Mention succession planning at Dallas-based Pepco Sales & Marketing, and you won’t just hear about how President and General Manager Charlie Parham worked his way up from moving boxes in the warehouse to inside sales to accounting to outside sales and eventually into executive management. You’ll hear about the company’s S/MOT program (Sales/Management Opportunity Training) where the company’s next sales leaders are shaped. And at Pepco, it’s not about the experience — it’s about the fit.
“We don’t think of succession planning as just the next group of people leading the organization,” Parham states. “We think about succession all the way down to a territory level — building our bench and grooming new leaders. I want to see the next person who’s going to cover Houston or the Dallas/Fort Worth area because that’s important, too. With the amount of experience our sales leaders have right now, if we’re not thinking now about who is going to come in behind them, we’ll be in trouble down the road.”