Your weekly disruption

Your weekly thought-provoking exploration into building disruptive capabilities.

Esme Borgelt: Dare To Lead

Daring leaders must care for and be connected to the people they lead. Given the reality of the world we live in today, that means leaders must create and hold spaces that rise to a higher standard of behaviour that we experience in politics, news and life.

Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 9

A lot of leaders talk about a culture of care and a paradigm of breaking down the silos. Most don’t walk the talk. Esme Borgelt not only walks it; but is a shining light in the FMCG industry. Who we are, is how we lead.

Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 9

Making A Difference

The Power Of Diversity

Breaking Down The Silos

We actually have a very interesting, let’s call it experiment on the go at the moment. It’s born out of the fact that more and more employees are looking for breadth of experience; they’re looking for new and different things, as opposed to just building their careers in a vertical way. We’ve identified three key business challenges that we face in this year& put together very diverse teams. Diverse in terms of functional expertise, diverse in terms of experience, and pointed people up against some of these challenges, and given them the freedom to work through what we need to do, to address some of these issues. And it’s been quite amazing how people have stepped up to the challenge and how much energy it actually generates, stepping outside of your functional comfort zone, and looking at a business issue from so many different angles, to come up with a more holistic solution. We are learning a lot, and it isn’t completely smooth sailing as it’s the first time we’ve done this. But I think that the engagement and energy that it’s generating through the business has been nothing short of amazing.

Over the past three years, we’ve worked really hard to integrate sales and marketing in the way we go to market. And we’ve come a long way during that period. This is just a natural evolution and taking it to the next step, which is truly integrating work streams across the organization. There is a school of thought that says, we are moving people from technical functional experts to be more knowledge workers. In IDEO speak it is the rise of the ‘T-Shaped’ employee. This approach is exposing people to the broader business, in a very meaningful way. I think these days, our job as leaders, whether it be a sales leader, or a business leader, is about getting people to think as opposed to getting people just to do a job. They will if you can unlock new and innovative ways of doing that, that drives engagement, and in doing so drives the best of all worlds.

Disruption Starts With A Step

In regards to sales disruption, it would feel wrong, if I didn’t start by talking about sales fundamentals and sales basics, because it is often undervalued. The very basic but critical task of making sure that you’ve got the right product at the right price in the right place, so that the shopper can find it, when she’s looking for that, is critical for innovation, or disruption from a sales point of view to stick. The second point around that is to be truly focused on teasing out insights from the heap of data that you have at your fingertips to solve a problem. To solve a problem for your customer, is critical for disruption. A few years ago, one of our big retailers went on a fairly intensive range rationalization project. They were removing duplication from their range. We had insights that showed that removing this duplication would actually result in lost sales for both us & our customers. At the same time, as we were socializing the data, it actually emerged that there was an opportunity for a third pack size, which would then fulfil a very unique need for shoppers. It was a fairly intense process of convincing the customer of this. We got there in the end, had a fantastic piece of collaboration between the sales team and the supply chain, to ensure that by adding another product, we weren’t going to create a heap of complexity for our supply chain. We developed the third size and launched it into this retailer as an exclusive and as a third pack size. It is the fourth year that all three sizes of this particular brand has delivered growth every single year and incremental growth to the category because it talks to very specific shopping and consumer needs that we tapped into. So that’s quite disruptive, because the customer’s strategy was something completely different to where we had ended up.

Building An Innovative Culture

We have a couple of brands that are actually only available through the convenience channel, specifically because those brands and the products there represent, have been designed for a specific occasion that is being unlocked by that channel. That’s how the thinking has evolved over time. It is more around, what are the different consumption occasions if you’re a food brand for your brand? And then how can you commercialize that through the various channels. If you think about occasions in that way, it becomes a far bigger opportunity than purely just thinking about a sales execution in a specific channel.

So, for us at Kellogg’s innovation is very much an integrated value creation process. It touches the consumer, touches the shopper, touches our customers. So, we do that in a very integrated way. We’ve got a very well-developed process. We manage around a three-year innovation funnel that we continue iterating from strategy to ideas. Other ideas are more disruptive, and we tend to be more agile, around those. Something that is quite interesting is the notion of experiential learning in innovation, and how you quickly iterate ideas. You learn by doing and I think that is interesting for us how we continue redeveloping that model so that we can become more agile and compete more effectively.

