Why Internal Promotion for Sales Leadership Often Wins in Packaging Automation

Here’s a question I didn’t have a good answer for until about three years ago: does promoting your long-time technical expert to VP of Sales actually work, or is it just a feel-good story?

In my eight years as a packaging coordinator—managing specs for about 200 orders annually across a dozen converters and machinery suppliers—I’ve sat through sales pitches from the freshly hired “industry rockstar” and the guy who’s been with the same company since the Reagan administration. The rockstar had the polish. The lifer had the answers. I’ve seen which one actually gets the order when the line is down and the plant manager is on the phone.

So when I saw the news about Bob Kuzmich’s promotion to VP of Sales at Econocorp, a company that makes cartoning and packaging automation kit, my first thought wasn’t “corporate announcement.” It was, “That’s probably the right move.” I looked up his background—1984 start date, assembly line, multiple internal roles. That’s nearly four decades of institutional memory walking into a sales leadership role. That’s a different kind of asset.

The Surface Skepticism: “A Salesperson Should Sell, Right?”

The obvious argument against promoting a technical insider is that sales is a different skill. You need charisma, closing ability, pipeline management—things you might not learn on an assembly line. And look, I get it. In 2021, we were evaluating a new labeling system. The sales rep was fantastic. Great presentation, responsive, promised the moon. The problem was, the “moon” his system promised wasn’t technically possible with our film substrate. We found out after the PO was cut and the machine arrived. A $45,000 lesson in “sales speak vs. engineering reality.”

That’s the risk with a pure sales hire in a complex field like packaging machinery. They can sell a vision the company’s equipment can’t quite deliver. The customer ends up frustrated, the vendor’s reputation takes a hit, and you’re left with a very expensive piece of metal that doesn’t solve your problem.

The Deep-Dive: What a “Lifer” Really Brings to the Table

Promoting someone like Kuzmich isn’t about putting a sales title on a technician. It’s about leveraging a specific type of knowledge that’s almost impossible to hire from the outside: deep, visceral product and application knowledge.

Think about it from a buyer’s perspective. When I’m sourcing a critical piece of line equipment, my biggest fear isn’t the price. It’s the hidden “gotchas.” Will it integrate with our existing upstream filler? What’s the real-world changeover time, not the brochure time? What happens when Product A, which runs fine, is suddenly switched to a slightly tackier Product B?

A sales leader who came up through assembly, testing, and field service has seen those “gotchas” play out in real time. They’ve probably caused a few. That experience lets them steer their entire sales team away from making promises the machines can’t keep. They can look at a customer’s SKU list and immediately flag which one will cause jams at a specific speed. That’s not sales training; that’s scar tissue.

As Sam Goldberg, Econocorp’s COO, put it in the announcement, it’s about having the “technical wherewithal to ensure end users feel confident we can provide the solution we have set forth.” That’s another way of saying, “We won’t sell you a solution that breaks in month two.”

The Cost of Getting It Wrong (And Why Internal Knowledge Is the Insurance)

Let’s talk numbers. A misguided capital equipment purchase doesn’t just waste the machine’s price tag. The real cost is in:

• Line downtime: A machine that doesn’t work shuts down production. For a mid-size CPG line, that’s thousands of dollars per hour in lost throughput.
• Re-engineering: Fixing the problem often means custom parts, extra sensors, software patches—all at premium rates.
• Lost trust: The operational team won’t trust procurement’s judgment on the next big purchase.

The Bottom Line: It’s a Different Kind of Growth Strategy

Econocorp’s move signals a growth strategy built on reliability and long-term relationships, not just quarterly sales spikes. It tells the market, “Our differentiator is our deep, practical know-how, and we’re putting that at the forefront of our customer relationships.”

From my corner of the industry—dealing with the fallout when specs and reality don’t match—that’s a compelling pitch. The next time I see a machinery supplier promote from within their technical ranks, I won’t see a corporate headline. I’ll see a company betting that the best person to sell a complex solution is the one who truly understands what it can and cannot do. And in packaging automation, where downtime is the ultimate enemy, that’s a bet I’d take.