From a combat deployment in Desert Storm to a $300 million sales operation at Materion, Todd Caccamo learned that adaptability is not a reaction to crisis but a discipline practiced daily. Whether on a hockey rink outside Cleveland or in a boardroom during a market downturn, he treats change as strategy, not threat.
Todd Caccamo is Managing Director, Vice President and General Manager of Sales at Materion Corporation, where he oversees a $300 million commercial and compliance team supplying advanced materials to defense, automotive, aerospace, and consumer electronics industries. A United States Marine Corps combat veteran who deployed during Desert Storm and Iraq, Caccamo holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan and an MBA in Marketing and Finance from Wayne State University. He has coached hockey since 1980 and serves on the board of the Charter Township of Canton.
How did your background in mechanical engineering shape the way you approach sales strategy today?
The technical training gave me fluency in how things actually work, which matters more in a sales conversation than most people realize. When a customer asks whether a material can handle a specific thermal load or meet a tolerance requirement, I can speak to that directly rather than deferring to engineering. The degree also taught me problem-solving frameworks that apply well beyond product design. You learn to break a complex system into parts, identify where the constraint is, and work backward from the outcome you need. I use that same logic when I am building a commercial strategy or diagnosing why a sales process is stalling. The MBA added the business vocabulary, but the engineering foundation is what lets me translate between the technical side and the market side without losing fidelity on either end.
What did your time at General Electric teach you that you still use at Materion?
GE was where I learned to read market dynamics rather than just reacting to them. I spent time translating technical specifications into commercial value propositions, which sounds straightforward but requires understanding what the customer actually cares about. A feature only matters if it solves a problem the customer is willing to pay to fix. I also saw how partnerships get built. Winning a key client is rarely about having the best spec sheet. It is about showing up consistently, understanding their business pressures, and delivering on what you promise. Those lessons carried directly into my work at Rhinestahl and now at Materion. The industries change, but the principles do not.
What do people consistently get wrong about your work?
They assume sales leadership is about closing deals, when most of the job is about building systems that let other people close deals. My role is setting the vision, removing obstacles, and making sure the team has the tools and the clarity they need to execute. If I am the one closing every deal, something is broken. The other misconception is that revenue growth comes from a single decision or a big strategic pivot. It does not. It comes from dozens of smaller decisions made consistently over time: how you onboard a new account manager, how you structure a pricing conversation, how you respond when a customer has a problem. The results people see in the numbers are the lagging indicator of work that happened months earlier.
You led a major restructuring during a market downturn. What made that so difficult?
The hardest part was not the strategy itself. It was the internal resistance. People were understandably anxious about what the changes would mean for their roles, their teams, their standing in the company. Declining sales and rising competition made the case for restructuring clear on paper, but that did not make it easier to ask people to trust a plan that felt risky in the moment. I spent months in difficult conversations, explaining the reasoning, listening to concerns, and involving the team in shaping the decisions rather than just announcing them. That took patience I did not always feel like I had. But the alternative, imposing change from above without buy-in, would have failed even if the strategy was sound. Looking back, the persistence through those conversations mattered more than any single move we made.
If I am the one closing every deal, something is broken.
How did Materion grow revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic when most companies were contracting?
We adapted instead of waiting. Early in the pandemic, it became clear that strategies that had worked in 2019 were not going to carry us through 2020. We adopted new digital tools that trimmed costs and let us stay connected to customers even when travel stopped. We shifted toward emerging opportunities in industries that were still moving, like consumer electronics and certain defense applications. And we found new ways to support customers who were dealing with their own disruptions, whether that meant adjusting delivery schedules or helping them navigate supply chain issues. The team was willing to try things that felt uncomfortable at the time, and that willingness fed into the fastest growth we had seen in years. Adaptability was not a reaction. It was a deliberate choice we made early and reinforced every week.
What is the most important skill you learned in the Marine Corps that you still use in business?
Leading through uncertainty. In a combat deployment, you do not have perfect information, you do not have unlimited time, and the stakes are real. You learn to make decisions with what you have, communicate clearly under pressure, and adjust as new information comes in. That applies directly to business. Markets shift, customers change priorities, internal dynamics create friction. The leaders who freeze because they are waiting for certainty get left behind. The other thing the Marine Corps drilled into me was accountability. If something goes wrong on your watch, you own it. You do not deflect, you do not blame the team, you fix it and you move forward. That standard has shaped how I run every organization I have been part of since.
You have coached hockey since 1980. What does coaching teach you that corporate leadership does not?
Coaching forces you to meet people where they are. A nine-year-old learning to skate backward does not need the same instruction as a sixteen-year-old preparing for a college showcase. You have to adjust your approach based on who is in front of you, and you have to do it in real time. That translates directly into management. Not everyone on a sales team learns the same way or responds to feedback the same way. The fundamentals are the same, discipline, effort, accountability, but how you reinforce those fundamentals has to flex. Coaching also keeps my ego in check. When a play breaks down on the ice, the kids do not care about your resume. They care whether you can help them understand what went wrong and how to fix it. That is a useful reminder when I walk into a boardroom.
Tell me about a moment early in your career when something went wrong in front of a client. How did you handle it?
