We Are Norstella

Tom Wyness

Global Director - Commercial Training & Enablement

Tom Wyness is Global Director – Commercial Training & Enablement at Norstella. In this role, he heads the commercial enablement team, which works with the commercial teams supporting anyone involved with the go-to-market process. He is also heavily involved with onboarding newcomers to the company.

Tell us a little bit more about your role.

What the commercial enablement team essentially does is try to make it easier for our client-facing teams to communicate with their customers. That is largely based around the work that we do around understanding our product areas, our market, their workflows and what they do, and trying to find the way to help our sales and customer success teams understand it and communicate it in a way to our customers. We’re a bridge between product and the sales and customer success teams. What also falls within that is a whole range of skills development. So we’ve got the remit to ensure leadership through to front end-staff have the skills they need. Another large part of what I do is onboarding, getting people within 90 days to a position where they’re able to effectively communicate and deal with customers.

How did you join the company? What in your background brought you to pharma?

I didn’t have a background in pharma. I initially qualified a Masters in in business psychology. I spent 20 years in sales leadership working for organizations like British Telecom’s NetSuite, which is an Oracle system. T When the position came up during COVID, I thought “Wow, that’s my background entirely”. It’s taking that basic knowledge I had before and applying it to help leaders develop their people.

What does your day-to-day usually look like?

A large part of what I do is preparing onboarding programmes, meeting the sales leaders to set out requirements for onboarding, meeting new staff on their first day and supporting them on their onboarding journey. I lead training and coaching around people, markets, and product areas. I also work with the sales leaders to identify the skill requirements for their teams, and with other partners to design and develop training which we then deliver to the team. The third strand is working within my own commercial enablement team about their product launches and training requirements, so that we can communicate those to our customer success frontline sales staff field team and helping them to developing learning materials for that.

What are some of the larger projects you’re working on?

We used to do regular monthly or biweekly meetings with sales team members to do training, whether that’s skills, training, or more often product and personal training. We’ve recently been working on a project with the learning and development team in Norstella to build out that as a much more blended approach to learning. The idea behind it is that our field teams can access the learning they need at the time they need it. That’s the Norstella Learn platform. Another important thing we’re working on at the moment is the automation of the onboarding programme. Everyone has a different journey, but the journeys are actually pieces of learning which everyone shares. We curate that learning and bring it together, along with mentor, who help take them through the learning. The truth of the matter is we learn most in the first 90 days, so if we can get them thinking about how we work, who we work with, where to go to get the right information, and how to communicate it, that’s a good basis for them to start from.

What are some of the common challenges of your role?

Partly it’s the complexity of people’s different learning needs. With a background in psychology, I think quite a lot about cognitive workload. How do we get people to easily think on their feet and process information and share it with clients without overworking their cognitive workload? When you’re talking to a client, you really want to be engaging with them, not trying to think about what to tell them about this product. Our resources and the training is largely geared around giving them the right information at the right time, which makes it much easier for them to have those communications with their customers.

What’s been your career highlight to date?

Two things stand out. I’m part of the team that actually brings the yearly Florida kick-offs together. We work with all the executives on what we’re going to deliver during the day. It’s a brilliant experience – I always get asked to do the MC role- and the nice thing is that, because I do a lot of training and onboarding, I know most of the team members. The other most rewarding thing is to see people come into the organization, absorb the training, and start to apply it. Then I get to see how they’re bringing what they know to the organization. I find that really rewarding.

What trends are you seeing across the industry right now that Norstella is in a unique position to help with?

The industry is accessing our data in data warehouses in order to inspect the data themselves. I think that’s an amazing bit of progress that we’ve achieved. I’m also really keen on what we’re doing with AI, which I think is going to radically change the way we access information.

Which company principle resonates most with you?

‘Humility, Gratitude and Learning’ is the core part of what we do, but the ‘Resilience, Mettle and Perseverance’ mindset is very important. For our team, learning is key. Ongoing learning is really important, but so is our people’s ability to use that information and continue to do so with their clients and through all the changes that we go through. The attitude going into learning something is so important, so that growth mindset is important.

What do you tell someone just starting their career with Norstella?

I meet most people coming into the organization on their first day. I ask them what led them to the organization and a bit about their background, then I’ll try and make it clear what they’re bringing to us is important. That’s the key thing that I really want them to get their head round. Then I go on to tell them that Norstella is a worldwide organization with so much opportunity, so they should really embrace it and enjoy it.

Where do you see Norstella in the next year or two?

More product, more markets, and greater opportunities for our people.

What do you like most about working at Norstella?

This morning, I was speaking to the customer success teams in Japan and China. At lunchtime, I’ve got meetings for people in London and early this evening I’ll be interviewing someone in California. The variety, the people, and the way they engage with things are all brilliant.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I live in Looe in Cornwall and I’m a big kayaker, so the estuary is important. I go paddle boarding and kayaking up the estuary, and then go to our local pub, the Jolly Sailor. It’s a 15th century pub and has a nice pint of Cornish ale.

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