Your weekly disruption
Your weekly thought-provoking exploration into building disruptive capabilities.
James Lane: Master of Change
Following last week’s introduction to the Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 1, I am thrilled that our first guest is James Lane formerly the Sales Director at Coca Cola Amatil. James has had a phenomenal tenure at CCA and is exemplary example of someone who has made some great leaps to further his career. Hear his tips on his ascension and why he is making another career leap.
Download the podcast on iTunes or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 2
James is one of the most decorated Sales Directors in the FMCG industry from the past few decades. He started in Perth and his adventures took him to Atlanta, all the way through to Sydney. James has always embraced the concept of stepping back to grow and it is one of the key reasons his career has been so successful. Hear his tips on his ascension and why he is making another career leap
Change in nature of the consumer
Make The Leap
Building and managing a team
The key is to be agile in your approach to different types of personalities. By the time I was managing a team of National Account Managers I was fortunate to have led employees ranging from the more militant (managing drivers) to the more educated. With the former you had to exhibit fairness whilst ‘rolling up the sleeves’ (filling up machines) and with the latter you needed to give them the resources and the planning skills to make the most of it. So I think a combination of managing both blue collar and white collar sales people gave me a good foundation for going forward. So, if I look back over my career now, one of the things that people do say to me is, I’ve got the ability to see from beginning to end of the business and how it actually works.
Companies need to disrupt themselves
Coca Cola has been forced to rethink strategy in a dramatic way as consumer needs have evolved. Complacency will get you killed as consumers have moved away from sugar and fat to health and it’s not just a soft drink issue. It’s affecting pretty much every industry. So if you look at any industry, you’ve got growth in premium you’ve got growth in value you’ve got movements away from established brands to new brands and people willing to try different things. This has led to fragmentation that is revolutionising the market. I think one of the probably biggest things I’ve been involved in in the industry was what we refer to as ‘Mother 2’. It was our seventh attempt to get into energy category and was probably the first category that CCA entered into, with a completely different way of going to market. It was a low cost launch. It was in a completely different package than what the industry was currently consuming at a different price point. Today CCA has volume leadership in that category in grocery and Mother was the only brand retained in any country around the world. So that was a good credit to the people involved.
Execution requires disruption
I think you’ve got to attack it on all different fronts, you’ve got to look at how to get people to keep consuming cola or, or soft drinks, maybe not in the same volumes, but maybe in different occasions, or different packages at the same time as entering into the new categories that are growing. So, another good example would be we our launch of Coke Zero, which would have been the biggest launch of my career. We tackled the execution in military style to transition people out of drinking sugared Coke into a non-sugared variety. Diet Coke had been launched 10 years earlier and was mainly female skewed. So, this was more of a male focus drink. Overnight it was everywhere.
Aim for Scale to match the brand
We were great at launching on a big scale. What we didn’t do very well was to launch small well and to incubate well. So we learned over the years that sometimes it was better to take a small team off to the side or even leverage third party to target a particular market and then almost under the cover of darkness go and launch a category into your own coolers or into your own customers without disrupting your Sales force. Vitamin Water was a segmented launch that we learned from the global launch in New York. We knew we couldn’t get our sales force focusing away from our core so employed Superior Sales Force to ensure the launch hit all the key metrics.
Sales & Marketing need to be joined at the hip
The Coke system is unique. There is Global Marketing. There is the Coke Company and a separate company who deliver the sales piece in CCA. So, the interaction between Sales & Marketing I’ve seen in various forms. And the number one failure is when you don’t get the Marketing team in front of the customer enough so that they don’t get enough good input so that their plans are not actually grounded in the reality or the problem that you’re trying to solve. And a disconnect ensues.
So whilst James made his mark at Coca Cola, his ability to take the leap will ensure that his career will flourish and his wealth of experience would benefit any company, big or small.
So many great takeaways from this conversation. Listen to the episode in the player below, or download and enjoy it on iTunes. If you’re so inclined, please leave us a review!
Download the podcast on iTunes or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 2
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!
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