10 Questions in 60’ Seconds with Valentina

I have worked for the IR-Robuschi division for a little more than a year. I have started to work as the area sales manager for Robuschi in Central Europe. In December 2019, I had a great opportunity and honor to change my role to work as a sales manager for the German market. The challenges and responsibilities are immense but I have muscles and like to fight and I am very thankful for this opportunity.

From a young age, I have really enjoyed drawing, with a preference to pastel and pencil drawing of people. However, in the last couple of years I have lost my inspiration; I was afraid forever. Unexpectedly my muse has decided to return to me during the weeks of quarantine and I have started to draw again! This was my personal little ray of light in this exceptionally difficult period.

It is to challenge myself, which makes me grow and brings me forward in all possible ways.

It is the enthusiasm to see our technology as a vital part in a number of various applications, which one does not realize to a full extent when looking from the outside.

It is the interaction with different people in and outside of the company, which I enjoy even more now that I am working for an international company such as IR.

Our goal is to raise the awareness of the Robuschi brand and increase our presence in the German market. The opportunities are enormous but so are the challenges, Germany being the home to our greatest competitors. Meanwhile we are starting from scratch, building up our customer base, which requires time, effort and dedication. We all are working on different construction sites at the same time. When I say “starting from scratch” I mean it literally. We are starting with basic things such as the introduction of processes, build up costumer lists, quotations, descriptions, pricing structures and so forth. It is a balancing act.

Clearly the biggest milestone to achieve this year is the challenging target forecast we have committed to. Breaking it down in smaller but fundamental milestones, we can name only a few to start with: 1) to become a supplier for two new O&G sector EPC companies in which we started to approach recently, 2) to overcome past difficulties with two of the existing OEMs and 3) to grow together in a close collaboration.

We are a very young team still in our formation period, so I would like to see us as a little start up, where everybody is participating actively by bringing in their own ideas and a great deal of effort and commitment. I would describe my team as “klein, aber fein”, as we say in German, which means small but finely made. We count 5 people: three greatly experienced sales engineers, one very motivated internal sales and customer service associate and my humble self.

Just a few words about each team member:

Wolfgang Boehm, has been working as the sales engineer for Robuschi in Germany for over 10 years now. In the last three transition years between the old and the new structure of Robuschi in Germany, Wolfgang was nearly alone running the show in Germany. Needless to say, all the credit to him for a great job, and his commitment and persistence. In our new structure, Wolfgang is responsible for the south part of Germany, where our biggest existing customers are located.

Alexandra Zank is the sales engineer responsible for the north-east part of Germany. She started to work with us in January 2020. Besides the 25 years of experience in compressors, blowers and pump sales, , Alexandra brings to our sales team a big deal of commitment and motivation as well as deep insights from her previous roles. This helps us to implement and achieve “best practices” in our daily work and organization.

Kai Trepte is the sales engineer responsible for West-Germany and has been working with us for 6 months now. Kai has nearly 20 years of experience as a project manager and sales engineer . As well as Alexandra, Kai enriches our team with his fresh ideas and gives valuable support to our engineers thanks to his deep technical understanding and insight from his past experience. Besides his great commitment and motivation, Kai is probably the most enthusiastic and positive person I have ever met. And he is an Excel-Guru.

Alexander Weinbender started to work with us in February 2020 as the internal sales and customer service associate. Alexander has vast experience in his role, but was completely new to our product and industrial sector. Even though only three months have passed, Alexander is already running nearly at full speed. Thanks to his motivation and dedication, Alexander has made a quantum leap in the past three months in his understanding of our products, organization of daily activities, and he is already starting to set up new databases for our products and customers.

As I said already, we are a new team that started to work in this organization only in February of the current year. In the first months, we had to bridge the training phase and we are getting closer with each step to working at full speed. Surely, the current situation with the COVID-19 outbreak began for us a considerably unfavorable period. It was as if we hit the wall during our acceleration phase. The uncertain economic situation worldwide and specifically in Germany makes it hard to predict possible sales scenarios. Nevertheless, we are very motivated and confident to bring results thanks to the enthusiasm and efforts in approaching and satisfying our customers as well as committing to our cause as owners on a daily basis.

I am originally Russian, so my mantra is a Russian or better post-soviet countries saying: he who does not risk, does not get to drink champagne. I believe in English it would be: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

To grow and become better in my new role as the team leader, and to be able to support and motivate my team members to achieve successful results.