Engineered success
Motion Industries' Ed Van Hell relies on his education to keep his customers happy
By John R. Johnson -- Industrial Distribution, 4/1/1999
Russ Blood remembers the first time Ed Van Hell called on his meat packing plant in High River, Alberta. Blood, Cargill Foods' purchasing manager, wondered if the rookie salesman with an engineering degree and a white collar look had what it took to call on the plant where "brown boot" is often more apropos than blue collar.Cargill kills, packages and ships 4,000 cattle a day. Needless to say, work conditions at the plant can be downright nasty.
"He was really a rookie as far as sales and the meatpacking industry, so he had to go through the initiation process here," says Blood. "It's a tough industry to call on, because you're often up to your knees in [manure] and it can be a hard thing.
"The stuff he's selling us is the stuff that makes our operation run, and it's usually in wet and smelly places that sometimes aren't very pleasant to be in. But a salesperson who calls on us has to do that and come in on nights and weekends or whenever the business needs you."
Van Hell gained the confidence of the staff at Cargill quite quickly. In fact, the territory manager for Motion Industries' Canadian branch in Calgary has taken sales from $600,000 to $1.6 million at that plant alone. Indirectly, he is partly responsible for MI gaining millions more in sales at six other Cargill locations in the United States. For his efforts, the 27-year-old Van Hell is the recipient of this year's Merit Award in Industrial Distribution's Salesperson of the Year contest.
Last year, MI provided Cargill with 16 percent cost savings on purchases, which translated to over $250,000. Van Hell will also be the recipient of the Calgary branch's Gold Medal Sales Award for 1998.
"Ed brings 1000 percent confidence to the customer," says Dan Bell, general manager for Motion Industries Canada. "He's a professional mechanical engineer, and in our mechanical world, credibility is instant. If he says 'I'm going to make you a drawing,' it'll be done. Once the customer experiences that reliability, it's a forever type of thing."
Van Hell recognizes that fact. To his credit, he wasn't quite a rookie when he first called on Cargill in 1997. VanHell came to MI fresh from the University of Alberta, and started at MI's Canadian headquarters in Lethbridge. He spent six months there learning the business, from shipping and receiving to inside sales. He was then transferred to Calgary, where he spent two years in technical support, working closely with the outside sales force. It was then that VanHell was ready for the challenge of outside sales.
"Outside sales gives you the freedom to pursue your interests as well as the company's interests," says Van Hell. "And there's pleasure to be gained by selling and landing the big sale. I got a feel for that [in tech support] and I liked it."
Van Hell subscribes to a customer-first theory, and has backed that up by spending countless hours at Cargill, including nights and weekends.
"The perspective I've adopted from our vice president of marketing is that rather than being MI's representative to the customer, change your role and be the customer's representative to MI," says Van Hell. "I've tried to adopt that, and I'm expressing Cargill's interests to my people at Motion."
Indeed, he has done that time and time again. Recently, Van Hell was instrumental in getting Cargill up and running again after an equipment failure required an immediate system redesign. The mid-afternoon call from Cargill informed Van Hell that the plant had closed down, and that the system needed to be working the following morning. Van Hell got to work, designed a system, ordered the required parts, and was at the plant by 4 a.m. to install the system.
Cargill is VanHell's largest customer and consumes about 80 percent of his time. However, his credentials are just as solid with his other customers. For example, Van Hell designed, built and installed several robotic Rapid-Trac handling systems for Bonar Paper, and played a key role in redesigning a critical drive application at Lafarge Canada, completing the work in a near-impossible time frame.
According to Bell, Van Hell is only too eager to put his technical and engineering skills to work for others, noting that he spent many weekends designing, building and installing a wheelchair lift for a relative who lives several hundred miles away from him.
Perhaps the biggest accomplishment to date of Van Hell's young career was helping to roll out Cargill's vendor reduction program throughout North America. While he refuses to take full credit for it, the pilot program at Cargill's High River facility has been so successful it is being duplicated at the firm's U.S. locations.
"Although MI's parent in the U.S. had originally thrown their hat in the ring on this, I challenged Ed to take what we were doing here and roll it out to all their plants in the U.S.," says Blood. "It amounts to a tremendous amount of business for Motion.
"We rolled it out at a Cargill purchasing conference in Wichita, Kans., and the challenge was put out to the U.S. plants, using High River as an example of how a vendor relationship could work, and that was due mostly to the hard work of Ed. Now, it's picking up in all the plants. MI has a guy in the states full time looking after Cargill."
"Cargill basically said 'we have a mandate to reduce vendors and inventory, and we are choosing Motion to work with us,' " says Van Hell. "It was left up to the salesperson or Motion branch to pick up the ball and run with it. I guess we've done that faster here than some of the other locations, and that's why maybe we get more credit for getting on the wagon quicker.
"I've been fortunate to be surrounded by a good team of people," says Van Hell. "Obviously I don't have 20 years of experience. They've surrounded me with good technical people, and we couldn't do it without them." m
ID: an unlikely career path
Ed Van Hell has seemingly found a home in an industry he knew nothing about when he graduated from college in 1994. In Alberta, Canada, most graduating engineers wind up in the oil industry. However, Van Hell responded to an ad for a position at Oliver Industrial, a distributor owned by Motion Industries' parent, Genuine Parts, and the rest is history.
"Quite honestly, coming out of the University it was a field I'd given zero consideration to," says Van Hell. "That's as blunt as I can be. I found that distribution as a whole seems to have a low profile. Here in Alberta we're an oil province, and if you're an engineer you're usually destined for the oil patch."
The career fairs that Van Hell attended in Canada made no mention of distribution, and no recruiters from the industry were present. Unlike the U.S., where recruiting is occurring big time, distribution still seems to be an undiscovered career path in Canada. However, Van Hell is glad he stumbled upon it.
"I wasn't convinced I wanted to be in the oil industry because of the ups and downs it experiences, and this was an attractive option," he says. "There was a lot of promise and opportunity which has come true."
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