In this episode, we shift gears and dive into leadership in a vital area of our industry: sales. With the help of Brodie Hutchins, Vice President of VÖGELE Products at the Wirtgen Group and Chair of NAPA’s Associate Member Council, we break down what it takes to become a trusted voice in the field. Brodie shares what it truly takes to succeed in sales roles—a blend of deep technical knowledge and relationship-building that puts people first. He discusses key sales philosophies like value over price, how to motivate teams during down cycles, and why honesty builds lasting customer trust. Tune in to sharpen your business development mindset and learn how to thrive in your sales role. This episode is sponsored by Wirtgen Group.
Released June 3,2025
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your company?
Thank you for the invite and for having me on here. I'm the Vice President of the VÖGELE Products of products for North America. I’ve been with the Wirtgen Group now for 20 years. Prior to that I was with some familiar brands in our industry. Ingersoll Rand and Blaw-Knox for 17 years. The Wirtgen Group is a global manufacturer of milling, paving, compaction, crushing, and screening products. It’s primarily a German-based company, but now part of the John Deere company. So, background about, me, how I got into this industry. I was in high school and my very first job with Ingersoll Rand was the janitor. My father worked at Ingersoll Rand and back then, employee kids got first shot at some of the seasonal work and the part-time stuff. So my brother worked in the shipping department, and I got to empty the trash cans and clean the toilets and even back then, empty the ashtrays. That's how far back this goes. Anyway, long story, a little less long, one evening I was going through and emptying the trash and doing what I was doing and the manager of the publications department at the time, asked me what I was going to do in college. I said I'm going to pursue a degree in graphic design. He said ‘what's that?’ I mean, this is pre-Illustrator, pre-Photoshop, pre-everything.
There was a program called CorelDRAW that was out at the time.. I was explaining what I wanted to do and long story short, he got really interested in it and asked me to come back throughout college and work doing illustrations, parts writing, and things like that. He wanted me to bring some of this technology. You know, scanners for 35 millimeter slides and digital photography and different ways of doing that. So I got to be, like Q from James Bond with all this cool technology to document construction equipment. It was a lot of fun, really interesting, and I just never left the industry. I ended up working through college and then went to grad school and held a bunch of different positions from janitor to intern to tech writer to then marketing and product management and different levels of management and business development. So I've basically been a paver guy my whole career.
How do you build and maintain a high performing sales team? What do you think are some of the key values or practices that really make the difference?
In our industry, it's a very technical process. It's a blend of technical astuteness and capabilities, and very long-term relationships. It is a relationship business, but it's also very technical and it's that combination that builds the credibility with our producer members who are making equipment decisions based on what machines will do. More importantly, they're making those decisions about the machines that they know will come with the best support and the best uptime because we deal with a perishable product, we deal with lane closures, we deal with pretty high pressure situations. If there's any glitch in the process, and with us being a paving manufacturer, that machine can bring that entire operation to a halt. So it’s a pressure cooker. It's keeping the machine up.
At the same time, everything, as long as things are made by man, are going to fail at some point, and it's how quickly you can recover and how much you can minimize the downtime, the damage, the wasted asphalt. So our sales organization is one where they're lifers. This is not a career path for someone who's got their five-year plan and they're off to the next level of whatever. Call it a District Sales Manager or Territory Manager, that is the end game for these guys for a number of reasons. One, you've got to have deep roots, and you've got to have credibility. It takes a long time to establish that. Many cycles, many years, and oftentimes from one generation to another. The sales people that end up in those jobs end up loving them. So why would you want to go do something else? They're passionate about it. For whatever reason our industry seems to be a little like the mafia. Once you're in, you never get out. Or it's like the Hotel California, you can check out, but you can never leave. People just fall in love with it and they stay. Our guys like the people they interact with. Their customers become their friends. It’s not a job, it's just what they do.