Embracing Vulnerability

I’ve been incredibly fortunate with the mentors that I’ve had, through the course of my career. Probably one of the most powerful experiences that I had, was when I was appointed to lead the consumer sales team at Kimberly Clark, in that at that point of my career, I didn’t feel that I was ready or that I was up to, to doing a job, that big. At the time, my mentor said to me that if you had to wait until you were ready, before you would put up your hand for anything, you will never be ready, and you won’t progress. So that is something that I’ve taken with me right through my career…put your hand up, put yourself out there. You have to be courageous in driving your own development, which means making yourself vulnerable, which means becoming comfortably uncomfortable as you stretch yourself. Pretty big lesson for me early on.

I’ve always had an interest on how the whole business works. I’ve put my hand up for different experiences. And even in the last three years, as part of the Australian business, it is about having the mindset of being a commercial leader, not just a sales leader, and evaluating business opportunities like that. It sets you up to make the jump. It makes it a natural transition, as opposed to a quantum leap to something else. It’s just a mindset.

Living Your Purpose

It comes down to getting really clear on your career purpose. And being comfortable that you won’t really have that at the beginning stages of your career. So, if you’re clear with purpose, and you have those open and honest conversations with your company, around how the company can facilitate different experiences that gives you breadth of experience to get there, it is where engagement can thrive. So, for companies and for leaders, I think it becomes an interesting balance in how you allow for these experiences, while retaining, a level of expertise within the business to keep the business going. The new generation of employees want new and different experiences. Rather than fight it, I think we need to find a way of really tapping into that and find a new and a different way of working.

The key is to be courageous, put your hand up for lots of different things, even if you don’t think that you are qualified for something, go out there and learn. Every interaction, every situation is an opportunity to learn from. Sometimes you learn through adversity, and sometimes you learn through having really positive experiences. It’s about seeing it as such, and embracing the learning, because it will stand you in good stead as you progress up the career ladder. Don’t undervalue lateral moves as part of your professional development to ultimately unlock your career goal. It is often in those lateral moves that you make in an organization, where you truly embed an expertise, and you can gain great learning from it.

What I enjoy at the moment, or what I enjoy about this role is you are focused on the high-level strategic direction of the company…the company’s overall growth. But today MDs are also much more operationally involved and more hands on, you’re involved in influencing the culture of the business focused on the role of your business in the community and doing the right thing environmentally, and, generally invested in the wellbeing of people. The way I see my job is really to enable the organization and not to control it. I read somewhere that CEOs should stand for chief enabling officer. And that really sums it up for me.

Vulnerability has played its part of my own leadership development journey. And, being more relatable to the people around you, and showing them a little bit more of the real you and what’s inside of you. It’s been incredibly hard for me to learn how to do that. You get taught through your career that you don’t do that. And then at some point, it’s, well, now you have to do that. In order to be an effective, critical and relatable leader, you have to unlearn a whole heap of things that you have learned for many years before. Yet it is incredibly powerful, when you do that, in creating those human connections, and helping, the people around you unlock all the potential that they have inside themselves by being more authentic.

I think that on the whole, everyone comes to work, to make a difference and to feel being challenged. And I think that’s no different for the organization as a whole. Our team tells us that what gets them out of bed every day, and brings them into the office and the various places that they work for us is that they’re very proud to be part of the Kellogg family. And they feel challenged to make an impact, and they feel that they are empowered, to make an impact. And I think that makes all the difference. It is constantly showing people what is possible, because what is truly possible is already inside of everyone.

So many great takeaways from this conversation. Listen to the episode in the player below, or download, subscribe and enjoy it on iTunes.

Download the podcast on iTunes or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 9

If you want your Sales team to Gamify it’s performance please contact us at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/

Next week we are going to delve deeper into the elements of Creating The Game.

If you are looking at running a Sales Game workshop either email Mark at mark.truelson@superiorsales.com.au OR dig for more information at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/workshops/

At Superior Sales we build programmes leveraging all the core drivers of capability – organisation, people, process and culture, not just skills. Refer to our white paper at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/whitepaper/

At Superior Sales our capability experts work extensively with companies to equip sales teams, and indeed the whole organisation, to deliver a better customer experience. Please get in touch at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/

Happy Weekend!