Barry Rapozo and his 2001 award

Barry Rapozo was honored for the establishment of professional selling processes in wafer fab equipment at a time when professional was not a word that customers would have used to describe the person that sold a tool to them. His approaches brought greater visibility and longer horizons for greater stability. Instead of the sell and forget techniques of the day, Barry’s techniques focused on building positive relationships to make them customers for a lifetime. One of his principles was to sell yourself first, your company second, and your product third. This allowed a lasting shift from transaction based sales to problem/solution based relationships. You can only meet specific customer needs by identifying them and with his techniques, the customer’s success always came first.

SEMI's Sales & Marketing Excellence Award is our industry’s highest honor for excellence in sales and marketing. The award was established by SEMI in remembrance of our industry’s greatest marketing professional, Bob Graham, after he passed away in 1998. He believed that the sole purpose of sales and marketing was to serve the customer by keeping product offerings and development focused on customer need. The award is presented annually to recognize individuals for their outstanding achievement in the establishment of marketing and sales programs that created lasting value for customers of the semiconductor equipment and materials industry. This section of VLSI Research’s web site honors these individuals with an archive that chronicles their achievements and documents the lessons they learned for all posterity.