The Sweet Taste of Sales

Monty Pooley's ingredients for a turnaround at Sara Lee include bringing its food brands under one sales

By Julia Chang

Monty Pooley isn't exactly in love with his job title at Sara Lee Food & Beverage. "It's not my favorite title in the world, because it's kind of a high-falutin' title," says Pooley, who holds the unusual designation of chief customer officer. "People kind of look at me funny when I say that."

But he does believe it's an appropriate one. Pooley could just as easily describe himself as the head of sales, and he sometimes does. But Sara Lee's current focus on making customers' needs a priority makes his job as chief customer officer a pivotal one as the retail food division of Sara Lee Corporation transitions from having a broker-based sales organization to one that takes more ownership of the customer relationship. In fact, Pooley was hired in July 2004 because of his experience creating customer-based strategies at H.J. Heinz. "When I joined Sara Lee the question was, how do we become a more customer-centric selling organization?" he says. "I was asked to lead that process, to finalize design, to actually execute, and then put in a process of continuous improvement that would allow us to further deliver against the customer-centric objective that we laid out."

The new sales organization's structure was rolled out in 2005, starting in the meats division of the Downers Grove, Ill., company, and then growing to include other parts of Sara Lee's retail food business after newly appointed CEO Brenda Barnes initiated a slew of changes company-wide to fight years of eroding profits. Sara Lee Corporation is still in the turnaround process, but its net sales grew 9.2 percent in the third quarter, and it reported growth in all of its segments, including a more than 6 percent rise in both the meats and bakery businesses. "We'd experienced a kind of long-term erosion on key brands, and if you look at our share performance over the last eighteen months, what you'll see is a pretty consistent turnaround and consistent share growth across our biggest brands," Pooley says. "We believe that's an outcome of our customer-centric model. By and large, our customers have voted for us by supporting our brands."

Pooley took time to talk to Sales & Marketing Management about what prompted the change in sales strategy, what he needed to do to execute an overhaul of his organization, and how Sara Lee cooked up a culture of customer-centric selling.

S&MM: Have you always held the title "chief customer officer?"

MP: When I joined the company in July of 2004 my title was chief customer officer. I think as time has gone on, it's a much more appropriate title because of the importance that the customer management organization has strategically. So depending on who I'm spending time with I either will emphasize chief customer officer, or often I will talk about being the head of the sales
organization, which feels very comfortable for me.

S&MM: What are the major changes you've made to Sara Lee Food & Beverage's sales organization?

MP: The company at the time [when I came onboard] was Sara Lee, the meats business. They recognized that they did not really own what was the most important asset that a customer management organization can own: a relationship with its customers. We had over a hundred brokers that represented our meats business, and we had a selling organization that was responsible for managing the relationship with the broker. For an organization that really wants to be customer-centric, we had to take that responsibility. So when we established the strategy we did a couple of things: We looked outside of Sara Lee, and really outside of the meat industry, and looked at consumer packaged goods and their best practices. Having worked at Procter & Gamble and Heinz, I had a pretty good set of experiences that showed potentially how to build up customer-centric teams.

We had a number of terrific sales professionals that were managing the broker relationships, but were also pretty good with customers. So we grabbed the best of the talent that was working for Sara Lee at the time and brought them into the process. When it came to design of our organization, and subsequently the execution of that plan, we had a number of key sales leaders from Sara Lee that helped make that happen. Then we went out and found some talent outside of Sara Lee that would complement what we had internally.

The last thing we did was partner with an organizational group that helped to confirm where we were going, and helped us think through from a process standpoint how to build an organization that would execute well and really get it right. I think we had a pretty good idea of what we needed to deliver against, but we were an organization whose expertise was not selling to customers necessarily, but managing brokers. So we had to define the roles, and then define the roles' capabilities. Then we had to execute a training plan to make that happen. That whole process, while still going on because we're still training ourselves, was a 12-month process.


S&MM: So much of this change was happening in the meats division.

MP: Yes it was. When I came onboard our meats business had been a series of individual brands that were acting like companies. So we had Ball Park, we had Bryan, we had Jimmy Dean, we had Hillshire, and each one of these brands really acted like a separate company. They had a separate sales organization and management infrastructure. So to take the meats businesses and combine them into one retail sales organization, that was a pretty significant change for us.

We pulled the trigger on the new organization in January of 2005, and it wasn't until about two months later that Brenda [Barnes] took over as CEO for the corporation and announced that our foods business in North America would all come together. That included the fresh bakery business, which was really the other big business that we hadn't incorporated, as well as our coffee and tea business, which we felt at retail [was] not quite at the scale of these other businesses. But really the big next step was to take this organization that was designed to sell meat, and then incorporate the work that the fresh bakery folks had done, to come in with a truly retail sales organization that represented all of our food brands across North America.

S&MM: How did your approach to customers change?

MP: The whole industry has evolved a bit, but when I joined the company back in 2004, the way decisions were made in the perimeter of the store, in packaged and processed meats, and in the deli tended to be less database driven and more relationship driven. You had a lot of regional players that had developed solid track records of delivering against customer-service expectations, and the branding associated with those businesses was not as strong as you would see with a [CPG product].

We felt that with the brands that we have, it would be advantageous for us to sell with more of a branding and consumer-based approach, versus just placing meat in coolers. We spent a lot more time putting together category management plans, and taking those to customers to talk about how our big brands could impact the overall category performance for them. We're building an organization that focuses on how to take that story and tell it in a more database-driven, fact-based way. Traditionally, that wasn't the approach that a lot of our competition was taking in that part of the store.

S&MM: That sounds like consultative selling.

