Covergirl: Heike Faustmann appeared on the cover of “Around Franke” magazine in 2021 after her sales team won a new major customer for Franke.
Heike Faustmann has been with Franke for over 40 years. During this time, she has worked her way up from trainee to commercial sales consultant and has actively helped to shape many change processes with her optimistic can-do attitude.
When Heike Faustmann, then still known by her maiden name Stelzer, joined Franke in September 1983, she became the company’s first ever commercial trainee. At the time, the company had around 75 employees and everyone knew each other. Rather than being subject to an intricately designed training programme, the budding industrial clerk was often simply sent wherever someone was needed. A lot of it was “learning by doing”. “From day one,” she recalls, she was “a fully-fledged member of the departments.” This was partly because she internalised a piece of advice from Managing Director Helbig: “Keep asking questions until you’re the one being asked – and always do a little more than is expected.”
After completing her training, she mainly worked in sales, where her passion and her skills lay. Her workstation was a sea of typewriters, forms, pencils and erasers. When the first PCs found their way into the offices, Heike Faustmann showed an attitude that she has maintained to this day: Seeing innovations as necessary improvements and actively promoting them without any hesitation. And so, when it came to the introduction of IT, she was an early adopter, who was expected to do a lot – but also expected a lot.
With her willingness to embrace change, she has experienced and shaped a lot over more than four decades of service at Franke: The company’s growth in terms of workforce and facilities, the transformation of the formerly male-dominated domain of sales to more womanpower, the reorganisation of sales structures into three-person teams consisting of commercial, technical and field sales specialists, cooperation with significantly younger female colleagues or intensified and digitally shaped external communication. She is currently heavily involved in the “Neustart” project. This includes a CRM system in which all marketing and sales activities are collated globally and partially automated – including the extensive knowledge that Heike Faustmann has acquired over the years.
Incidentally, she has found more than just a job at Franke, she also found her husband here. Like her, he has remained loyal to the company to this day. //