CHANGING OF THE
GUARD AT LEVITON:
SALES OPPORTUNITIES ABOUND FOR DISTRIBUTORS

With the recent retirements of long-time industry veterans Bill Marshall and Bill Cheetham there has been a changing of the guard at Leviton.

In March 2020, Leviton hired Randy Mortensen as senior vice president of global distribution sales and marketing to take over the role previously held by 26-year company veteran Marshall. In addition, Leviton promoted Stuart Serota to vice president of U.S. electrical distribution sales to take over the role previously held by 47-year company veteran Cheetham.

Mortensen works across all four business units at Leviton—residential, commercial and industrial, lighting and controls, and network systems—and is responsible for overseeing sales activities and helping to design effective sales and marketing strategies that integrate seamlessly around customer needs.

Serota supports implementing the strategic initiatives of Leviton’s president and chief operations officer. “Overall, I help to further the distribution sales channel’s mission to continue calling upon the distribution, contractor, builder, end user and OEM markets to drive growth,” Serota said.

Brett Serxner, director of distribution marketing, leads the strategy development and tactical execution that sets the tone for the Leviton team’s overall channel marketing partnerships. “Our marketing support targets mutual growth for Leviton and all distributor channel partners and therefore has a strong emphasis on sales enablement across the channel,” Serxner said. “Our team, working alongside Leviton sales, integrates with our channel partners for marketing, promotions, programming and more. We help provide demand-generation initiatives that grow brand preference with contractors and end users through co-marketing activities that drive sales through the distribution channel.”

Distribution marketing develops a variety of marketing content, such as virtual tours, videos, blogs, advertising, merchandising, promotions, playbooks, marketing, development, funding and program support, vertical marketing and more. All of this content goes directly to the industry and many assets can be co-branded for use with Leviton’s distribution partners. “From Leviton sales, manufacturer representatives and distributor sales to builders, architects, engineers, specifiers and electrical contractors, we recognize each audience and make certain our marketing content, trainings, sales tools and support meet all expectations and needs,” Serxner said.

Gino Dabbicco, corporate director of strategic accounts, distribution, works alongside IMARK Electrical and its members to assist in developing and executing sales growth strategies to drive incremental growth and achieve sales goals. “I work directly with our distribution sales and marketing management team to ensure our activities and strategies are aligned with Leviton’s annual goals,” Dabbicco said. “I also work directly with the IMARK Electrical team. My additional responsibilities include establishing annual GainShare goals with our members and doing all I can to help members achieve these goals.”

A Leader in the Market

“Leviton’s commitment to engineering thoughtful and innovative solutions that help make life easier, safer, more efficient and productive allow us to be a market leader across a range of industries, including electrical, lighting and networking,” Mortensen said. “Additionally, our global manufacturing footprint provides us with a best-in-class supply chain that allows us to maintain product availability for our varied customer partners.”

“We have a very robust product line and regardless of what markets our members serve, we truly believe that they are always best served with Leviton,” Dabbicco added. “We have tremendous talent and leadership within our organization, and the excitement and energy we all feel, particularly after such a challenging year, is truly remarkable.”

Leviton Load Center

The Leviton Load Center with intelligent circuit breakers gives contractors, builders and homeowners a smarter and safer solution. Homeowners can view real-time monitoring data such as energy consumption by total aggregate, individual circuit or trends by day, week, month and year. With customizable alerts, homeowners can get notified when and why a circuit breaker trips, when a load is on or not drawing power for an extended time and view system status in real time and detect if critical loads need to be addressed.

“We feel that the Leviton Load Center is second to none,” Serota said. “We encourage IMARK members to review it with your Leviton sales representative and allow us to show you how we, together, can increase sales.”

Featuring an all plug-on design and circuit breakers that exceed UL safety standards, the Leviton Load Center can be installed more efficiently compared to competitive products. All branch wires terminate at custom lugs in the panel, making wiring easier and neater—and eliminating the need for pigtails. The innovative design also enables users to switch out branch circuit breakers with no rewiring required.

Leviton Inform and ‘Smart’ Devices

Leviton Inform is an operational technology platform that enables select products to provide real-time data to the end user. This data can be used to improve safety, efficiency and productivity and make products more functional and informative in industrial and commercial applications.

For example, industrial devices with Inform provide smarter electrical connections by integrating with Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology to support predictive maintenance schemes. Commercial devices with Inform provide a simple and efficient way to improve code compliance and electrical safety in health care facilities.

Leviton also recently launched the next upgrade of the WiFi product line within its Decora Smart product offering.

Growth Opportunities

Expect to see an increase in adoption of IoT-driven solutions across market segments. In residential settings, this includes a whole-home connected solution, from smart outlets and lighting controls to a load center that brings intelligence to each individual circuit through the house. In commercial settings, this includes remote monitoring of electrical connections to improve safety and data analysis to improve productivity by decreasing unplanned downtime.

“The residential market continues to look strong as Americans look to move from urban areas to the suburbs,” Mortensen said. “In the commercial sector, technology convergence is driving the need for seamless network communications across commercial buildings and factory floors, and the proliferation of IoT and IIoT devices require network connections and data centers to store and analyze data.”

Best-in-Class Service

For 115 years, Leviton has taken pride in understanding its distributor partners and customers. “As a family-owned company, which many of our IMARK partners are as well, we have the same common core goals,” Serota said. “Those goals are to be financially strong, understand the needs of our partners and always strive to be the easiest company with which to do business. We insist on having the most professional and well-educated sales organization that has our customer’s best interest at hand.”

Leviton employs the largest direct sales team in the industry and it is supplemented by a team of National Electrical Manufacturers Representatives Association reps in certain areas of the country.

The Leviton distributor that is most successful with the Leviton partnership is the distributor that educates their staff properly and keeps a healthy inventory of the company’s product portfolio in stock to best serve their customers’ needs. “These distributors fully understand the partnership that they need to have with their vendors within IMARK, to continue growth together moving forward,” Serota said.

“Our customers’ success is our success,” Dabbicco said. “Challenges to our members become our tasks to solve. We are making things right when, at times, things may not go as planned.”

Responding to the pandemic, Leviton has vastly grown its digital marketing, training, demand generation and many critical channel partner business building support tools. “This includes our investment to provide productivity tools like Captain Code, Leviton 2Go, digital catalogs (mobile apps and desktop), design assistance and code training to assist electrical contractors,” Serxner said. “Leviton also has three experience centers, called Leviton LIVE, located in New Orleans, Chicago and San Francisco, dedicated to training electrical professionals and showcasing the latest solutions and products.”

Making it Happen

“Our internal mantra is: We Make it Happen,” Dabbicco said. “The most important ingredient to our success is the true entrepreneurial spirit that exists within our organization, which is fostered by the Leviton family and our executive leadership team. We put our heart and soul in all we do, and we truly care about every IMARK member we do business with. We consider them all part of our Leviton family. It is a sacred trust to place your faith and business with us, and we never take that for granted.”