Diversity in sales

I joined Bloomberg LP in 2000 and rarely held a position within the company for more than three years – I worked on many transformational and start up initiatives and knew that this was where I thrived professionally. After about 10 years I went for a directorship role and I didn’t get it. It was really disappointing to me, but what I didn’t know was that two weeks later I was going to be given an opportunity to move to London to build a new sales team for an enterprise software service. The lesson I learnt right then was that every time you step forward for something and don’t get it, it’s not a failure, it just opens you up to more opportunities. This moment was instrumental in my career because without that move, I never would have ended up here at Capita Software and I actually ended up in a much better than I ever would, had I got that job.

I moved to Capita Software 18 months ago. My role is primarily around sales strategy and maximising the revenue for the division. I’m responsible for sales and operational cadence, and making sure we have the same sales processes and career paths for all of the people that work within sales and marketing at Capita Software. I joined the business for two distinct reasons. First, my passion for a complex challenge and the opportunity to shape the future. Second, Capita’s capability – with the long list of assets and the impressive client list, it was clear to me that I had a unique opportunity here to join a company with the ambition and drive to change the world. The last 10 months in particular have been exciting and fun. It’s exactly where I wanted to be, surrounded by people with a common goal and a passion for making a difference. 

Diversity of perspective

When I first joined Capita I was pleasantly surprised by how open and collaborative everyone was. Jon Lewis - the Capita CEO - and his leadership team have done a fantastic job of living and breathing the values, and encouraging everyone all the way down to individual contributors to be comfortable promoting those Capita values. They also want to make sure that every opinion is heard and counted. That mutual respect for everyone around us fosters a lot of creativity and a lot of motivation to want to do a job well. That’s why it’s important to have a diverse team. Diversity means different things to different people. In my mind, it’s not only about gender, race, ability, age or sexual orientation etc, it’s about diversity of thought, experiences, cultures and perspectives. I’ve worked on lots of different teams with lots of different people and where we get the most innovation is from a diverse point of view that we can share and use to impact our bottom line.

A winning working environment

Sales is all about the number of conversations you have and the creativity and innovation that comes with those conversations. The phone doesn’t ring here with someone calling about an order they want to place – you need to be proactive and be creative with the way you think about our services. I’d describe the working environment as fast-paced, innovative and disciplined. Fast-paced because you need to have as many conversations as possible to build a robust pipeline. Innovative because we ask people to look at what’s possible and curiosity, passion and creativity go a long way. Disciplined because that is the rigour of hitting the phones, getting out to meetings and making sure that you’re looking at your pipeline on a daily basis.

I’m proud of what I have achieved so far in the business. Something I was aware of when I came in was that we had a number of challenges related to the processes that were used. I’ve used that as an opportunity to spend time with our sales directors and bring the team together so that we can have a holistic view of the business and what we’re working on. That means we can take an all-inclusive look at what we’re working on to stimulate conversations and ideas and make sure that the consistency is being implemented across the divisions of Capita, and ultimately across groups.