Tell us a little about yourself. What does your job at Telefónica involve?
My name is Isaac Monjas, and I trained as an industrial engineer. I began my professional career in the electricity and consulting sectors until I joined Telefónica 26 years ago.
Since then, I have always been part of business areas and units in corporate sales and marketing teams and later in the service development and customer engineering units in the operators area.
Since 2014, I have been responsible for Sales Management for Telefónica de España’s Wholesale Business. My role is to lead and coordinate a sales team of sales managers and account executives who are assigned portfolios of customers that are unique in that they are operators and competitors of Telefónica in the market.
In addition, we also have a group of sales executives on the team who are assigned portfolios of international operators with whom Telefónica has bilateral business.
What are the responsibilities of a wholesale sales team?
The Wholesale Sales team is made up of 27 people and is responsible for commercial relations with customers in the Operator segment.
The team’s work is focused on meeting the various commercial indicators set annually for the Wholesale area as a business unit, always in accordance with the strategy defined by Telefónica.
Among others, our main objectives are aimed at maximising revenue, cash flow and margin from wholesale service sales, as well as minimising debt and potential regulatory conflicts with operators that pose any risk to Telefónica Spain.
What professional profiles are found in these teams?
It is essential that team members have commercial skills for negotiating with large customers, as well as knowledge of the wholesale market and regulatory framework, but under this common denominator, we have sales executives with training in engineering, physics, economics, law, etc.
In addition, the team includes people with years of experience in managing large operator accounts and new sales executives who bring new skills and a new vision to commercial management.
Being a small group with a wide variety of profiles gives us a fundamental advantage by facilitating group interaction to share knowledge and different ways of doing our work.
Why is cross-functional collaboration with other areas so important?
As many of the contracts with operators are strategic in nature and involve large sums of money, it is essential to ensure that the services are provided in accordance with the terms agreed in the relevant agreements.
Thus, the provision of services to operators must ensure, for example, that it does not contravene current regulations and/or competition law, so that under no circumstances does it pose a risk to Telefónica.
Additionally, in recent years we have moved from having contracts with very standardised conditions to contracts with conditions tailored to each operator, so it is necessary to assess with the different areas affected the operational, systems, billing and network media viability requirements, etc., in order to ensure that the provision of services is carried out in accordance with the conditions set out in the contract.
All of the above requires us to coordinate constantly with the Legal, Regulation, Operations, Network Planning, Billing, Financial Control, Service Development and other departments, and to work with multidisciplinary groups using AGILE methodologies.
What role do new technologies play in the wholesale sector?
Considering that we are a small sales team and that the number of operators and the complexity of services and contracts have grown in recent years, the assimilation of new technologies into our daily work is key to ensuring the sustainability of our task.
The digitisation of processes in the first instance and, in recent years, their automation has allowed us to increase the team’s efficiency, eliminating costs due to ‘non-quality’, administrative tasks that do not add value to our commercial function and reducing the time to market.
This has also allowed us to maintain a growing trend in the satisfaction index of operators with Telefónica, a metric that we measure regularly as in any business unit.
Where can wholesale sales evolve with the development of these new technologies?
Without a doubt, the challenge is to incorporate and systematise AI into commercial management as a new tool that is disrupting every level of activity.
It is essential to explore use cases that allow us to achieve greater efficiency, for example, by enabling a new organisation of the commercial team or new forms of customer management.
Which people working at Telefónica would you nominate for this interview who you consider to be excellent at their job?
I nominate Ignacio de los Mozos, who has been my boss for years and who has been a role model for me because of his strategic vision and anticipation of market developments, leadership and team management, and use of innovative approaches to undertake large projects and negotiations.
I also consider Guillermo Prieto Castro to be a role model for his knowledge and experience in the wholesale market, as well as his vision for solving complex problems, his collaborative attitude and his humility as a people manager, being approachable and acting as an integrator and facilitator of team development.