I was running a product demonstration at GE, showing avionics equipment to a client who had flown in specifically for the meeting. The equipment refused to power on. When it finally did, it started throwing error messages I had never seen before, and the projector was flickering the entire time. It was a disaster. I could have tried to salvage it with excuses, but that would have made it worse. Instead, I leaned into humor. I joked about the unplanned light show, acknowledged that this was not how the demo was supposed to go, and offered to reschedule once we had sorted out what was happening. The client did not buy that day, but he left with a favorable impression. He told me later that how I handled the failure mattered more to him than whether the equipment worked perfectly the first time. That lesson stuck with me. People remember how you respond to the unexpected, and that often carries more weight than the outcome itself.
The leaders who freeze because they are waiting for certainty get left behind.
What piece of feedback early in your career stung at the time but turned out to be the most valuable?
A mentor told me I needed to slow down and listen more during meetings. He said I was making decisions before I had heard everyone out, and it was costing me credibility with the team. That was hard to hear, because I thought I was being decisive. But he was right. I was moving fast because I believed speed showed confidence, but what it actually showed was impatience. I started forcing myself to pause, to ask questions, to let other people finish their thought before I jumped in with a solution. It changed how I made decisions and how I built relationships with colleagues. Looking back, that feedback reshaped my entire approach to leadership. I treat negative feedback now as routine maintenance. It is not a setback. It is information, and if it holds truth, I use it.
What is overrated in sales leadership right now?
The obsession with data dashboards. Do not misunderstand, I rely on data every day. But I see leaders who spend more time looking at metrics than talking to their teams or their customers. A dashboard can tell you that a deal stalled, but it cannot tell you why. It cannot tell you that the customer is worried about a supplier relationship you do not even know exists, or that your account manager is burned out and needs support. The human conversations are where you learn what is actually happening, and no amount of visualization software replaces that. The best leaders I know use data to ask better questions, not to avoid the hard work of listening.
You helped dedicate a memorial for Marines killed in Fallujah. Why was that important to you?
Because service carries a cost, and we have a responsibility to remember that cost, not as an abstraction but as names and faces. Twenty-two members of the 1st Battalion, 24th Marines were killed in Fallujah. They were fellow Marines. The memorial at the Canton Veterans Memorial Wall is a way to honor that sacrifice and to make sure their families know the community has not forgotten. I stayed active with veterans after I left the Corps because the support does not end when the deployment does. The transition back to civilian life is hard, and a lot of veterans need resources and connection that they do not always know how to ask for. Helping provide that, whether through the memorial or through the work I do with other veterans, is not optional for me. It is part of the obligation I took on when I put on the uniform.
What advice would you give to someone stepping into their first sales leadership role?
Understand that your job just changed. You are no longer measured by how much you sell. You are measured by how much your team sells. That shift is harder than it sounds, because the instincts that made you a great individual contributor, being the smartest person in the room, closing the toughest deals, can work against you as a leader. Your job now is to set a clear vision, remove obstacles, and develop the people around you. Invest time in coaching, even when it feels slower than just doing it yourself. And learn to let go of the need to be the hero. If your team succeeds because of the systems and the culture you built, that is a better outcome than if they succeed because you personally saved every deal.
How do you balance technical expertise with strategic judgment when a sales decision has both engineering and business implications?
You have to know which lens the decision requires. If a customer is asking whether we can meet a specification, that is an engineering question, and I need to answer it with precision. If they are asking whether the investment is worth the risk, that is a business question, and I need to frame it in terms of their outcomes, their timeline, and their alternatives. The mistake people make is treating every conversation as one or the other. Most decisions in advanced materials sit right at the intersection. A material might technically work, but if the lead time puts the customer behind schedule, the technical answer does not matter. My job is to hold both sides of that equation at the same time and help the customer see the tradeoffs clearly. That only works if you respect both the engineering and the business side, and you do not let one override the other without good reason.
A dashboard can tell you that a deal stalled, but it cannot tell you why.
What stays true in sales leadership no matter how much the market changes?
Relationships. Technology will keep evolving, customer expectations will shift, entire industries will get disrupted, but the foundation of commercial work is still trust built over time. A customer will forgive a delayed shipment if they trust you to fix it. They will take a risk on a new product if they trust your judgment. But that trust only comes from showing up consistently, delivering on what you promise, and being honest when something goes wrong. The tools we use to manage those relationships will change. The speed at which decisions get made will accelerate. But the underlying dynamic, one person deciding whether to trust another person with their business, that does not change. If you lose sight of that, no amount of strategy or technology will save you.
What keeps you motivated after decades in leadership roles?
Impact. Not titles, not revenue targets. The chance to watch a team, whether in a boardroom or on a bench, grow into something more capable than it was the day before. I had mentors early in my career who invested time in me when they did not have to, and I feel a responsibility to pass that along. Whether it is a young professional navigating their first management role or a nine-year-old learning to skate backward, the work is the same: you show them what is possible, you hold them to a standard, and you give them the tools to get there. That combination, driving results at Materion, coaching on the ice, mentoring in both settings, is what gets me moving each morning with a sense of purpose. The day that stops feeling meaningful is the day I will do something else.
