By letting your inner drive and ambition take over, you can find yourself ending up anywhere you want. For Director of Sales, Michael Hili, that place happens to be the same one as where his journey started – Schibsted. After almost 15 years he still sees opportunities for future growth.
One and a half decades ago, Michael Hili started his journey at Schibsted, and the sales team for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. As for all underlying companies within the large concern, Svenska Dagbladet was fending for themselves, and competing with other Schibsted brands such as Aftonbladet in Sweden. As the hungry salesman Michael Hili was, it did not take too long for him to start looking for ways to develop within his team. And when Schibsted started to lean towards becoming a streamlined concern with one common sales strategy, Michael Hili saw his chance.
“I like change, and pretty soon after I started I knew I wanted to develop towards leadership and strategic development within sales. I entered the Nordic talent development program which helped me grow in those two areas. Soon I became part of the organisational development team as well as the workgroup where the goal was to digitalise and streamline how we worked cross-sales,” Michael Hili says.
During the years, Michael Hili has had many different positions, before becoming Director of Sales three years ago. One of the most challenging, but also rewarding tasks was to implement a new work culture cross-concern in Schibsted Marketing Services (SMS). Something that is very relevant till this day.
“Changing the culture of an entire organisation is challenging. But it is clear that Schibsted is focusing on an open and driven culture, which we can see every day. Our SMS coworkers are all ambitious people that want to help each other succeed and develop, and that is also what we are looking for when recruiting new talents,” he says.
Schibsted is constantly developing the sales team. With a new sales model, all employees get to attend several courses where each and every attendee get to decide in what way they want to develop further – just like Michael Hili himself has done.
“Working in the SMS sales team is full of opportunities. The role itself contains sales, project management and business development – all at once. The team contains spearhead commercial understanding and we are backed up by our creative resources and strong brands. How you want to develop in your sales career is fully up to you and your own ambition. I like to describe Schibsted as a gym with the best personal trainers in the world. They will hand you the weights, but you are the one who has to do the lifting,” he says.
The ambition is for all employees to stay at Schibsted for a long time, no matter how and when they develop and change their positions. After 15 years aboard, Michael Hili still sees no end of his internal career.
“I want to keep on developing, I just need to figure out where to aim next, because I know it will be possible. But until then, continuing to build this open culture and being surrounded by this level of competencies, is astounding enough,” he says.
