Holding considerable expertise in sales, Nanette Crawford Rota began her career as a regional sales manager for Filter Queen, an air filter company, in 1990. During this period, she obtained a degree in business administration and management from Piedmont Community College in 1995 and was later certified as a pesticide applicator and by AIB International. In 2003, she joined the Terminix International Company Limited Partnership as a salesperson, rising to become the area sales manager in just six months. She went on to become a branch manager in 2009 and, in 2013, she helped to establish the commercial division of Terminix, where she has excelled as a commercial sales inspector ever since. In 2018, Ms. Rota was promoted to the role of regional commercial accounts manager.
In her current roles with Terminix, Ms. Rota works as a commercial business-to-business salesperson, overseeing customers in three regions. She is also responsible for managing customer complaints and extreme situations that may call for a more specific and targeted approach than their usual methods. Additionally, she has taken great pains to learn as much as she can about different cultures, since her work has her interacting with people from a wide range of backgrounds. For example, in Hinduism there is a prohibition against killing any living creature due to their belief in reincarnation, which means that Ms. Rota has to bring a different approach to Hindu clients than she would with clients from other cultural backgrounds.
Looking toward the future, Ms. Rota is working on her pest control license and hopes to establish her own multi-franchise business in the pest control industry, The Bug Prep Squad. Her goal is to create a business that will provide cleaning and preparation services in advance of pest control treatments, which can be a difficult and time consuming task that involves laundering everything in the house and boxing up all loose belongings. Recognizing that such intense prep work may be impossible for people who are elderly or physically disabled in some way, Ms. Rota has brought her passion to help others to developing her plans for this new business.
Alongside her primary responsibilities, Ms. Rota has contributed her skills to Bell Cow, an HVAC, plumbing and electrical repair company, as an account sales representative since 2015. She also maintains professional affiliation with Women in Pest Control in order to keep abreast of new developments in her field and was recently asked to be a keynote speaker at their annual conference. Furthermore, Ms. Rota greatly enjoys working with children and has proffered her expertise as a “bug lady” to local schools to teach children about bugs during the spring.
Attributing much of her success to her upbringing and her parents’ encouragement to work hard regardless of the career she chose, Ms. Rota has made a name for herself through her relationships with her customers, treating each customer as if they were a close friend and making sure she is always available for them. She feels greatly enriched by all that she has learned over the course of her career, particularly what she garnered from the book, “Me and My Big Mouth” by Andy Stanly and by the fact that there is always something that you can learn from the people around you. For her excellence over the years, she has received a variety of honors and accolades, including being ranked #1 in North America as a seller with Filter Queen. Since 2013, Ms. Rota has been recognized as the #1 Commercial Salesperson with Terminix, something she considers to be her most notable achievement as a woman in a very male dominated field.
