Distology hands Sarah Geary sales role

Distology has looked within to find its next chief commercial officer (CCO) to run its sales organisation.

The distributor has selected Sarah Geary, previously chief marketing officer, to take on the CCO role after her positive impact on the channel player’s marketing operations.

Hayley Roberts, CEO of Distology, said the business liked to promote staff who had developed their skills and gained knowledge of the business and culture.

“Often with a fast-growth business, you tend to just keep putting people in place,” she said, adding that it then took time to integrate and share the values with those new staff.

“Do I take in a senior sales manager again? Do I take a sales director for the UK? What do we do?” she added. “In the main, I don’t like bringing in people unless there’s obvious trust there, or there’s a good reason for it, and slotting them in ahead of those people who have high potential.”

She said Geary had indicated a desire to get more involved with sales and had been proactively driving the marketing team to be more commercial and support vendors and partners.

“Sarah wanted to get more involved in the sales side of things and helping out, so I had the obvious solution right under my nose. Sarah was really up for it and had an excellent track record, and everybody had bought in and had a huge amount of respect for her, so that was a bit of a eureka moment,” said Roberts.

“She’s got a lot of commercial experience as well. One of the key drivers, as well as growing as a business, is to get each department working more fluidly with one another,” she added.

Geary said she was relishing the opportunity to make a difference on the sales side and felt her experience on the marketing and alliances side was a benefit.

“These sort of CCO roles, CRO roles, have to be multifaceted, because you can’t be entirely sales-focused if you don’t understand where the marketing component fits, and vice versa,” she said.

“In any of my working experiences, someone who has a multifaceted approach to any role is always going to be successful because it’s not just understanding what another function does, it’s having deep respect for it and experience of having been in it,” she added.

“This is a massive opportunity,” she said, adding that there were stints in sales on her CV and she had the experience to handle the expectations from the new role.

Roberts said the philosophy of the business to promote from within and encourage personal development was one of the motivations for launching its apprenticeship programme.

“When we hire, we hire on skills and competency levels. Energy and attitude are the main factors for me, and if you’ve got the right level of commitment and energy, and you know that these people are giving you their all, then why wouldn’t you then develop them in conjunction with your business plan?” she said.

“It’s really important we provide a transition, so we look at our career and our people team, and look at our careers path as more of a tube map than a linear process because it’s really important to look at where the skills people bring with them are not just because they tick a box on a job description,” she added.