On May 14, 2024, we hosted on WU campus, Dr. Markus Plankensteiner, VP Sales and Marketing at TT Control, who shared valuable insights on complex and high-tech-driven B2B selling within the course 5483 Personal Selling and Sales Management in the Global Context led by Dr. Zoran Latinovic. Our Bachelor students engaged in some meaningful conversations with Markus. Markus emphasized connecting markets to solutions, specific market trends, and various application fields for a high-tech environment. He highlighted the importance of long selling cycles and team-based decision-making within buying and selling centers. Moreover, he addressed the particularity and complexity of winning a project and incentivizing based on average annual contract values.

Dr. Plankensteiner has a solid technical background with research and development positions at Siemens Medical, Environmental Agency Austria, CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) in Geneva/Switzerland, and IBM Research Labs in Austria and Germany. He then had leading product management, product marketing, and marketing roles in several Austrian startups, including one that managed an IPO. Markus joined TTTech, an Austrian high-tech company with over 2300 employees today, as Head of Marketing when the company had about 20 employees. He stayed at TTTech for around 20 years, founded a business unit focusing on industry and automation and initiated standardization activities for Ethernet technologies at SAE and IEEE with companies such as Honeywell and Cisco. Markus then moved on to a German company that provides parking management systems, with business development and sales responsibility for North and South America. Afterwards, he was a founding member of a startup that offers food product evaluation. Since 2020, Markus has been VP Sales and Marketing at TTControl, a company focusing on mobile machine controls and a joint venture between TTTech Group and HYDAC, a German provider of hydraulics, systems, and fluid technology. Markus has a master's degree and a doctorate in mathematics (both with distinction), a master's degree in business information systems, a master's degree in computer science, and university diplomas in data systems engineering and political science.

We are incredibly grateful to Markus for his visit. The impression that local executive leaders leave on our students is indispensable.