Well formally or informally, they're always the team behind the sales organizations. It's like the guys on the bench ready for the coach to say ‘look, I need you to go in and swap out here.’ When someone does make a decision to retire, there are a couple things. One, that person knows who all of their support structure has been. They're familiar with a lot of the technical people or the trainers or whatever role they may be in, but they're always somebody that has been in this industry or something very similar to it. They see the attributes of that person. They see their ability to have relationships. A lot of times, they already know the customers. They already know the territory, whatever it would be. Once a spot does open, there are always people eager to jump into it because they don't open often. A lot of folks in our service organization, they interact with the sales people and they know what they're up against every day. So when they realize, what that role looks like and when they participate in it, they like it and want to do it. Those jobs are well known by everybody in the organization because they're the quarterbacks, and everybody knows they're making the plays, they're calling the plays. They're really critical to winning. And when we look at the demographic of that sales organization, and we know we may need to replenish, we look at specific people. Whether they're from an area or whether they’re familiar with the product or a certain customer group or whatever. We usually have people in mind for that. Rarely is it from a somewhere else scenario. They're coming in with a lot of experience, from a technical standpoint. They're coming in with those existing relationships, with those people or the attributes to grow those relationship roots because you assume the technical knowledge, but that ability to carry on that relationship is key.
How do you help keep people motivated when things are a little bit slower?
The people selling, specifically road building equipment, they know the long game. They're familiar with those cycles, the replenishment cycles. Fortunately we serve a pretty consistent industry, as far as the number of pavers that get consumed in a year in North America. The number of milling machines, even the number of rollers. That doesn't ebb and flow like a lot of other industries. So we've got the benefit of some consistency. But with products like a paver, there's a selling cycle to an asphalt paver, which we've looked at and analyzed in a number of different ways. We basically concluded that it's about a two year selling cycle to get an asphalt paver into a customer's hand. Whether that's someone that reorders one that they've already used and are familiar with, or it’s demonstrating a new machine to a crew that has used something else. We've also found that paving crews or paver operators are not ones to want to make change. Familiarity and comfort, because of everything else going on that job site, all the consequences associated with it not going, perfectly, they're reluctant to change. So that's where you have to go and do some demonstrations and show them, a new a piece of machinery or a new way of doing something. Our sales organization. they're not selling just one product, they're looking at the whole mill, paver, roller that whole solution.
So even if there's not a new paver going into a customer that you know that particular year. With pavers, you sell it again and you keep it sold. You've got to stay with it the whole time. So they're doing follow up and making sure the operators like it. Making sure we're getting machines inspected periodically and know that everything is in tip top shape. It's not a drive it off the lot and wish it well. You're with that machine until it comes back in really.
What metrics do you use to track success and are those different for you versus the people on your team?
You know, the ultimate measure is market share. It's a small world and an even smaller industry. We've got really good data on all of the types of equipment that we sell. We know how many different products and segments are going into different places, and we want a certain share position in each of those regions. That math indicates our success, or lack thereof, but there are a lot of softer things on there too that we look at. Is this same customer buying more of the same or are they repeating? Did they have a good experience with that first machine? Were their ownership costs where they wanted them to be? Were they able to get technicians and parts when they wanted them? Were they able to get their crews trained or refreshed in a timely manner? In a lot of cases, what kind of incentives did that machine help the crew earn as far as a smoothness award. Any of the awards that NAPA gives, all the way through, including the Sheldon G Hayes Award, if your equipment's part of achieving some of those successes, then we count that as a success as well.
How is your team approachinng new products and changes to the market?
I think there's a shift happening from the iron to solutions. I don't mean that to sound, hokey or trendy or whatever. But really, these machines, when I started back a million years ago, it was about production, it was about tonnage, and the crews lived with their machine. When they had a machine, it was theirs to use to pave and it was also theirs to rebuild every year. In the last, especially 20 years, we've seen a big change where crews aren't necessarily associated with any one machine.
They're given a job location and they're going to go do it. They may or may not have some input on what equipment they can use. So we've got to make these machines intuitive. How can you minimize the human error? I'm not talking about autonomy, but how do you automate some of the functions on the machine? So it takes out, like I said, any room for error. In the case of pavers, anything that would mess with the smoothness or density or any of the things that they measure. So we're shifting from the iron piece of it to the intellectual piece of it, which are things in the operating systems. Like I said, more automation with functions, technology like 3D paving, where you put in parameters and then the machine goes out and it does what was manually calculated. There’s more and more. content to be taken from the machine as far as location hours, temperature readings, fuel consumption. Ways of measuring the job, with grade and slope, with different measurements on machines like density meters on rollers. They're becoming more and more high tech, more automated, and ultimately more practical and productive.
