When looking to add to his sales staff, GS Hydraulics' president John Thornton looks for people with more engineering experience than sales experience. At the same time, though, he says he realizes that a good engineer may not make a good salesman.

“I want guys who have been in engineering and applications support before they hit the sales force,” Thornton explains. “It takes the right person. If we have a good sense of what they do well and where they might need support, then we'll have a better idea of whether they'll fit that role long-term.”

GS Hydraulics is a distributor of fluid power, electro-hydraulic and electronic components and systems based in New Berlin, Wis. It employs 110 people and had 2007 sales of approximately $50 million, Thornton says.

“We do a lot of engineering work for our customers, so we're not just a component distributor,” he explains. “Half of our business is value-added, like custom assemblies and specially designed products we have contractors manufacture for us.”

As with any distributor that emphasizes value-added offerings, hiring and keeping talented people is a major concern.

“It's absolutely the biggest challenge we face,” Thornton says. “We try to grow our own, from within, so to speak. The selling is going to be heavily engineering-oriented.”

Thornton explains that some of the best sales successes have come from a positive reinforcement approach that takes place during their regular sales meetings.

“[One] of the fundamental things we've always done during sales meetings is to talk about success stories that any of the regional salespeople may have had,” explains Thornton. “They share what their keys to success were, so others can pick up on them. [For example], it could be a method they figured out to work with a customer better.”

Sharing notes and providing feedback along these lines “is a tried and true philosophy and it has worked well for us,” he adds.

Besides, there's nothing dramatically new that guarantees sales success, Thornton admits.

“It's easy to forget about some of that [tried-and-true] stuff because there's so much noise in the market,” he says. “I think everybody's customers are asking them to do more. If you can take on more responsibility and do more things for the customer—that's proven very successful for us.”

So far in 2008, business is good but spotty for GS Hydraulics, depending on the specific market, Thornton says.

“Anything tied to housing is quite slow. But the minerals and oil [industries] are spending money like crazy,” he explains. “And anybody exporting anything seems to be very busy as well.”

Earlier this year, Thornton became president of the FPDA Motion and Control Network. He says he's looking ahead to the association's fall meeting in Nashville next month, where he hopes to see the roll out of a new motion control sales certification program. It's one he thinks will benefit all fluid power/motion control companies, especially in terms of fighting the commoditization of some products.

“It's common for us to have to fight the commodity battle. Customers try to commoditize [motion control] products,” he says. “Giving salespeople extra tools to help fight [that] is very important.”