Tell us a little about yourself. What does your job at Telefónica involve?
During my almost 24 years at Telefónica, I have held many positions and worked in many areas for different companies within the group, until I ended up being responsible for the online training platform for all B2B salespeople, the B2B Sales Academy. It is an exciting challenge to create the strategies and content necessary for our teams to continue growing and achieve commercial excellence, a hallmark that sets them apart from other operators.
You have been recognised for your commitment to ‘innovative and truly useful’ training within the Telefónica B2B Sales Academy. How do you define that balance between innovation and practical usefulness?
In our sector, as in all sectors, but even more so in a company as cutting-edge as Telefónica, you have to be up to date with all the latest technological developments that can help improve the impact of training, and our team firmly believes in practical training, especially in soft skills, because by confronting salespeople with situations that are very close to reality, time and time again we get them to internalise these skills so that when they are faced with a real customer they come out naturally.
Can you share an example of a training initiative that you consider particularly successful or transformative in this regard?
In this area, we have already carried out several projects with a company in the training sector (Practikalia), in which we have developed specific courses to train skills such as the consultative sales process or closing the sale, with great success, directly impacting the results of our salespeople, doubling the sales of those who have received this type of training.
In your experience collaborating with partners such as PRACTIKALIA on eLearning solutions, what lessons would you highlight about the co-creation of effective training materials?
Our experience of more than 10 years of constantly evolving alongside our suppliers has taught us that we must grow alongside salespeople in terms of their needs, but also in terms of their ability to consume training. This has led us to create shorter training courses that can be consumed from any device, in different formats, such as listening to a podcast in the car before going to a meeting (as you can do with our B2B Sales Podcast channel), and always training that is highly adapted to their reality. Rather than courses from endless library catalogues, we always try to ground the training in their day-to-day lives, understanding the daily challenges they face so that we can help them from the trenches, not from a theoretical classroom.
What trends do you see in B2B sales training techniques, tools, or formats that are paving the way for the coming years?
Of course, the main one is AI. As in all areas of society, it is having an impact and producing wonderful results because it is helping to reduce costs and time in the production of materials, making them much more scalable for all OBs where Telefónica operates. AI is evolving in line with our needs, enabling us to create previously unthinkable solutions that help us to develop training that is increasingly personalised and tailored to each individual’s needs.
What role should the B2B Sales Academy play in anticipating these trends and maintaining the relevance of commercial talent?
Our spirit is to always help train from an innovative and entertaining perspective, with the aim of enabling salespeople to integrate knowledge and put it into practice naturally with their customers in order to achieve better sales. so we continue to evolve our projects and, in the near future, we hope to launch courses with interactive avatars designed by our team, with which salespeople can interact and develop their sales skills in a practical and enjoyable way.
How do you balance a rigorous focus on results with creativity and innovation in training?
Of course, all the results of any action must be measurable in order to evaluate its effectiveness and real impact on the business. Our goal is to sell more and better, so for us, apart from innovating and being creative in formats and content, we always monitor the results of the trained salespeople, which are very satisfactory both in terms of economic results and in the satisfaction surveys that users constantly carry out, with an NPS well above the average for companies in the training sector.
Which people working at Telefónica would you nominate for this interview who you consider to be excellent at their job?
I would nominate Aldo Egea López, who is part of our management team. Apart from his creativity as a designer, he is an expert in AI and, with his knowledge, he is helping us to keep up to date with all the latest developments in this field and helping us to improve our training objectives. And Francisco Javier Camello Parras, a regular contributor to training, in this case for being the leader and inspiration behind a training programme for female salespeople to boost their professional and personal growth. Initiatives like these are what make you feel proud to be part of a company like this.
