Rarely do we literally refer to the title of an article, but if that title is ‘Up and running within a year’ in the context of Working at Nedap, it certainly calls for attention. Lisanne Kemps (Staffing Solutions) started as a sales trainee at Nedap Retail Benelux located in Groenekan and now is a very full-fledged sales & account manager at Staffing Solutions. She looks back at her very first year at Nedap.
“After gaining some experience in the working field as a project manager, I reached a point I absolutely knew what to search for in a job,” she starts, “I very much missed the commercial aspect in it, so in extension of my master, I knew my next job had to be a combination of commercial and IT as well as change management.” Being approached by a recruiter, Lisanne did not really know what to think of Nedap when she heard of it at first. “Honestly said, I had never heard of Nedap before until I found out I have been running into Nedap products almost daily without knowing,” she says. But what really caught her attention was when she learned more about the job itself, the room to grow and the culture.
Lisanne started in Groenekan, working for Nedap Retail Benelux. “Thanks to the demarcated and market area but also being able to work directly with a team of sales colleagues from field and office sales, it was a perfect position to master the sales profession,” she says. “I learned a lot and got really prepared to make the switch to a sales team in Groenlo”. Given the opportunity and following her ambitions, Lisanne joined Staffing Solutions’ sales team last February. “The most of what I get out of my work is the unique freedom given to grow and to develop. I truly am an entrepreneur in our own market group. Initiatives are appreciated and we are all trusted with picking it up and to actually carrying it out together.”
The current situation makes us closer as a team. We share a lot and we work closely together on new initiatives.
Just like other teams, the sales team at Staffing Solutions also faces new challenges due to the Corona crisis. Having real life contact or face-to-face meetings are currently not an option. To overcome or at least bridge these gaps as much as possible, sales as a discipline finds itself in a new era of sales management. “Together with the implementation team and the support team we are continuously looking for new opportunities to continue business as usual,” Lisanne says. “It’s important to stay in touch with our customers. For instance, we have moved “Nedap Connects”, which is an offline event originally, to an online version and we also organize online events to build a community to stay in touch with local businesses. Therefore we organize several digital meetings per region. With our first event we aimed for the ‘Achterhoek’ region, doing so by Zoom meetings on a regular basis. We will organize several digital meetings per region to really build that community aspect.
We share experiences and we invite others to organize the next session. That is how it becomes a joint venture. In addition, HR managers are our target group and we hope to learn from them to further develop our proposition. “Another aspect that really makes her job worthwhile is implementing the scale-up program that started just before the outbreak of Corona and which has accelerated ever since. Lisanne concludes with a list of some of her other activities: “I’m involved in the development of an app for sales managers, in the further design and development of our new Dynamics (CRM system), and I work with marketing to further optimize the buyer journey. The current situation makes us closer as a team. We share a lot and we work closely together on new initiatives. So we are really getting the most out of our home office time to be ready for when the new normal allows us to go back on the road.”
What more can we say, other than that Lisanne indeed is up and running and moreover in a job that she wished for.
