Pitney Bowes Sales Career Framework Makes Front-Line Coaching a Major Priority

Employee Relations, Jobs, Skills and Training

Pitney Bowes, while in the midst of its growth and transformation as a world leader in the physical and digital commerce business, recognized the need for a fundamental change in its approach to global sales force development.  To accelerate progress the company is implementing a global sales career framework, bringing together somewhat disparate—largely regional and line-of-business focused HR processes—into a more globally uniform approach that clearly defines sales roles, articulates the critical skills required to be successful in each of those roles, and provides essential learning and development to the sales leadership team, enabling them to provide the ongoing coaching and guidance required to build a thriving sales team.  The new Sales Career Framework integrates and advances the ability for the sales function to make better choices in hiring, aligning learning and development activities to address critical skills development and key business priorities, and allows Pitney Bowes' sales team to deepen their engagement and understanding of clients.  For employees—it shifts development into a deeper, more robust short- and long-term conversation between the front-line sales team and their managers—leading to even greater personal and professional success for each member of the team.  Investors benefit as the rate of development and client engagement translate into greater sales results.  "As Pitney Bowes shifts to a product orientation with more digital commerce orientation we needed to simply move faster.  We made the choice to upgrade performance management to be more fact based and use more of a balanced scorecard approach to the metrics.  We also recognized that it falls apart unless we significantly advance the collective organization approach to development and coaching to address both the cultural and competency changes needed,” says Johnna Torsone, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer.