culminates in a two-day interview process headed by all the senior management of the company, including me, my vice presidents and several generations of salespeople – some newer people and others who have been with the company for many years. The recruits can see firsthand and ask point-blank questions about what it’s like to work for us – what are the opportunities for advancement, will they be challenged and whatever else they want to know. At the same time, our salespeople, who know best what it takes to be successful in our markets, can assess the recruits and help determine which candidates would make the best additions to our organization.

“So through a variety of multifunctional interviews with people up and down the chain of command, we decide whom we want to make job offers to, and then within 24 hours we offer them positions and aggressively go after them. It’s a rigorous process and the candidates are very strong – I know I would be frightened to have to interview with that group today. But it has been very effective for isolating the very best candidates who will fit in and succeed here.”

It’s one thing to pursue talented candidates; it’s quite another to bring them on board. While Rockwell offers many enticements to prospective sales professionals, Banaszynski says that the greatest may be the opportunity to do something meaningful while gaining experience in the global marketplace.

“There’s a high demand for engineers today,” he explains. “The way we attract and maintain them is with the career path potential, the ongoing education they receive, high compensation, the challenges we offer and also the accountability and responsibility that comes with the job. The best people want a job that’s significant, and so it falls to us to show them how we are going to be a leader in developing markets. They want to know how their careers are going to progress in three to five years. They want global exposure, so we highlight the international assignments we offer top performers and the short-term international rotations of six months or so that we use to solve specific problems. We offer them those sorts of growth and learning opportunities, and they really jump at the chance to accept.”