Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
I'm a commercial leader with 20 years in industrial manufacturing — connecting strategy with execution to improve how businesses sell, price, and grow. My path started in sales and key account management, moved through marketing and business development, and eventually landed in commercial excellence — the discipline that ties all of it together. Over the years I've built and led teams across CRM, pricing, market intelligence, and sales transformation in businesses ranging from a German steel SME to global DAX and MDAX corporations. At GEA I spent nearly six years building the commercial infrastructure that helped the group consistently outperform its growth targets — across CRM governance, sales excellence, market intelligence, and a full CX suite rollout for thousands of users worldwide. Since early 2025 I've been at Calderys, where I'm building the EMEA Commercial Excellence function from scratch — developing our growth strategy, overhauling how we price, redesigning the sales organization, and leading a multicultural team across Sales Enablement, Marketing, Pricing, Commercial Excellence, and Product Management. I believe commercial transformation only works if it's grounded in reality — in the way people actually sell, the markets they operate in, and the tools they use every day. My focus is always on making things measurably better, not just strategically sound on paper. Executive education at MIT Sloan and Harvard Law School. Co-author of two Harvard Business Review whitepapers on B2B commercial excellence.
Building the EMEA Commercial Excellence function at Calderys — a global leader in high-temperature industrial solutions (~€1.6bn revenue, 6,500+ employees). Leading a multicultural team across Sales Enablement, Marketing, Pricing, Commercial Excellence, and Product Management Core focus areas: · Developing and executing the EMEA growth strategy, including white-space identification and strategic initiative portfolio · Introducing pricing as a discipline, replacing ad-hoc approaches with structured governance and segment logic · Reorganizing the EMEA commercial organization to improve coverage, accountability, and execution speed · Building the EMEA Product Management function from scratch · Serving as Business Sponsor for Salesforce CRM, Vendavo CPQ, and Power BI across EMEA and APAC
Led three functions simultaneously — CRM Governance, Market Intelligence, and Commercial Excellence — across Europe, South America, and Asia, with up to 15 reports. Core responsibilities spanned CRM strategy and governance for a global SAP C/4HANA platform, market intelligence, sales force effectiveness, and the group-wide commercial excellence program. Key contributions: · Drove the commercial excellence program that enabled GEA to consistently outperform its organic growth targets and deliver its five-year financial plan ahead of schedule · Rolled out a full CX suite — CRM, CPQ, e-commerce, FSM, Service Management, Customer Portal — serving thousands of users across 40+ countries · Implemented the Sales Excellence Playbook, including training programs for senior sales leaders and front-line staff worldwide · Built a central market intelligence platform combining macro, end-market, and project data to support route-to-market optimization and budget planning
Developed a CRM governance approach, build up and manage the CRM governance team. Definition of a unified process landscape and transfer of relevant sales, service and marketing processes to a unified digital cloud platform Development of a uniform master data concept for the topics customer data, supplier data, installed base as well as marketing attributes. Develop a commercial excellence apprach, build up and manage the Commercial Excellence team. Managing the internal sales excellence project focusing on a more efficient sales approach and organic growth of 4-6% per year via optimal route to market setups. Highlights: - Conceptualized and developed a holistic senior sales management training. Conducted trainings with more than 300 senior sales managers worldwide. - Conceptualized and developed a holistic front sales management training. Supervising the training rollout to all sales managers worldwide. - Design of a Sales Excellence Playbook with individual initiatives to improve efficiency, effectiveness, revenue growth and increase customer satisfaction - Development of a catalog of measures as well as sales setup (route-to-market) and KPIs to optimize the sales setup per market and product area. Gradually rolling it out to all business/market combinations. Next to come: - Conception of a subscription-based sales model
Developing and managing a global template approach in a 18.000 people manufacturing business. Managing one template to cover: - Sales - E-Commerce - CPQ - Service - Customer Portals - Field Service - Customer Satisfaction - ERP Integration - Website Integration - Business Warehouse and Analytics integration - Master Data Management Integration - Office 365/Outlook Integration Highlights: - More than 5.000 users globally using the central one template solution - >50% of Customer Service Inbound Channel handled via CRM - Improvement of NPS Score by >30 points - Integrated pipeline forecasting and analytics feautures - Integrated end-to-end processes for Sales, Service and Marketing starting outside the company on the website or customer portals up to multiple back and forth processes with the ERP backend
Developing and managing a global template approach in a 22.000 people manufacturing business with integration into a 160.000+ people corporate. Managing the global community and driving forward the development/rollout of additional modules like marketing and service whilst governing the exisiting sales approach.
Creation of a holistic concept for customer relationship management. Development of a requirements specification with subsequent multi-stage vendor selection. Implementation and maintenance of a CRM system for a medium-sized industrial company.
Driving strategic marketing and hollistic business development. -Rebranding -Developed digital marketing approach -Developed trade fair concept including sales trainings -Conducted market and competitor researches -Developed white spot analysis to identify new market segments and potential customers -Acted as public releations manager for press statements
Business development on two key white spot markets: North America and Australia Managing key accounts in North America, Australia, Denmark and Germany in the wind turbine industry