Formerly Vice President, NA Sales Operational Excellence: Dale Reineke of Emerson Automation Solutions

Dale Reineke jumped onto Sales Operation Demystified and shared his knowledge of the sales operations. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

You can learn more about:

• Dale Reineke
• Emerson Automation Solutions

Tools

• Sales Cloud
• Oracle

Key Takeaways

Building up a sales operations career

Former Vice President of Sales & Operational Excellence at Emerson Automation Solution, Dale Reineke started his career from the ground-up as a customer-facing field service engineer and his diligent nature helped him work up through the organization. His professional journey from a successful sales role to being promoted to sales manager involved various responsibilities like hiring, training, and developing sales and regional managers. By this point, Dale managed about half a million dollars of business for multiple business units and optimized the production line at Emerson. 

Dale’s need to drive sales excellence and his fascination with sales, earned him the position of Vice President, for the North American organization of Emerson. Dale felt that he was the right fit for this position. He had a broad role in sales, operational responsibilities that involved HR in terms of talent acquisition and worked closely with the account management and project team.

 He served for about 16 years in sales and sales management, before moving into the operational side of sales.

Salesforce sales methodology

While it is important to have company goals in mind, Dale focused on North America with the role of driving a global standard within the business for processes, technology, and methodology, including several thousand salespeople. Dale can attribute just one factor to the impact on the efficiency of the sales team which was implementing a consistent sales methodology. Dale stated it had an immense impact on the selling organization: “you have to have a sales process”.

Solution selling

For Dale, selling has changed dramatically in the last two years. Typically customers now have a better understanding of the marketer before reaching out to a sales rep. He explained that solution selling focuses on observing customers’ desired end goal and buying behavior then adapts the solution to be sold accordingly.

Dale’s take on sales forecasting 

“Forecasting is a very easy and interesting process when you are in a stable environment”, states Dale. Unfortunately the environment has become rather unstable in the past few months so Dale is sympathetic with his fellow sales ops ninjas right now!

#1 sales metric – sales management performance

Dale states that we must look at a metric that focusses on moving opportunities through the sales pipeline. Dale believes that narrowing down such a complex process to only one metric is incorrect, but if he had to pick one, he would look at the performance of sales management.

This is an interesting take that we have yet to see from a guest… instead of measuring rep or business performance in his chosen metric, Dale instead prefers to look at the performance of his sales managers.

Dale’s biggest influence:

His biggest influence was one of his sales superiors whom he had a lot of praise for and an amazing manager that coached him over many years:

• Jeff Greenlund – Sr. Field Sales Engineer at Micro Motion, Inc.
• Steve Kinz – Vice President North America Oil and Gas at Emerson Automation Solutions
• John F. Gardner – Retired-President-Global Strategic Accounts at Emerson

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