Management Motivations is a new series of articles by Quectel’s senior executives that explores their management styles, approaches to the challenges of further developing the company and what drives them to lead and succeed.

Ricardo Simon, regional sales director, Latin America

1.Push beyond your comfort zone to open new markets

My background is in finance and I graduated with an MBA in Retail and Consumer behavior which led me to spend the early part of my career in finance departments, supporting sales in preparing pricing, understanding costs and addressing issues such as taxation. The focus was on getting the knowledge and background information in place to enable sales people to be better prepared in front of customers and stronger in their negotiations. This background helped me to really understand sales and, in 2007, I migrated into the sales area.

Initially, I gained valuable experience opening up new markets by working directly with customers as well as developing new sales channels such as distributors and representatives. I also enjoy the opportunity sales interactions provide to know different businesses, people and places. This enthusiasm plus my skills in developing new markets has been particularly useful in the M2M and IoT field, which I have worked in since 2010 across Latin America. This has helped me to open up some markets and bring new technologies or business units to the region.

The constant change and evolution of technology is what attracted me to the IoT and M2M market. It’s what I like most about the industry because we need to keep learning and understanding new solutions and markets that technology enables and creates to keep interested and excited in our work. I certainly want to avoid working in my comfort zone and doing the same thing that I’ve mastered for a long time. The achievement comes from learning something new and then succeeding at it.

There are two main reasons why I joined Quectel. The first is the leadership vision of our CEO and founder, Patrick Qian, and our COO, Norbert Muhrer. I could easily see that they would be able to lead Quectel to become a market leader in the industry and during this journey I would learn a lot from both of them. My second reason for joining the company is Quectel’s DNA which drives it to be the best in all areas with the flexibility to adapt to customer and market demand. This means we can be confident of delivering the best products and services to our customers.

Look out for my next blog in this series: “Maximize the value of your time by training while selling”.