A Culture of Support

On August 27, 2020, Hurricane Laura made landfall in southeast Louisiana. It was one of the strongest hurricanes on record to hit U.S. shores. Toya Garraway had been the Zone Sales Director of the Shreveport region for just a year. She had trained for nine months as a Zone Sales Leader Designate in Houston, so she had seen bad southern storms before, but not like this.

“That storm decimated 75% of my zone. I had five sites without power and employees without water,” she says. The PepsiCo network swung into action. Pallets of water were delivered to her hardest-hit sites. The fleet team arrived with fuel trucks at each location to fuel the employees’ trucks and their personal cars.

But what really surprised her was the other Zone Directors — some from neighboring zones and some from other states — who pitched in to help. “Many of them hopped in their cars and drove hours to get here,” she says. “They were using chainsaws to clear paths to our sites, delivering food and water on their way south to Lake Charles. Here are these guys who I compete with every week, and they were driving through the night to bail me out. It was incredible.”

So how does a company build a culture like that? How do you get a bunch of competitive, Type A sales managers to stick together instead of abandoning each other in a race for first place?

Build it and they will come.

If you ask Tim Brinkmann, Vice President of Human Resources Field Sales at PepsiCo Foods North America (PFNA) and the man who helped scale and formalize the Zone Sales Leader Designate Program over the last eight years, he’ll tell you it’s made possible by two things: the kind of leaders they recruit and the training.

The Zone Sales Leader Designate Program was created 15 years ago to build a leadership pipeline for Zone Sales Directors. Being a director requires a vast assortment of experiences since each Zone is basically its own multimillion-dollar business with a huge front-line workforce.

“Look, back then, we needed diversity, and we needed really experienced people from outside our organization,” he says. “And we needed to train them because this is such a unique job. The essence of it is very hands-on, since you’re leading this big team of front-line people, but you’re also getting access to corporate leadership.”

And that’s how the Zone Sales Leader Designate Program began. The program recruits rising stars in the sales field and gives them an extraordinary amount of training. One thing the company looks for in each candidate is a quality that is expected of every manager throughout PFNA: a servant-leadership mentality. The PepsiCo Way is a set of seven guiding behaviors that every PepsiCo employee should follow, and top among them is to act with integrity.

“There’s this balance of talent and skills, but you also need to be humble. Do you put yourself above the team or underneath the team to say, ‘I’m here to serve, remove obstacles and provide value — it’s not about me, it’s about you,’” says Steve Llewellyn, Sales Senior Vice President at PFNA.

Training camp

A Designate’s first task is training. They learn every aspect of the Zone — running delivery routes, crunching budgets with business managers and doing a deep dive into the HR hiring process. The training lasts from nine to 12 months. One way to describe it is a leadership boot camp and a master class in servant-leadership.

“The training builds your respect for the type of work that our front-line people are doing every day, and the workload of the district sales leaders that we supervise,” says Vanessa Montes De Oca, a former Designate who now leads a Zone in Los Angeles. “The toughest part was the delivery route training, but if I can’t handle it for four weeks, how do I manage people that are doing it for years?”

Throughout the training, each Designate also has a dedicated career coach who is available 24/7 to answer questions, give guidance or just let them vent.

“I’ve been at Frito-Lay for 23 years, and being a coach was the best job I ever had. It’s just wonderful to be able to help somebody start their career off on the right foot and set them up for success,” says Kathy Brnak, former National Sales Capabilities Manager who spent years coaching Designates as they went through the training.

“I always thought of myself as the connector. I’d introduce new Designates to each other and to people who’d been through the program. That way they can call each other and ask, ‘Is this happening to you?’ or ‘Did you do this?’ They can coach one another.”

And what she saw was how organic the connections became, the deep friendships that were formed — how the unique experience of being chosen as a Designate, and putting your whole self into the training, bonded them all together.

Scott Closson, a Zone Sales Director who has mentored multiple Designates, sees it too. “It’s an experience unlike any other, and I always emphasize that to the Designates I mentor,” he says. “And I tell them to really embrace that time they spend training and meet as many people as possible, that network is out there just waiting for you.”

Winning the game

Every Zone Sales Leader Designate has their own story of when they knew they’d hit a home run by joining the program. Montes De Oca was recruited to become a Designate while she was a Zone Sales Manager at Campbell’s Soup in Chicago. The main thing that gave her pause was relocation. She’d turned down one promotion because it meant moving to the Northeast — she and her family didn’t want to leave the Windy City unless it was for a sunny city.

“But it was obvious from the resources the company’s dedicating to the program, the training and the coach, that a lot is invested in each Designate,” she says. “They were going to do their best to make me happy.”

Montes De Oca was still in training when a Regional Vice President in the Southwest sought her out at a women of color session at a conference. “She asked me about my training and when I was getting certified — then she asked, ‘Would you want to come to California?’

“When I came back home and I said it could be California, my daughter was so excited,” she says. On moving day, her daughter even helped the movers sent by PFNA.

For Toya Garraway, the ZSD who faced a hurricane in her first weeks on the job, her home run was the diversity. “When I came on board, I quickly got involved with the Women’s Inclusion Network and MOSAIC events,” she says.

“So, when the announcement came out that I had become a Zone Sales Director, a lot of people who looked like me or had similar backgrounds to me reached out to welcome me to the Director team and tell me they were here to help.”

But again, what really surprised Garraway was when the other Designates all showed up for one another. “I hosted a happy hour at the national sales meeting for Designates. There were new Designates and alumni, and I realized that we’re kind of this sweet subculture that sticks together and we’re always there rooting for each other.”