Daniel Roth is a seasoned titan in the world of sales and supply chain management. Currently serving as General Manager and Vice President of Sales for Stavig Industries, LLC, Roth has a storied 20+ year career that began at the esteemed Intel Corporation in 2002. As a Regional OEM Account Manager, he cut his teeth coordinating strategic sales of desktop motherboards to organizations of all sizes. But this was just the springboard for a career marked by cross-functional team leadership, business development, and the management of large-scale projects on a global scale.
Through his extensive journey from Intel to Myers Container and now Stavig, Roth has honed his expertise, strategically steering corporations toward operational excellence and creating a remarkable legacy in the process. Today, we sit down with Daniel Roth, gleaning insights from his vast reservoir of experience and visionary approach to supply chain and sales management.
What brought you to the field of supply chain and sales?
I started my career in Materials Planning at Freightliner Corporation, a division of Daimler Benz. After 3 years of learning the ropes of working with suppliers, getting material from their dock to the factory floor, I moved on to Intel Corporation where I worked as a Materials Program Manager, working exclusively with Asia-based Original Design Manufacturers (ODM’s) to produce Intel designed and branded components for desktop computing.
Over time, Intel began to take advantage of the supplier’s design capabilities, and I began working with the ODM’s to design and build components and systems using Intel’s products to continue to push the market to adopt the latest available technologies.
As the newest technology is invariably the most expensive and in many parts of the world the “N-1” or next best technology was good enough for the majority of people’s needs, convincing the ODM’s to attack a niche rather than the mass market became less like a supply chain function and more like a sales function. After several years of working in this role, I transitioned to simply selling Intel-branded products directly to customers in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. I have found that I very much enjoy working with people to solve the particular problems that they are facing. In both the sales and supply chain functions, one can interface with people to collaborate and solve problems.
What is a problem you have identified in supply chain logistics?
Lack of collaboration. Effective collaboration among supply chain partners, including suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, is essential for smooth operations. However, challenges such as poor communication, lack of trust, and misaligned incentives can hinder collaboration efforts.
Looking back on the last five years of your career, what has been the highlight?
The highlight over the last 5 years of my career has been the same as it has for the entirety of my career: The ability to meet, engage with, and learn from smart people. I’ve had the fortune to be exposed to and learn from the day-to-day challenges of someone working on the production line of a drum factory and work with them and their managers on how to make their job safer, easier, and more rewarding to work with senior executives at customers or suppliers on how I could assist with their go to market strategies for new products and services. I’ve been able to connect with people from different industries and get their perspectives on how they are managing their businesses and apply those lessons to how we ran ours. It’s been an amazing experience.
What does a typical day look like for you as Senior Vice President of Sales?
The SVP of Sales days is generally very busy. My day is typically packed with meetings discussing everything from overarching business concerns such as gross margins, demand forecasting and planning, production trends, and quality issues. There are typically scheduled (and unscheduled) calls with customers and internal stakeholders to discuss all manner of issues that range from cost, pricing, or availability to name a few. I always tried to touch base with a few members of my team “on the ground” as well.
Touching base with individual account managers to ask them what is happening at their accounts, or what is going on in their region was always important to me and built a sense of camaraderie and fostered a team dynamic. It always meant more to me to speak to an Account Manager and discuss their issues and figure out how I could help than to read an email or a contact report in Salesforce. The days go fast, but they are typically very rewarding.
Describe a situation where you faced failure and the lesson you learned from it.
While at Intel, I worked with a customer in Germany who needed a very specific solution for a line of computers they wanted to take to market. The solution they required would require the resources of an entire design team I was using in China. The design team’s mandate was to develop general products with a specific technology that would appeal to the largest amount of customers across Europe. The German customer required a solution only for their specific purpose.
The Engineering manager in China assured me that his team could do both projects as there was significant redundancy between projects. I believed that this was impossible, but did not effectively communicate my reservations. While the design win for the German customer was a feather in my cap, my initial thoughts of this being an impossible task for the design team proved to be well-founded. In trying to be everything to everybody, we were late on both projects and disappointed all our customers. The lesson I learned from this experience was that I can’t sell what I don’t have and to be honest and forthright with all stakeholders, including internal stakeholders on what limitations exist. In trying to be heroes, we failed. A more experienced sales professional would have told the German customer realistic timelines of what he was asking for and/or steered them to our “off the shelf” solution in the meantime.
How did you overcome your failure and progress forward?
One of the tenets of Intel’s culture is “Informed Risk Taking”. As the saying goes about broken eggs and omelets, failure is part of the process. I eventually got the German customer their product, although it was late and we missed their publicized launch window. We also missed some key product introductions as a result of focusing on the German product. We conducted an internal post mortem which illustrated the failure mode of how the decisions were made, and how by trying to be all things to all people, we ended up disappointing our customers.
I visited each customer in person, hat in hand, went through the post-mortem with them, and illustrated the fail-safes we had put in place in our product development process as a result. Customers appreciated the honesty and the failure became part of the fabric of our long-term relationships. Relationships and trust aren’t built by everything always going swimmingly, they are forged in the downs as well as the ups. I believe I became a better sales executive as a result of my failure.
Share an example of one of your greatest achievements. How did you feel?
One of my greatest achievements in business was developing and leading a high-performing sales team that I was proud to be a part of. When you are selling a commodity product like a steel drum that has been around with very little technological advancement (compared to other industries) for over 100 years, my experience is that you attract first-time sales professionals who have either no experience in business (recent college graduates) or experience in almost anything but sales.
However, what I did find was that nearly all people want to do a great job for their company and their customers. Our sales team drew folks that had wide-ranging experience with anything but Sales. We had people with backgrounds in Accounting, Production, Logistics, and Engineering. I was very fortunate to build and lead this team and I was very proud of the work they had done, where everybody was able to learn from one another. We were able to change a very long-standing dynamic of how steel drums were priced in the Western United States and as a result, increased our profitability by over 30% in 2021. We never could have done that without the benefit of the wide range of experience these folks brought to the team.
Name a necessary skill that is crucial to be successful in sales.
To succeed in sales, I believe it is imperative to be an effective communicator. Effective communication encompasses various aspects, including verbal and nonverbal communication, active listening, and the ability to convey information clearly and persuasively. Excellent salespeople do each of the following: build rapport, present value, negotiate and persuade, handle objections, collaborate, build long-term relationships, and show adaptability. Effective communication is the critical path for each of these skill sets.
What would you say to others who find themselves in a situation similar to yours?
“What an outstanding question” states Daniel Roth. I’m still in the process of figuring it out myself. In a private text conversation with a friend, I corrected a quote from a nearly 40-year-old movie they had typed, which contained an insensitive and offensive word. Unfortunately, that text conversation became public, and I deeply regret my lapse in judgment. As a consequence, both my colleague and I lost our jobs.
My advice to anyone facing a similar situation is to first acknowledge the facts of what happened and try to see them from someone else’s perspective. It’s crucial to take responsibility for our mistakes, apologize to those affected, and actively work on personal growth to become better people. We are not defined solely by our worst or best moments, but we should always strive to be the best version of ourselves.
Moving forward, the most important thing we can do is learn from our experiences and continue progressing.
What are some key takeaways you would like to share?
Life is ultimately a collection of experiences, and it is our responsibility to define how those experiences shape us. Throughout my extensive career in Sales and Supply Chain Management, I have had the privilege of working alongside remarkably talented and motivated individuals. I am deeply grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to foster and nurture relationships with so many incredible people. My career has taken me across the globe, introducing me to remarkable individuals from all walks of life.
From working with engineers in Asia who attended schools with dirt floors to Ivy League-educated bankers, I have been fortunate to learn something valuable and unique from each person I’ve encountered. It’s important to recognize that no one achieves success on their own. It requires agility, adaptability, and a collaborative spirit to create something truly remarkable. Embracing the diverse experiences that life presents and maintaining a lifelong commitment to learning from them is key.
By appreciating the lessons and perspectives gained from these experiences, we can continuously grow and evolve as individuals. Always appreciate the opportunities life offers and remain open to the valuable insights they bring.