Vodafone and SDA Bocconi collaborate on the new frontier of “Digital Selling”

In 2021, Vodafone Italia decided to invest in the future of its managers and professionals through two important custom-made managerial training courses designed and delivered with SDA Bocconi and included in Vodafone’s Marketing Academy and Sales Academy.

The idea is the result of a meeting between Gianmario Verona, Dean of Bocconi University, and Aldo Bisio, CEO of Vodafone Italia, and was part of a broader skill transformation program that started back in 2018. This program is enabling Vodafone to reinforce its strengths and build a new range of skills to meet market challenges in an increasingly uncertain and variable scenario. At the heart of this new skill development model is the relationship with customers and the digital transformation of the sales function, which allows rapid responses to customers and their consumption preferences.

For Vodafone’s Sales Academy, SDA Bocconi designed and implemented “Digital Selling,” a managerial training course targeting Vodafone Italia’s sales workforce (around 835 people) – consumer sales (who manage entrepreneurs and stores), on the one hand, and business sales, who work directly with the Corporate and SME/SOHO sales segment (via agencies), on the other.

Considering the high number of participants and the client’s intention to train the whole sales area in a short time lapse (the entire course took place in June and July 2021), they opted for a format consisting of synchronous and asynchronous webinars lasting 2.5 hours each.

The aim of the project was to develop an overview of the digital transformation in sales from a distribution chain and channel digitalization perspective, in the various go-to-market formats, above all from a B2B2C point of view.

The 5 asynchronous webinars that complemented the synchronous ones were designed and implemented balancing rigorous theoretical framing (“high” models) with business case studies, incidents, videos, testimonies of managers from other companies, questionnaires and support materials.

The topics of these ad-hoc asynchronous webinars were:

• Sales digital transformation of the whole customer experience (through a concrete business case).
• Digital transformation in sales through sales content management.
• Omnichannel management.
• The 2021 digital marketing and communication keyword.
• Setting a working framework about modern digital marketing.

The asynchronous webinars by SDA Bocconi were managed through the platform used by Vodafone, allowing for on-demand use that matched the professional and personal needs of individual participants.

The Digital Selling project was directed by professor Paolo Guenzi. Sandro Castaldo and Giorgio Soffiato were the other faculty members involved in designing and building the webinars.

SDA Bocconi’s Corporate Development Manager Anna Borri was in charge of project development and management as well as coordination with Vodafone.