The Challenge: At Markem-Imaje (a Dover Corporation company) I was the Region Director for Sales and Marketing. The SVP for North America decided to make a change in leadership as the Canadian Operation was significantly underperforming expectations, team members were leaving, and there was a lot of pressure mounting to get it back on track.

The Solution:    There was no immediate successor to backfill the role, so I was tasked with taking the country manager position in addition to my current role. Over the course of the next 6 months, I traveled every other week to our two offices in Toronto and Montreal. My first priority was stabilizing the team and I did that by laying out a detailed strategic sales and marketing plan that everyone bought into. I added some additional incentives to get the team back focused on sales and ensured that we celebrated our wins. I held bi-weekly team call to communicate the progress we were making as well, focus on sales fundamentals, and reinforcing the power of using our CRM data to expand existing customers. Within 6 months, the operation was back on budget, there was genuine enthusiasm amongst the team, and there was a well-developed framework for a new country manager to work with.

My Contributions:   It was critical to be onsite with the struggling operation to show that there was support and confidence from leadership. My plan from the outset was to get the fundamentals right and reinforce the plan and progress through regular communications. At the same time I was actively recruiting for someone to take over the operation and found the ideal candidate. For the following two years, Canada was the top-performing country for Markem-Imaje with 20%+ growth.