This first full week of the New Year has been a busy and exciting one at CPI. All of our sales managers, including our teammates from Europe, Middle East, China, Mexico and Canada, converged on our Georgetown, Texas facility for our annual sales meeting, The Global Sales Summit. The Summit involved two days of making and renewing friendships, and reviewing CPI’s programs, products and priorities for the New Year, as well as some pretty intensive training.
Many other CPI employee owners attended as well including our president, vice presidents, and several technical support, customer service, and marketing employees. One very special aspect of this year’s meeting is that it was held in CPI’s brand new Research, Development and Training Center located adjacent to the Georgetown facility. The center was designed to showcase and demonstrate CPI products. You will be hearing much more about the RD&T Center in the near future.
The overall attitude at the summit was one of excitement about the new products and relationships that will be built over the coming months. Our customers who may be attending the BICSI Conference later this month will get a close look at our first new products of the year. You will be able to find all the information about this new products in this blog and on the CPI Website the week of January 19.
Attendees demonstrated quite a bit of competition during the “CPI Solution Workshop”. This involved the group being broken down into smaller groups each of which were given the challenge of finding the best solution for building a fictitious company’s data center using CPI products. Then each group had to present the solution to the company which was comprised of four of our data center experts. Hearing the presentations and critiques was a great way to sharpen skills. Of course our Passive Cooling® Solutions was the foundation of each recommendation because of its effectiveness and ease of implementation.
 Employees were divided into groups to come up with the best possible thermal solution for a particular data center scenario. This group consists of domestic and international employees in sales, product management, marketing and customer service. |
In addition to the updates, training and planning, Summit attendees got a taste of the Austin nightlife. The first evening involved dinner and awards at Dave & Buster’s. A surprise band entertained the group, but you won’t find this band’s songs on iTunes because it was made up of CPI sales managers. They called their band, “Bent Metal, UL Listed”. It was hilarious and several of us were surprised that our teammates had such musical talent! Louisa Phillips, our Quotations Supervisor from our New Bern, NC facility said, “There is no way we can top this. They are going to have to play for us every year!” Take a look at some of their talent on YouTube.
 Louisa Phillips, Quotations Supervisor (second from right) received the “AVP Award for Outstanding Field Support” from Sandra Sheppard, Area Vice President – Western, Jeff Steen, Area Vice President - Corporate & Strategic and Joe Weber, Area Vice President - International. Several employees received awards. |
Our outlook for 2009 is bright and we look forward to giving our current and future customers the best products, solutions and services possible. One big difference about CPI is that we are all owners of this company and have a stake in its success. This compels us to go above and beyond the norm. And, if you take a look at the video or our sales managers jamming, I think you'll agree they are above the norm as well! Kim Ream, Sr. eCommerce Specialist