Checking the time as I enter the headquarters of Universal Robina Corporation, I’m at least 15 minutes early for my appointment with the company’s newly appointed managing director for the beverages division, Oscar “Oca” I. Villamora Jr.
With the company’s hybrid work policy still in effect, it’s definitely much quieter than the last time I was here around three years ago, before the pandemic. From the reception area, I’m instructed to head straight and turn left, which should lead me to a meeting room amusingly named after one of URC’s most popular products, Chiz Curls. As I open the door, I’m in for a little surprise – Oca’s already here, working diligently on his laptop.
After exchanging handshakes (Goodbye, awkward pandemic fist-bumps!) and introducing ourselves, I congratulate him on his new post, but we both know why I’m really here – to learn how Oca transformed URC’s sales team and helped the company achieve impressive growth, even in the midst of the pandemic.
If the best-selling book about sales professionals, Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, by Harvey Mackay, ever had a Philippine edition, Oca would be the perfect candidate to put on the cover. Not just because of his achievements in sales over the last 25 years, but because he’s literally done what the book’s title says.
It's true: in September 2019, fulfilling the most outrageous thing on his bucket list, Oca jumped into the chilly shark-infested waters of San Francisco Bay, and swam nonstop for an hour and a half from the island of Alcatraz to the mainland.
There’s a lot more to his personal “Escape from Alcatraz” but first, let’s talk about sales.
Finding His Passion
Oca’s career didn’t start off in sales. After earning his Business Administration degree from the University of the Philippines in 1997, he joined one of the country’s biggest banks at the time, but stayed for just over a year. “I found out it wasn’t a fit for me. In a bank, you work with a lot of restrictions because your product is money. There are a lot of controls. I didn’t find it liberating or entrepreneurial enough,” shares Oca.
“I didn’t really know about the concept of sales when I started my career. When I was a student, nobody really taught about the discipline of sales in college. Most of our exposure to the profession was, if you recall, the Electrolux salesman who’d go door to door. I had no concept of managing key accounts or distributors as a college student.”
It was only later on when he’d hang out with his former college classmates that he began to have a better picture. “Some of my friends had joined multinational corporations and were handling key sales accounts for big retailers and distributors. As they talked about it, I got very curious, leading me to shift from banking and into consumer goods.”
After being hired by one of largest MNCs in the country, Oca was assigned to a sales position covering a province in Northern Luzon and, as he fondly recalls, “That’s where I found joy.”
According to Oca, being part of the sales team gave him a sense of “ownership” of the company, the feeling that his actions, his plans, and his strategies all had a major contributing effect on the company. “I had the sense of, ‘This is my business, I will make it grow.’ Being in sales allows you to immediately see the growth of the plans that you implement. When you negotiate with the supermarket owner, when you negotiate with the distributor to deploy a sales team or to do a promotion, the impact is immediate. Once you shake on the deal, you plan and execute the initiative, and you quickly see the effect on growth. To me that was very exhilarating.”
The other aspect of sales that Oca grew to love was the different sets of challenges or experiences that he had to face each day. “At a certain time, you could be in a very high level, strategic business meeting with a supermarket owner, but in the next hour, you could be on the floor talking to your merchandiser about operations. Then the next day, you're talking to the owner of a distribution company, another different kind of business. All of that, combined with my being attuned to be customer-facing, made me discover my passion for sales, and that’s where I formed my expertise over the last 20 or so years.”
The URC Challenge
With the joy he had for the job and desire to continuously learn about other aspects of business, Oca began his ascent in the corporate world. In 2004, he moved to another big multinational company and continued his stellar rise. His work with this particular firm brought about one of his career highlights, being named among the Mansmith Young Market Masters Award winners in 2010. The YMMA award honors young achievers who excel in marketing, sales, and entrepreneurship – it was a sign of great things to come.
Toward the end of his stint with that company, Oca was enjoying his plum position as Country Director (consumer business) in Vietnam. It was during this time that URC reached out to him and presented a challenge that he couldn’t refuse. “I was told that the task was to transform the large sales team – there were around 300 of them – and be able to hit the targets. I thought it was a good opportunity to come back, especially since it was for a very reputable company, URC, under the JG Summit Group.”
