Erica Baird

Executive Director - Global Sales and Service / Cummins Inc.

Erica Baird is on the DBU Leadership Team as Executive Director—Global Sales and Service. In this role she has responsibility for all platforms, processes and people capabilities, as well as channel management, strategic mining accounts and DBU engineering and customer support.  She also, served as the President of the Industrial Segment for Cummins Sales & Service North America (CSSNA). In this role, she provided leadership for the North American off-highway sales and service applications, including the Oil & Gas, Marine, Mining, Rail, Construction, and Agricultural markets, as well as the service support team and the design and application field engineering team. While in her position she grew the business from $1.6B to $2.1B. She also led their roll out of Sales Force moving utilization from 35% to 98% and propelled her sales team from 41% to 100% completion of Driving Towards Success sales training.  

Erica has an incredible passion for our people and helping them reach their full potential. Her active sponsorship in many Cummins Black Network and Women Initiative Network programs demonstrates how important it is to her to invest her time and talents in others. She has recently taken on leadership for our Cummins Advocating for Racial Equity (CARE) work in CSSNA, as well as is the executive sponsor for the National Society of Black Engineers.  

Prior to joining Cummins, Erica had an extensive sales leadership career at Caterpillar, where she was their Global Allied Products Manager responsible for growth for all aspects of this segment including strategy, pricing, dealer relationship management, process development, and quality. In this role, Erica successfully expanded the business to a global customer base as well as the Power Generation segment.

Erica began her career in the mining business and held roles in sales and business risk management and process improvement. This is where Erica developed her passion for serving customers and established a deep knowledge of enterprise risk management, which led to her receiving industry recognition for developing a world-class business risk mitigation process at Caterpillar.

Erica is a graduate of the University of Arizona with a B.S. in mining engineering and is certified in Change Management and as a Diversity trainer. Erica was selected by the mayor to found and sit on the Board for the Peoria Community Against Violence. She also served as the President – Board of Directors for the African American Hall of Fame Museum and Chair of Volunteer training for the HOI United Way. She has been honored as 25 Women in Leadership and as an African American Legend in her hometown. In addition to sitting on the City of Peoria’s Human Resources Commission and Police and Community Relations Advisory Committee. 

In her personal time, Erica is an open mic poet and was a foster mom to 14 teens and her 3 biological children. Her passion for helping children of severe abuse earned her a seat on the state foster care advisory board as an advisor to the governor.