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The Skills of a Salesman
- 9/19/11
Chuck Battipede draws on the energy and accountability of a sales veteran to ensure Hewlett-Packard’s learning offerings are aligned to business needs.
As a revenue generating activity, sales can’t get much closer to the bottom line. Simply stated, more sales equals more money. The line from the learning function to the bottom line isn’t always so clear.
Chuck Battipede, vice president of learning and development for global information technology company Hewlett-Packard (HP), has helped to clarify that line, thanks in part to his skill as a salesman.
From East to West
Battipede began his HP career in sales in 1983 in New Jersey. Eight years into the role, he moved to California for a two-year rotation assignment to consult with the corporate training organization about the sales organization’s needs. After a year and a half, he took over sales force development for the Americas and subsequently worldwide sales force development before going back to the field as sales general manager in enterprise sales for the western United States.
Battipede eventually left HP for competitor Cisco Systems, where as senior director of sales support programs he was responsible for learning for the sales organization and systems engineers. A stint as chief learning officer at Avaya followed before he returned to HP in 2008, taking responsibility for all learning in 2010.
With 326,000 employees from different cultures, speaking different languages and with different learning styles and needs ranging from professional to sales to technical aptitude, Battipede has had to specialize and scale the company’s learning offerings, employing a variety of delivery mechanisms and developing the infrastructure needed to support a complex learning system.
Regardless of how learning is delivered in the 170 countries where HP operates, Battipede said the key is the output learning provides. He said helping employees do their jobs well and advance their careers is both rewarding and challenging. “You really have to think outside the box when you have all these different types of learners. You need to be state of the art, but there are deliverables. Those deliverables are then implemented and you can start to see the results.”
Aligning Ability to Execution
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