Robert Weiskopf
Chief Sales Officer at SKIDATA GmbH
For me, I feel leadership comes down to having a clear vision of what you are wanting to achieve and then having the skills to garner support and buy-in from the personnel that you rely on to make that vision a reality.
Gaining and maintaining and overall understanding of the parking industry and then developing a vision of how you can contribute to, and add value to, the marketplace is what I think separates leaders from managers and drives successful companies forward. Gaining and maintaining that understanding is best achieved by listening to and empowering your people that have the closest contact with your customers as they have the best understanding of the challenges of the client and that in turn provides insight into what the market needs generally.
Parking is an interesting environment that has changed a lot in the past few years. To the casual observer, it can all seem quite simple and straight forward, and to some degree it is, but when you add the factor of a multitude of individual customer needs things get a bit more complex. The technological advancements in parking have been significant, but in the end, it is the customer that defines satisfaction through their parking experience. That experience encompasses both the services and the technology today. Whereas in the past they might have been separate, now users experience them as one. We get more feedback from the marketplace in this regard via social media and direct surveys.
So, parking solutions must be designed, and technology leveraged, to provide that satisfying experience. Often this means creatively combining technology and provided services to address customer wants. Partnerships between solution providers and service providers need to be both strong and functional so that a synergy is created, and the end user benefits from the most robust solution and best experience possible.
This is another point in the process where it is essential to be agile and responsive to what you learn from the market, both through your own people and directly from consumers. Listening to sales and service providers and implementing their market insights can help your efforts to be proactive and to provide genuine thought leadership with your solutions.
In my 30 years in this business, many challenges have remained the same, but the environmental influences are rapidly changing. As the industry has evolved into the next dimension of a mobility services provider, we are presented with many challenges and opportunities. Innovating new products and delivering expert services to support those products has required a heightened level of internal coordination among our teams.
Back-office, sales, project management, and technical service all needs to be aligned. In the process of this alignment, a leader’s skills are brought to bear as they must maintain functional, motivated, and engaged teams while also aligning those teams’ efforts with their vision of the company’s position and goals in the marketplace.
With engaged personnel and a passionate spirit, leaders can motivate and encourage team and individual excellence daily. This makes all the difference and is the cornerstone of a good leader. //
Robert Weiskopf is Chief Sales Officer at SKIDATA GmbH