What's the best piece of sales advice that you've ever received?
I'm not sure that there was any single instance or a single note or anything. But I tend to be drawn to the process. I'll give you an example of what I want to turn around and run from. You walk into a store or pull onto a car lot and you've got a hundred noses against the window inside just ready to pounce as soon as you come to a rolling stop and they can get on you. I don't like that. That pressure. Or you walk into a store and before the door even closes, they're like ‘can I help you?’ and you have three people tackling you to try to sell you something. I think in our industry, when I said earlier that technical expertise and those long-term relationships, and of course honesty, with everything. A lot of people tend to see when you tell 'em you're in sales, there's always this element of what aren't you telling me? So just being, completely transparent on things and not pushing that customer beyond what they really want, but can you solve their problem?
Can you answer the question when they say ‘tell me what's not good about it.’ There's a brutal honesty sometimes where maybe one machine had better visibility to a certain area for example. Being very candid, being very open, knowing that whatever you're going to sell them, you're going to live with it the whole time.
Is there a book or mentor that has impacted your career journey?
I've got some phrases and little tidbits of advice from some really great mentors over the 35-plus years that I've been doing this. I can't point to any one instance, but there are some principles that you can formulate based on various experiences. One is just timely communication. You know, follow up with somebody before they have to call and look for an update. Even if it's a ‘Hey, I don't have an answer yet, but I'm still looking at it.’ People appreciate that. I think to keep people informed even that you're not selling to, but people that are part of that process. In the case of manufacturing, you've got to get everybody with some level of ownership in it. Whether it's the engineers or the parts department or the people assembling the machines. Creating ownership, creating this we're all part of it kind of thing and not just a sales-only piece. Sales is the result of all of those other things going right. I've had a number of mentors and bosses over the years that have said a number of things.
One, be patient. Don't let any one instance rattle you. Really be self-aware of your personality and how you would react to things. Also focus on your emotional intelligence so that when you have something not go right, you can be patient and play the long game. Let your character and your actions speak for you. You don't want to be known as a hot head or someone who overreacts to something. You want to think about it, digest it, and ask yourself if somebody were to replay this right now, what would that look like in five years? How do I make it so that I would not cringe if I watched it? How do you always try to be smart is one thing, and know the answers, but there's something to be said for wisdom, which is having similar reactions to a number of different situations. How do you handle disappointment? How do you handle being part of something that you can't control? How do you handle being told no or rejection. Getting back to a sales situation, one of your machines is out with a customer and it just falls flat on its face. There are different ways to react to that, to stay on the high road. I guess that's a really unabridged way of saying, play the long game, be patient, and be wise.
Do you have a story of a negotiation that you haven't forgotten?
Here's one to absorb the punch. Let's say you're going to get criticized. Something's not going to go right. Some expectation won't be met. When a customer or a dealer or somebody comes at you with criticism, empathize. Take that criticism because it's probably true. Own it, own your mistakes. The reaction to that is ‘I see how you feel that way’ or ‘I completely agree’ or ‘I totally understand’ or ‘that it's really unfortunate that happened.’ Whatever it would be, try not to combat something. Like I said, absorb. It might have been some training class that used that tagline, but absorb the punch. Again, just be honest about it. It's really how you react to a failure that's really what speaks volumes about things.
To give one example. If somebody has a machine, and like I said, with a paver, it's a pretty high-pressure thing. One of your machines is out there and for whatever reason goes down. You've got a plant, you've got trucks, you've got a lane closure, you've got machines, rollers everywhere. You really can show your value when you get that backup going as quick as you can and sometimes that means getting another machine out there right away. So being able to absorb and react in the way that if you were that person you would want to look and see that they were trying to do everything possible. I always appreciated value selling versus price. It's what's the best value? And it's almost never the most expensive and it's almost never the least expensive. So when someone can come in and I get you to understand the features and benefits of something and have 'em say, ‘I get that. It consumes less fuel. It is more precise.’ That's always been a benefit or an attribute of successful selling that I would look for.
