Meet our Contributors

Eric Yeomans

Product Manager, Wheel Loaders

Product manager, wheel loaders | Eric has spent more than 40 years with Volvo, dating back to 1977 where he began his career at a Volvo CE dealership. He has worked in a variety of roles within Volvo, as well as Volvo dealers —including customer support management, telematics management and product management positions. Today, as product manager for wheel loaders in North America, works with the regional product requirements Volvo’s district teams, dealers, representing the regional requests by providing product training, support and design input.

Matt McLean

Product Manager, Excavators

Product manager, wheeled excavators | Matt started designing heavy equipment in 1996 and joined Volvo 14 years ago. He spent years working on skid steer loaders, trenchers, and horizontal directional drills. Today Matt’s role at Volvo has him conducting excavator product training for sales staff, collecting customer feedback to hear what tools and changes people are looking to see in the next generation of excavators, and spreading the word about the latest excavator technologies from Volvo.He is passionate about building customer relationships and enjoys getting to introduce people to Volvo’s latest machines.

Rob Palermo

Product Manager, Articulated Haulers

Product manager, articulated haulers | Rob Palermo has more than 25 years of experience in the construction industry, having worked in infrastructure construction and in sales roles at equipment dealerships. His current role as Volvo’s North American product manager for articulated haulers allows Rob to bridge the gap between customers, dealers and product engineers to ensure Volvo articulated haulers remain at the forefront of the industry.

Dave Adams

Product Sales Manager, Connected Services

Product sales manager, connected services | Dave is responsible for leading the Americas Region sales strategy for ActiveCare Direct,Volvo’s 24/7/365 active machine monitoring and reporting service. Dave is incredibly passionate about customer service and finding new ways to improve machine uptime. He has roughly 25 years of experience in both public and private sector fleet management, training and fleet services administration.

Jared Haughton

Product Sales Manager, Used Equipment

Used Equipment Regional Sales Manager │ Jared grew up in the used equipment business, first with his father’s company and now with Volvo CE. He covers the Western Region, plus Maryland, Virginia and Alabama. He also manages repairs at the Volvo Certified Used centers in Las Vegas and Detroit. He is based out of Alma, Arkansas, and enjoys spending his spare time with his family and doing metal fabrication projects.

Al Drake

Volvo Field Technical Support Specialist

Volvo Field Technical Support Specialist | Al spent the early parts of his career as a journeyman field technician in a similar role as current Volvo dealer technicians. He also spent time as a heavy equipment service manager and business owner. Over the past 15 years, Al has worked as a Volvo Field Technical Support Specialist (FTSS) working alongside technicians to troubleshoot construction machine maintenance issues on-site. He’s also a Volvo global certified trainer.

Dr. Ray Gallant

Vice president sales support, region Americas

Ray is responsible for Volvo’s vision in the region on future product development and technologies, customer center operations, and sales and operator training programs. He’s also in charge of Volvo’s demonstration program and any other required sales support activities in the Americas. Prior to his current position, Ray was a director of product planning. He has over 25 years of experience in product development, product planning and sales and marketing with a variety of equipment products. Ray believes we are on the cusp of exciting emerging technologies that will transform the construction industry and open up tremendous opportunities in efficiency, productivity, safety and operator comfort.

Tyler Smith

Operator Training Specialist

Tyler is a heavy construction and mining equipment product specialist with more than 10 years of experience in the heavy equipment industry. He specializes in operator training and product support. Tyler has been with Volvo CE for more than 3 years and has spent those years serving as an operator training specialist. Prior to joining Volvo, Tyler worked as a field service technician at Highway Equipment & Supply Co. in Harrisburg, Pa.

Chris Connolly

Product Manager, Wheel Loaders

Chris has spent eight years with Volvo, dating back to 2012 where he began his career as the paving training specialist for Volvo’s Road Institute. Today, as product manager for wheel loaders in North America, Chris works with internal Volvo teams and dealers providing product training, support and design input.

Hilton Wood

Product Manager, Repair Solutions

Hilton began his career with Volvo CE in 2008 as an intern, and in 2012 became a full-time employee as a senior telematics specialist working on programs like CareTrack® and ActiveCare® Direct. In 2016, he assumed his current role of Product Manager – Repair Solutions and covers sales and marketing for Volvo Certified New Life, Volvo Reman, Care Inspections and component rebuilds.

Mark Eckert

Product Manager, Compaction

Mark is the current compaction product manager and has over 22 years of experience in the construction equipment industry with knowledge of applications such as asphalt pavers, asphalt and soil compactors, milling machines, material handling equipment and aerial work platforms. Mark is also a trainer on best practices for construction equipment and material handling applications.

Danny Freeman

Sales Training and Product Support Manager

Before working for Volvo, Danny began his career within his family construction business. Currently, he’s a sales training and product support manager with 38 years of construction and demolition experience — he’s spent 28 of these years with Volvo.

Lars Arnold

Product Manager, Electromobility

Lars has an engineering background and has been with Volvo since 2002. He has worked in multiple positions in various countries and is now based in Shippensburg as the electromobility product manager for North America in charge of product specifications and required features for the North American market.