August 2, 2018—The new director of BASF Refinish sales says it is all about the “core of our strategy” when he discusses the future of the company’s refinishing lineup.
Troy Neuerburg first started his career in the industry after he attended a job fair while in college and was recruited for a manufacturer’s management trainee program.
His first sales role began in 2003 and since then has worked his way through sales and marketing positions in Ohio and Michigan. Prior to his new role at BASF, he spent three years as the director of sales excellence, which consisted of employee training and development, and implementation and management of sales tools.
Neuerburg joined BASF two years ago as a Zone Manager, in which he was responsible for the sales team in the Midwest and Northeast U.S.
FenderBender sat down with Neuerburg to discuss his future plans for his role as director of refinish sales.
What would you like to see accomplished?
I like to keep things simple and I believe that we need to get back to the basics. We need to focus on our BASF Core Strategy—customers first, winning together. By focusing on our customers and what is most important to their businesses, we can successfully maintain and grow our current customers while increasing market share with new business opportunities.
A press release stated you were going to focus on growing market share and leading sales. In these two areas, what do you specifically plan to work on?
My priority is to lead our sales team to maximize the use of resources that we already have available to us. The BASF Refinish team has an unmatched portfolio of great people, great products and great processes. There’s no question in the market that BASF has the best products and our technical teams are constantly innovating to raise the bar.
The BASF Refinish marketing team has products and services available for our customers to utilize and differentiators in the Vision+ suite like VPOL, SmartTRAK and performance groups. In this new role, I have the opportunity to influence the team even further to collaborate with our marketing team and maximize the use of these differentiators to bring the best suite of products and services to each individual shop that we work with. Our goal is to bring the right products and services to each customer to fit their needs.
It seems like you have had a career in which you switched from a business perspective to more of a market and sales perspective. How has that transition been?
Transitioning from business to marketing and sales has helped me understand the whole picture. Change never comes without challenge, but I’ve always looked for opportunities for improvement and that’s what this transition has been.
Having the background in business has allowed me to better collaborate with different functions and I’ve tried to bring that knowledge and empathy with me into the sales team. Better alignment among our team leads to better benefits for our shops and distribution partners.
