Jelle Schroven, Regional Vice President Benelux at Tableau, shares his insights on the leadership skills needed to succeed in today’s business landscape.
Each day looks different, so it is impossible to describe a typical workday. Yet that’s also why I love working for Salesforce. I joined the company three years ago because of the wonderful solutions and the impact it has on our customers. And thanks to our sustainability and diversity goals, we also help to change the world we live in.
Developing leadership skills
Of course, I also came to Salesforce to explore new career possibilities. The company invests a lot in personal development and growth. It supports this with an annual budget of €5000 for training and education.
When joining Salesforce, you immediately start developing the skills you need to advance, and you really get opportunities to grow into new responsibilities. For me, it was always my intention to take on a management role. So, the company supported me in developing leadership skills, and last year I became Regional Vice President (RVP) at Tableau for the BeLux region.
Putting my leadership skills to the test at Tableau
Tableau was acquired by Salesforce in 2019. It is a Business Analytics tool and global leader in Data Visualization. What makes Tableau unique is that it offers flexibility in your choice of infrastructure, flexibility in governance, and flexibility for the end user.
For the past months, my responsibility is to outline and execute the go-to-market strategy, put my leadership skills to the test, set up a successful local sales team, and find the right synergy with Salesforce.
Working from anywhere with our own solutions
This morning I met with a top executive in the manufacturing industry and we discussed how automated insights in every sales cycle will help them with guided selling and more efficient dynamic pricing resulting in more up/cross-sell and bottom line margin. Each day, I meet new challenges and try to find ways to support businesses.
With the need to rapidly shift to a virtual way of working due to the pandemic, my team still remains in close contact with each other and with our customers. By leveraging our own product suite and tools, we can collaborate more effectively in a virtual setting.
For example, using Sales Cloud in combination with Slack has helped accelerate deal cycles because all apps, data, and conversations are accessible to everyone, in one place. Leveraging our own tools helps us nurture relationships that get us closer to customers and internally enables us to better track deal cycles in real time.
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Tableau then visualises all this data in clear overviews, which is beneficial to me as a sales leader. It also adds a predictive layer that offers better forecasting capabilities and helps to identify where we need to increase our efforts. We not only sell faster but also smarter.
Next year planning with the V2MOM
When I’m not talking to customers, my focus shifts to more strategic topics. As RVP, it is important to understand what elements need our attention and where we must increase our efforts to accelerate. Salesforce trusts the leadership skills of its people and gives them a lot of freedom to decide what is necessary to achieve our targets.
The tool we use for this is the V2MOM – a company-wide alignment framework that helps to set priorities and communicates this strategy to the entire organisation. As a rapidly growing company, everyone is focused on strategic goals we want to achieve in a few years. This approach and the amazing dynamics of the people who work here make it a great organisation for me to be part of.
By the way, if I get you excited about working here, you should definitely check out what a Salesforce career looks like.
Learning about leadership skills and more with Trailhead
Although each day at Salesforce seems to fly by, I always do my best to make time to visit Trailhead. This online learning platform is a fun and easy way to learn new skills and earn credentials for your accomplishments. For free.
It's taken some time, but I am delighted that I have reached the credential of "Salesforce Ranger" which is currently the highest status on the platform. This by no means suggests I've completed my learning as there is always more to learn on the platform around leadership skills, other soft skills or even enhancing my knowledge around all the solutions we sell at Salesforce.
Want to develop leadership skills yourself? Here is a list of leadership trails you can follow on Trailhead. Or feel free to discover other trails that will stimulate your personal growth and might lead to a career in the Salesforce ecosystem.
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