North Canton, OH - The Timken Company is investing $22 million in new customer and sales management tools, designed to improve the customer experience through increased sales force effectiveness.
"Timken is well-recognized in the marketplace for its know-how, engineering skills and service support," said Richard G. Kyle, president and chief executive officer of Timken. "We invest heavily in developing the best and most technically qualified sales force in our industry and our people are highly respected by our customers.
"The result is a highly collaborative technical selling team, focused on developing solutions to industry's most challenging friction management and power transmission applications," said Kyle, "and that puts our technical and application resources in high demand both in the field and at our customers' design centers." Fifty percent of Timken's professional employees are engineers by training or trade.
Part of the company's previously announced DeltaX Initiative, the new XSell platform leverages the SAP infrastructure Timken deployed enterprise-wide over the past several years. It will provide the global sales team with new customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities as well as more consistent, mobility-enabled sales processes and business tools.
At the same time, the company expects to deploy a best-in-class quotation management module to more quickly respond to market opportunities and accelerate the growth of its products among existing and new customers. Development is well underway, with initial phases launching by fourth quarter 2014 and then rolling out across the company's sales and support teams in early 2015.
"We're excited to put these new tools in the hands of our sales force," said Hans Landin, product line executive of power transmission and engineering systems for Timken. "With this investment, we anticipate a significant increase in the effectiveness of our sales force. This will come through automating many of the more routine sales processes, which will free the team to spend more quality time collaborating with Timken customers to make the world's industry work better."
"Taken together with the new product line growth streams we announced earlier," said Kyle, "we're confident in our ability to grow by creating additional value for our customers and strengthening our competitiveness."