MP: That's exactly what it is. My only hesitation is that consultative can be a really positive thing, but it can also have some negative overtones. We're very much doers, executers. On the one hand, we want to put plans in place that make sense for the category, but on the other hand, it's about how we take those plans and bring them to life in the store. All the planning makes no difference if I can't get the displays up and the product positioned properly.

S&MM: How are customers reacting to your new approach?

MP: There was one school of customers who was saying, "You need to do this. As much as we value the brokers that are calling on us, we believe that we can get better business results if we're working face-to-face with the manufacturer." Customers like Wal-Mart and Safeway were pretty excited, I think. With Wal-Mart we had to develop a customer-centric organization a while ago because they demanded it.

Then there was another group of retailers who are even more dependent on broker-partners because they may not have the scale that gets them the resources they need from manufacturers to run their businesses. And with those customers it was really much more, "You've got to show us what you can do." And that was absolutely a challenge. We put together a really good communication plan. We went to all of our customers and told them what we were going to do, why we were going to do it, and what they can expect. We tried to listen to their concerns and to the extent that we could, make adjustments based on those concerns. There were some customers who said, "Wow, I just don't think you're going to be able to deliver on those expectations as well as your broker partners are today." And I would tell you that two-and-a-half years in, I think we've done well. Our profitability as a company has improved. Our volume has improved. But it would be totally disingenuous for me to say that we've hit this thing out of the park, because we know we've got a lot more work to do. We've got a couple of businesses that haven't made the kind of progress that we would have hoped, and we're very focused on how we can do that better.

The best indication for me are things like being voted vendor of the year by a couple of key players that we really care about, or being chosen to be part of strategic manufacture councils for some big businesses. In several instances we've been tapped because of our approach to be a part of those councils. We think that's an indication that we're bringing a nice mixture of strategic direction as well as a track record of execution.

S&MM: What sort of training was required to develop the new roles in your organization?

MP: First, we had to decide what roles we needed. I needed team leads to really understand how to work collaboratively with customers. I needed to have frontline, bag-carrying salespeople who were more collaborative and consultative, but also knew how to take those plans and turn them into action. So we did a couple of things. After establishing what our organizational structure would look like, we did a deep assessment of our current organization and we basically said, we think we've got some folks who can be successful. And frankly, there are some people who are great but aren't going to be successful in this new environment. So the first step was to choose those who would stay with us, and who would move on to other responsibilities outside the company. After we did that, we looked outside the organization, and said, "We've got to bring in talent that can supplement what we've already got here."

Then we built a pretty comprehensive training curriculum into our selling organization. We had what we called Role University. Each one of the customer-centric teams that we built went through a four-day session to understand what their specific roles were with a customer, understand the customer, understand what their strategies were, and then how to work together and integrate what they were responsible for with their partners.

The second thing we did is build a strategic-selling curriculum. This was about taking our salespeople, who in the past had been broker [management] folks, and teaching them how to sell in a more strategic way. It was as basic as how to develop a sales presentation, how you use data more effectively, how you work in a category management environment. Along with that, we laid out a curriculum in which individuals could fill in their experience and training gaps. You might have some people who needed work with financial acumen or on bringing a plan all the way through to retail. So we had to train them on how to better utilize our retail resources to get a translation of our plans into stores, and how to move to a more long-term planning platform. We're training ourselves as well as training some of our customers on the benefits of taking a longer look at the business.

S&MM: How did your employees feel about all this change?

MP: What was really encouraging for me personally was that by and large, people were truly excited about where we were going. Sara Lee has a lot of folks who like to get things done. But we hadn't really put them in a position where they were empowered. And I think that they viewed this as an opportunity to really own a more important part of the business process. And the folks who wanted to stay were saying, "Bring it on. Even if there are some areas where I'm not sure I'm going to be able to nail it, I think I've got enough faith in myself that I can build those skill sets." Culturally, it was exciting. That was the first step, with the meats business.

When we made the further transformation with combining our fresh bakery and our warehouse businesses into one retail-selling organization, I think there was this recognition that it was the right thing to do. But I'll tell you, skepticism and anxiety about figuring out how to manage in both a DSD [direct store delivery] environment as well as a warehouse environment was also there. That's been a real challenge for us. The fresh bakery business also has a culture of folks who get it done, but DSD is a unique business model, and for us, as a customer management organization, to really add value, we had to understand that model as well. We're still learning about what that looks like. I think the best way to gauge success now is that we're proud of eight straight quarters of hitting our numbers as a company. We're proud of share growth. And when you have an organization that wants to win, and they're winning, there's nothing better for a culture than that.


Sidebar: Meaty Marketing

Sara Lee Food & Beverage's turnaround efforts aren't all about revamping how the company sells. Much of its customer-centric sales strategy focuses on leveraging the strength of its brand portfolio—which includes the likes of Jimmy Dean, Hillshire Farm and, of course, all those pies—to help its grocery customers meet their business goals.

The strategy shifts have led Sara Lee to give many of its brands a makeover and to take on quirky ad campaigns. In 2005, the company dropped country singer Jimmy Dean as its pitchman for the sausage line and unveiled television spots in which the Sun was seen as your average Joe, a white-collar worker and family man. More recently, Sara Lee unveiled a TV campaign for Hillshire Farm with the tagline "Go Meat!" that shows people eating various Hillshire products in everyday life, as those around them cheer for the meat in their meals; consumers can also go to gomeat.com to view the ads and get special promotions. And then there's the Web site thejoyofeating.com, which showcases Sara Lee deli meats, bakery products, special recipes and the satisfied, food-stuffed faces of the consumers who enjoy them. S'more Pound Cake, anyone?