July 2026
Danfoss Drives is part of Danfoss, a global engineering group that employs around 40,000 people worldwide. Danfoss Power Electronics and Drives division supplies variable-speed drive technology to many industrial segments, including the mining, minerals, and cement industries. For Craig Rapson, Global Business Director for Mining and Cement, success depends on one thing above all: knowing about major capital projects early enough to shape them. GlobalData gives his global sales teams that head start.
1
The challenge
Craig Rapson's role is to support Danfoss's regional sales teams in targeted markets, building senior relationships with large end users and their supply chains so that local teams can open doors and develop new business. For years, the hardest part was simply finding the opportunities early enough.
“With limited data, it was very difficult to identify those projects at an early stage,” Craig says. That single gap had a knock-on effect across the business. By the time his teams found a project, it was often late in the process, with the technical specifications already set. Danfoss then had little or no chance to show what its technology could bring, so its sales teams were left competing on one dimension alone.
“Our sales teams were really only judged on price alone, rather than on the technicalities and the benefits,” Craig explains. The win/loss ratio suffered as a result.
The traditional workaround was slow and manual. Teams worked the phones, held face-to-face meetings over many months, combed through company websites, and leaned heavily on LinkedIn to track down the right contacts, often without an existing relationship to build on.
2
The solution
Danfoss now uses GlobalData’s Mining and Construction Intelligence Center’s to identify capital projects in its target regions early, and to build a structured process around them.
Craig Rapson accesses the platform regularly and has established a monthly rhythm with each target region. Ahead of every meeting, he runs a project report for the region, exports it to Excel, and works through it with the local team over Microsoft Teams to pick out the specific opportunities worth pursuing together. Extensive filtering is what makes this workable at scale.
“Having the possibility to extensively filter the project searches can save us lots and lots of time”. Rather than working through thousands of records, his teams narrow searches to targeted countries, opportunities, and customers in a few clicks.
Two further parts of the platform have become central to how he works. Company profile reports give his teams deeper insight into how target companies operate. Market outlook reports feed directly into the global mining strategy he is responsible for building. “The market outlook reports are really valuable for me. Having that more accurate data from GlobalData makes it a much more accurate report that I can support the regions with.”
3
The results
Danfoss is still formalizing how it measures the return, and Craig has built the tracking into the company's existing systems. Working with Salesforce, his teams tag every opportunity sourced through GlobalData with a dedicated attribute, so that as those opportunities convert, the business can report exactly how many originated on the platform. The clearest endorsement so far came from a senior colleague in Australia who joined Danfoss with deep mining experience. Craig sent him a GlobalData report on the Australian mining market, and the reaction was immediate.
- “My God, you’ve saved me months and months of time. You’ve given me all in one go.” - Senior mining specialist, Danfoss Australia, relayed by Craig Rapson.
Reaching those same contacts, understanding their projects, and getting introduced to their supply chains would otherwise have taken an estimated three months of work.
Early project intelligence has also reshaped how Danfoss pursues the opportunities it finds. When a project is a strong fit, the team marks it in Salesforce as a “must win,” which triggers what Danfoss calls a win room: a structured session that brings technical, application, and commercial specialists together to build the strategy for that pursuit. GlobalData's early-stage data is the starting point for those sessions, giving the team the time it needs to influence specifications and compete on the full value Danfoss brings, rather than on price alone.
Organization: Danfoss Drives Headquarters: Nordborg, Denmark Employees: ~40,000 Solutions: Mining & Construction
“The market outlook reports are really valuable for me. Having that more accurate data from GlobalData makes it a much more accurate report that I can support the regions with.”
Craig Rapson, Global Business Director, Mining and Cement, Danfoss Drives
