At SDN Communications, finding an employee who can successfully navigate both the tech and sales worlds can be a rare find. The company’s new commercial sales manager, Chris Aeilts, has the technical know-how and previously held sales and engineering positions at SDN, making him a unique fit for this leadership position.
“I’m not trying to get into what a typical sales manager would be, I’m trying to bring my unique expertise and capability to this role,” Aeilts said. “It makes me very effective even if it looks different than what’s expected.”
As the commercial sales manager, Aeilts leads a team of account executives in Sioux Falls and Rapid City, as well as network engineers and support staff. He reports to Ryan Dutton, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, who also held this position as part of his tenure at SDN.
Dutton shared that, “Chris is a natural leader, a natural communicator and a good person. With a long-tenured sales staff, it’s less about developing salespeople and instead helping our team continue to learn and expand their knowledge of tech, these are all real strengths of Chris, plus he has a training background.”
Aeilts celebrated his 10-year anniversary with SDN Communications this year. His professional background prior to SDN was more on the technical side. A sales position at SDN brought the Aeilts family from Shakopee, Minn., to Sioux Falls. Aeilts and his wife, Kristy, were excited to be closer to her family and to raise their two children in Sioux Falls.
The account executive position was outside of the mold of what he had been doing, he said, but he found he enjoyed putting together solutions for customers. Aeilts continued to prefer the technical side, however, so when a sales engineer position at SDN opened up, he went that route. In that role, Aeilts was able to continue to work with the sales associates and got to build complex tech solutions for customers. Dutton explained that because of the services that SDN sells, it’s common for sales executives to pull in technical resources when finding solutions for clients.
Finding solutions and creating partnerships is a large part of the sales team’s job. The bandwidth or amount of speed that business customers require has increased dramatically. In the last five years, Dutton has seen SDN’s managed services increase as well. Because of trusted relationships, customers have been able to reclaim their own tech teams’ times by partnering with SDN on additional services.
“We’ve seen growth and increased focus from customers on security, and a desire to partner with companies such as SDN who are able to support them in business and day to day operations as opposed to just buying things and doing it on their own,” Aeilts said, “It speaks to our managed services side of house and the way we provide solutions for customers, really sitting down and talking with them. It’s a consultative sales approach and gives us the ability to act as partners.”
Aeilts is excited to grow in this new leadership position and apply technical information while guiding the commercial sales team.
“Living in both tech and sales worlds is a unique combination of skills. Chris’ ability to move between both worlds is unique to his talent. Not a lot of people would be comfortable in both realms. We’re really glad to have him,” Dutton shared of Aeilts.
