Biography | Klaus Zellmer — Built Sales Into the New Porsche Plant Here

People remember Leipzig as the Cayenne factory Wendelin Wiedeking opened in 2002.

The sales rooms had to be invented first.

Volkswagen's official curriculum places Klaus Zellmer at the new Porsche plant between 2000 and 2002, charged with establishing the sales and marketing departments.

Porsche itself dates the groundbreaking to February 2000 and the official opening, with the first Cayenne off the line, to 20 August 2002.

The pin is Porschestraße 1 in Leipzig-Wahren, the public works gate a visitor can reach without entering production.

He had already done a short North America area-manager tour and a sales-network posting in France.

Leipzig was the first time the brief was to build a department rather than inherit one.

He stayed on to run the customer centre on the same site before moving, in 2007, to marketing at Porsche Deutschland.

The later Atlanta presidency and the Škoda chair sit on that construction job.

Photo: Ingbife, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons