Customer satisfaction is the core value

With the sign­ing of Sven Braatz as new Sales Man­ag­er and Head of Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment, the tem­per­a­ture con­trol sys­tems man­u­fac­tur­er hotset has strength­ened its man­age­ment team a few days ago. One of the pri­ma­ry tasks of the 44-year-old in­dus­try ex­pert is to syn­chro­nize the sales struc­tures of the Lü­den­scheid-based com­pa­ny with its high pace of in­no­va­tion. Read here which levers the new hotset man­ag­er will set in mo­tion to achieve this.

Mr. Braatz, who or what brought you to hotset in Lüdenscheid?

Braatz: As a na­tive of Lü­den­scheid, I know the com­pa­ny name since my child­hood. Dur­ing my pro­fes­sion­al ca­reer, the heat­ing el­e­ments and ther­mosen­sors of the com­pa­ny then met me again and again. With in­creas­ing fre­quen­cy fi­nal­ly in my last func­tion as sales man­ag­er and project man­ag­er of a well-known man­u­fac­tur­er in the sil­i­cone in­dus­try. Here, hotset is con­sid­ered a set pre­mi­um sup­pli­er that stands for qual­i­ty “Made in Eu­rope”. When I then learned that CEO Ralf Schwarzkopf want­ed to strength­en his man­age­ment team, I did not hes­i­tate for long…

…and as sales man­ag­er are now al­so a mem­ber of the hotset man­age­ment team.

Braatz: That’s right. In this role, I will do my part to en­sure that hotset can un­leash its enor­mous in­no­va­tion po­ten­tial even faster than be­fore and with sig­nif­i­cant an­nu­al leaps in growth. In do­ing so, I will be able to con­tribute both my com­mer­cial and tech­ni­cal know-how as well as my ex­pe­ri­ence from sales man­age­ment and marketing.

Where in the cor­po­rate struc­ture will you start to do this?

Braatz: In tech­no­log­i­cal terms, hotset has po­si­tioned it­self very strong­ly, es­pe­cial­ly in the re­cent past. In the de­vel­op­ment of new prod­ucts and sys­tems, we can score with high in­no­v­a­tive strength and very short in­no­va­tion cy­cles. This can be seen, for ex­am­ple, in the many prod­uct launch­es in re­cent months, the rapid fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of var­io­ther­mal mold tem­per­a­ture con­trol with the Z‑system and the com­mis­sion­ing of the sys­tem cen­ter for tem­per­a­ture con­trol tech­nol­o­gy. All of this re­flects an ex­treme­ly live­ly in­no­va­tion scene. And as I know, our en­gi­neer­ing de­part­ment al­ready has fur­ther ideas in the pipeline. All this puts pres­sure on the sales de­part­ment, which has to keep up with this fast pace of in­no­va­tion. I there­fore see a pri­ma­ry need for ac­tion here.

How can we imag­ine this in con­crete terms?

Braatz: As a man­u­fac­tur­er of heat­ing el­e­ments, ther­mal sen­sors, con­trol tech­nol­o­gy and tem­per­a­ture con­trol so­lu­tions, hotset has been very suc­cess­ful­ly play­ing the tri­ad of com­po­nent sup­pli­er, sys­tem de­vel­op­er and project part­ner for years. Our sales de­part­ment com­mu­ni­cates all three ar­eas of ac­tiv­i­ty to re­sellers and deal­ers as well as to OEMs and bulk buy­ers and al­so to spe­cial project cus­tomers — na­tion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly! That in it­self is a tru­ly mam­moth task. Es­pe­cial­ly since each of these cus­tomer groups has its own ex­pec­ta­tions and de­mands and there­fore re­quires a dif­fer­ent method and in­ten­si­ty of ap­proach and sup­port. In ad­di­tion to the high pace of prod­uct de­vel­op­ment, this is the sec­ond fac­tor that can now be heard as a creak­ing in the wood­work of the sales structures.