Michael Webb:                 B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision-makers and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Hello, this is Michael Webb and I am excited to introduce you today to someone I have known for many years and who has brought an amazing insight not just to business but to measurement problems and statistical analysis. Bill Bentley, welcome here.

Bill Bentley:                        Thanks Mike. Glad to be here.

Michael Webb:                 You just have this most fascinating background. I want to kind of walk people through it. You got an engineering degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic and then you began as an automation engineer for Procter and Gamble and Frito-Lay, right?

Bill Bentley:                        Right. I was at Procter and Gamble for quite a while. Then went to Frito-Lay from there.

Michael Webb:                 As a manager at Frito-Lay, right?

Bill Bentley:                        Right.

Michael Webb:                 And then when we met, you had been hired by Rockwell Automation. Tell us about why they hired you.

Bill Bentley:                        They hired me because I had just lost a job during a downturn. I was in charge of all the industrial automation and electrical engineering at Nabisco and when KKR bought them, they kind of dissolved the company, broke it all up, and Rockwell was a big supplier to us and they called and offered me a job in their sales force to help the sales teams sell to people like me or people who had jobs like the one that I had just left. So it was very interesting. My first reaction to that job offer was actually, "No, I'm not interested in that. I spent my whole life avoiding salespeople. Why would I want to be one?" But after a few weeks, realizing that I was unlikely to get any other work, I called back and changed my mind and that turned out to be a very interesting job and lot of fun and I enjoyed it.

Michael Webb:                 And likewise, I was hired by them in around, trying to remember, I think it was '81 or '82, not at the level where you are at. I wasn't an executive, but I was a sales manager and I was brought in to help their large vaunted sales force of degreed electrical engineers to make this shift. The president of the company, his name will come to me in a moment, was trying to turn Rockwell from a manufacturer of industrial controls sold in brown boxes through industrial distribution, limit switches, push buttons, PLCs, stuff like that. And he wanted, instead of selling the pieces in parts, he wanted to be able to sell integrated systems with all the margin covering the labor and all that, he wanted them to be able to sell solutions. And so I was in the field sales force in the St Louis branch and I met you as one of the guys at corporate who was helping us.

Rockwell had made it's success in the automotive industry. It was a way to automate and better control systems of relays. And now they were trying to move from that on off digital kind of manufacturing environment, into a more higher level control system environment, especially with continuous controls. So that was a fascinating, fascinating time. We worked on, and I think you were involved in, we made the first proposal to a large brewery, Anheuser Busch in St Louis, to use digital automation controls for what had always been controlled in the past by a distributed control system, which was a continuous analog factory control. That was a $20 million project that we bid, we proposed, you remember working on that Bill?

Bill Bentley:                        I do remember it and I remember the sales guys make a whole lot of money, maybe I should do that rather than be an engineer.

Michael Webb:                 Yes indeed. Yes indeed. So from Rockwell, after that, you were a general manager, senior executive at least one engineering firm, right?

Bill Bentley:                        I was, I was general manager of a contract engineering firm in Tennessee and we were actually a captive engineering group for a Procter and Gamble plant, a very large Procter and Gamble manufacturing plant. So I had about a hundred engineers and designers and programmers working for me at that plant.

Michael Webb:                 And then when that tapped out, a lot of us had some difficulties after 9/11, the economy kind of went South and then there was the financial crisis in 2008, so you founded a successful Six Sigma training company for yourself. Tell us about that.

Bill Bentley:                        After that stint, I came to Atlanta to be the CEO of a software company and that's the company that folded when 9/11 hit. So I worked again. And I did start my own consulting business and training business and that business lasted for 18 years. It's still going at a low level, but 18 years is the longest I've ever spent in any company. And it was my own company. So I was happily self-employed and I loved it. It was quite interesting. It started as a community service project to teach people who are out of work, how to do Six Sigma and ended up being a national training and consulting business.

Michael Webb:                 Which is a fantastic outcome. Not many people would be able to make all of these transitions in their careers and then a few years ago I was surprised, shocked and interested to see what you did next. Tell us what you did.

Bill Bentley:                        After 18 years of doing what I was doing, I started to get itchy feet, it started to become routine and I could see that business going down hill slowly. So I actually went back to grad school. I've got a new degree, a masters in applied statistics. I picked a bunch of other courses online and declared myself a data scientist and now I had the credentials to back it up. Went looking for a job and I took a full time job as a data scientist for a very large company here in Atlanta.

Michael Webb:                 And that's fantastic. I don't know, just because you had a passion, you really like the way, the analytical part and the creativity involved in the mathematics of statistics, if I understand that right.

Bill Bentley:                        I did. Right. And what drove me to do that and choose that is sort of my retirement job, I guess you could call it because the stuff that was ...