One other one. this goes back a number of years ago it was a customer, deep down in Virginia, and we were bringing a specialty machine in. It was a machine from Germany and we were bringing it in to do to do a racetrack. We were paving a speedway. So you think highways have a lot of pressure, you talk about a racetrack, that's a whole different level of pressure. We've got this machine specked out. We're getting ready to go out and work on setup. It was really a pretty meticulous arrangement and we realized that there were some things that the machine did not include that needed to. It was no one person's fault. I always like to go in when something goes wrong and ask, where's the teaching moment? How do you not make that same mistake again? In this one, when you go back and you do the postmortem, it was a number of communication things. It wasn't any one person's fault and it wasn't chump change when it came to the things that the componentry and the time to do what we needed to do to get it to do what we all thought it was going to do when it showed up.
Once we realized all that, I was having some discussions with the factory and of course, the factory's very much about production and doing things and getting paid for the things. Again, it wasn't their fault the things weren't on the machine. Long story short, we told the customer, ‘look, this was our mistake,. I feel really bad. We'll have this taken care of.’ It was a really short time to get it resolved. He asked the question ‘how much more is this going to cost me?’ And I heard myself as I was saying ‘nothing, that's what you thought you bought.’ So, you know, it was our mistake to own. We ended up having a bit of an argument about why he thought he should pay for it, and we're telling him no, It was communication that we should have been clear on, and we still chuckle about it to this day. That was 20-plus years ago. Again, you're paving a racetrack, so there's this element of technical expertise involved. Then you get into a situation where something happens and it's how do you react to the challenge? He never forgot. It was one of those full disclosure, honesty, and switch roles when that's going on. Pretend you are on the receiving end of this thing. What would you want them to do for you?
What inspired to join NAPA and take a leadership role on the Associate Member Council?
I remember, back to my janitor days when I'm walking around Ingersoll Rand emptying trash cans. One of our senior managers who was responsible for our compaction equipment. Again, this is like late eighties, early nineties. I believe the Associate Member Council started like ‘87, 1987 or something. And I remember thinking, how do these guys get to these jobs? Meanwhile, I'm emptying their trash. They're on these Committees and you see the NAPA logos and the little desk ornaments. So, as I got into NAPA, my real mentor was Wayne Evans, who passed away a number of years ago. He was the president of Hubbard Equipment down in, Florida and he took me under his wing. We worked for the same company, both for the Wirtgen Group, but that's when the Young Leader Initiative was starting to happen within NAPA. We had a kickoff at NCAT and he took a liking to me and literally walked me around and introduced me to everybody. This was 2005 maybe, so 20 years ago. He's really the one that started pulling me into the organization and is really the beginning of, let's say, my passion for NAPA.
But getting back to the original or the beginnings of the Associate Member Council. It's a number of the people that I knew, when I was just getting started in my career at Ingersoll Rand, that were part of this Associate Member Council. Getting it started and figuring out what the really big heavy, big equipment manufacturers. It's since become more diverse, with some component suppliers and solution suppliers and other things. But just as I got into it with Wayne bringing me there, he said, ‘you got to get in the committees. The committee are where the work happens.’ He's telling me which ones I should look at and the Associate Member Council was obviously a no brainer. So I would go and sit there listening to members talk about what they can do for the industry. I was really intrigued and inspired by this. I call it a servant type of approach of what can we do for the good of this industry. I've always been drawn to that. When people come, when the associate members come to NAPA, everybody does a good job of not wearing their brand and not being in sales mode. We're all there for the industry, and collectively pulling the same wagon. So it's because of that passion and meeting other people with that same passion. They're the ones you compete with every day, but they're the ones you can't wait to see at the meetings and figure out how to benefit this industry collectively. We bring a lot of our up-and-comers to the IMPACT Leaders so they can be exposed to the industry. So not only the relationships and the technical selling, but understanding the context of all of that, which is brilliantly, summarized in NAPA.
If you could sum up your leadership journey in one sentence, what would it be?
Never ask someone to do something you wouldn't do or couldn't do.