Not long after, Oca, his wife Erlene, and their two children, Carmel, and Cade, packed their bags. Back home in Manila, Oca hit the ground running, joining URC as the Branded Consumer Food Group’s Vice President for Sales in May 2018. Aligning with URC President and CEO Irwin Lee’s vision for the company to become a “Partner of Choice,” Oca began working out how to bring out the full potential of URC’s existing sales force.
Now, looking back on what the Sales team has achieved since 2018, Oca says that the past five years have been the “most fulfilling” of his entire career in sales. “The combination of the [sales] culture that I had to build, the business systems that I had to establish, the turnaround that I was expected to make, these are a couple of things that I am proud of.”
When he first embarked on the transformational challenge, Oca first took note of the strengths of the company. To him, it was quite obvious that URC had very strong brands, household names that were positioned well in various categories. Prying deeper into the company, he began to see how customer-oriented the company is. “I realized that anything that you need to compete in the market, the company is willing to provide, whether it's a product, it's a process, it's a resource, whatever it takes to win over the customer, how to win in the market, it is in the company's entrepreneurial DNA to go for it. People just galvanize and deliver. That’s uniquely URC,” says Oca.
Turning his gaze onto what needed improvement, he saw the need to expand URC’s distributor reach. “We were a large manufacturer/supplier in the industry, but when you look at its level of direct distribution, the number of stores that were buying directly from URC and its distributors, it was not up to par with the best in class companies.”
According to corporate estimates, URC would have to quadruple its level of distribution to even out the playing field. As of 2022, that target has been met. “We were able to double the direct reach within the first six months after we started the sales transformation. And even though the pandemic hit, by our fourth year we were able to quadruple our direct distribution to be at par with the industry best in class,” says Oca proudly.
Apart from increasing the avenues by which URC products reach the end consumer, the sales transformation led the company to be viewed more favorably by its key customers, meaning its distributors, retail partners, and other suppliers. “The Retail Advantage Survey, which is conducted by a third party, asks respondents to rank the performance of the manufacturers that key retailers do business with,” explains Oca. “We're quite proud that our ranking has increased consistently since 2018. As of 2022, we are now ranked No. 2 across all suppliers, which means that in the eyes of our key accounts, we were the highest scoring locally run supplier in their evaluations. That gives us a sense of pride because our key customers, they see URC – a local company with global standards and ambition – that we are among the most credible and preferred business partners.”
The third aspect of the transformation that Oca takes great pride in is that the positive engagement results came about with the same sales team that was in place in 2018. “The same team that had difficulty delivering targets are the same team who delivered the sales transformation. The same people who have been there for years were the ones who became open and supported the change. They were open to learn, they became progressive in the way business is managed, and became open to the new ways of doing things.”
There were quite a few catalysts behind URC-BCFG’s remarkable sales transformation, but the main ones, according to Oca, were fixing the culture, organizing with cross-functional teams in URC, re-engaging with distributors, going back to key customers, fixing trade marketing systems, and driving world-class competency programs within URC.
Elaborating on the effort to shake up URC’s sales culture, Oca describes how the sales groups used to be fragmented and seemingly operated in silos. By galvanizing everyone to strive toward a common goal, “we were able to unite ourselves and drive very high engagement with the team. Because of that, because the team is very motivated, very energized, now they’re giving sales a very good push.”
Gokongwei Group-wide employee engagement surveys confirm the extraordinarily high morale of the URC sales team. “BCFG Sales is the highest scoring [corporate] function in the engagement surveys, we get about 90+ engagement consistently year over year. The culture now is very positive, very dynamic. The sales team moves as one, so yeah, it’s a good team to be in.”
The second aspect, working with cross-functional teams, ties in very well with URC’s Agile at Scale program, which is another major factor in the company’s growth over the last few years. “We realized that in order to ‘win’, you need the expertise of the [other corporate] functions, it cannot be done by sales alone. So we created a meeting cadence daily, weekly, and quarterly with cross-functional involvement. With the expertise given to us by Marketing, we were able to plan earlier with our key accounts.
We were able to work with URC’s Supply Chain Service in collaboration with our customers. With Finance, we were able to fix the working capital requirements of our regional distributors. With HR, we partnered to drive leadership intervention and cultural intervention. All of that great functional support allowed us to go to market more effectively.”
