What are the major changes youve made to Sara Lee Food & Beverages 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 w
