Coaching for the Cloud

3rd September 2016 |   Brice Faure

As part of his Masters programme, SAP’s Brice Faure researched whether a sustainable coaching methodology could support SAP sales managers during the process of transforming the business into the Cloud.

Coaching for the Cloud

The concept of coaching has been much discussed in recent decades and part of my project has been to understand what coaching means and embraces. Too often in my reading, I noticed confusion between the concepts of coaching and mentoring for instance. At SAP especially, the notion of coaching is either considered as a corporate task performed by a list of official coaches and mainly to deal with employees’ professional or personal crises, or as one of management’s objectives for developing their people. In this latter case, the paradox we face is that no real coaching methodology is proposed or benchmarked. Worse, lots of managers at SAP are appointed after a successful sales career with the perhaps misplaced belief they will become good mentors for the sales teams.

I expect my research and my project’s direct application will inform coaching best practices and bridge the gap between coaching and mentoring as both, I believe, can be powerful strategies to facilitate transformation.

Brice Faure

Large Deals Manager – Strategic Customer Program EMEA North at SAP

Brice Faure is currently Large Deals Manager – Strategic Customer Program EMEA North at SAP. At the time of this research he was France Sales Director for Analytics Solutions and a member of the French Board. In this latter role he was responsible for developing SAP Software revenue in France with a team of 22.

Within this role, Faure directed sales strategy and was responsible for achieving SAP’s quarterly and annual targets with responsibility for leveraging SAP’s managers, sales executives and partner ecosystem. Since 2015, he was also been responsible for increasing Cloud sales revenue by transforming the traditional “on premises” sales business.