Re-engaging distributors meant going directly to URC’s customers to find out what their pain points were. “It was an advantage that I had come from the outside. I knew the retailers, the distributors, and I listened to them. I wanted to know why we couldn’t sell with them, or grow our business with them. With the cross-functional support that I mentioned, we started removing our distributors’ pain points, one by one.
This tactic is closely related to the fourth point of going back to key customers. “You cannot get to your end consumers without going through your customer, the distributor. It’s not enough that you excel in consumer marketing or that you have a good product, if your customers have many problems with you. They’re the ones who are going to put your products on the shelf. If they aren’t happy, they won’t bother selling your products to the end consumer.”
Fixing URC’s trade marketing systems involved separating the functions of teams involved in trade strategies and their execution. “There is a team that focuses on category strategy. They enabled early planning with the Marketing team on Demand Generation plans, which in turn, allowed us to advance our planning cycles with our customers. Then there is an execution team that handles all trade activities from a project management lens. This way, we get to execute initiatives within required timelines. The prior setup without specialization made our trade marketing too much of a jack-of-all-trades.”
The sixth key to the transformation was providing world-class training to the sales team. “I got industry experts in key account management, shopper marketing, distribution management, and I was happy that the company was very supportive. I was also happy that the team was very open. When they started seeing all of these new concepts, ang ganda ng reception. Gusto nilang matuto. That willingness to learn and combination of access to world-class training, really equipped and elevated the capabilities of the team.”
Swimming with the Sharks
If you’ve read this far, you should have figured out by now that Oca relishes a good challenge.
After successfully turning the performance of the sales team around, URC’s recently designated Managing Director has a new task at hand, which is to profitably grow the beverage side of the business while harnessing the power of the various functional teams within the company, including sales, human resources, supply chain, and finance, among others. “Having this multi-function discipline is a new challenge for me, but I'm taking it with a learning lens. Yes, it's a different role, but if I take it with the perspective of learning, I am not scared of challenges or failure, because either way it goes, I'm going to get that learning. And when I get that, I'm going to be a better business leader. As I’ve done throughout my career, I'm going to approach this with a lot of hard work. I've been given a very great opportunity. I'm going to work hard so that I learn, so that I can give back to the business.”
To give himself an extra push, Oca can look back on his epic adventure of literally swimming with sharks during that solo crossing. Like many life-changing experiences, it offers a multitude of motivational lessons, which Oca has already shared with his team.
“Number one is the power of visualization - if you can imagine it, it can happen. I didn’t have a way of practicing for the cold, you can’t really practice for that in the Philippines, and going to the U.S. for that was out of the question. I’m a believer in the mental aspect of facing challenges. If you can picture it in your mind – that I can see myself going across, or overcoming any other challenge – the power of visualization is real. When your body feels the challenge, but mentally you've already figured it out,” says Oca, pointing to his head, “your ability to deal with it is much, much better.”
While positive thinking is critical, you also need to act in a manner that will help you achieve your targets. The day-to-day work of being in sales isn’t easy, but it’s part of the territory, so you have to know what to expect, and prepare for it. That’s lesson number two: “Commit firmly to the discipline, commit to the regimen.”
Equating that with the months of preparation involved for his swim, Oca shares, “Every day, I said to myself that I had to swim one hour without getting tired. If I can do that, then I'm going to be fine.” If he still got tired after that training, it meant it wasn’t enough and he’d have to train some more. However, as Oca shares that he loves spending weekends swimming with his kids, maybe putting in a few more hours in the pool isn’t quite as difficult as he makes it seem.
Finally, lesson number three is that the goal changes the perspective. “For example, the goal I had was to swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco in the cold water. So when I was training, I prayed to God every day that the water would be cold!”
For comparison, the water in San Francisco Bay at that time of the year is around 15 to 16°C, while the coldest water temperature in Manila rarely dips below 27°C. “If that wasn’t my goal, I would think, oh, the water’s too cold, I’ll just sleep. But to me, I welcomed the cold, the simulation of the challenge, because it helped me prepare for my goal. So, if two people will swim in a cold pool, one is unhappy, the other one will be happy. Their only difference is perspective. And what influenced that? The commitment to the goal.”
Very well said for a man who appears more than ready, willing, and able for whatever adventure – business-related or otherwise – lies ahead. – Pierre A. Calasanz
