Orkla ASA is a leading supplier of branded products to the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods markets. With its 300 brands and 12 portfolio companies, Orkla covers a wide range of products distributed to over 100 countries worldwide. Consumers' behaviors, preferences, expectations and buying patterns are changing rapidly in all local markets and across the industry, particularly through the changing nature of digitalization.

To ensure that they maintain and increase their market position, Orkla recognized early on the importance of creating a deep understanding of consumers in the markets and product categories in which they operate. Orkla's Key Account Managers play a central role in building and nurturing customer partnerships, which drove the need to create a series of development tracks within a brand new sales academy.

Orkla decided to develop a central Orkla Sales Academy to create a harmonized world-class sales organization. To achieve this goal, they chose to work with Mindset.

The programs were designed as "high performance learning journeys" with the goal of driving adoption of desirable behaviors, thereby accelerating the implementation of the strategy and organizational change. Taking full advantage of the benefits required the careful design of appropriate tasks that support effective learning while producing the desired results.

The Academy consists of several different development programs that span over time. Each program contains a mix of different components, such as short theory sections, on-the-job application tasks and small group discussions, where summary presentations are shared with the rest of the participants. Each participant creates a personal business plan that clearly links to their financial goals and is monitored throughout the program.