Survival

In 2014, Crimea was annexed by Russia leading to sanctions from multiple countries. For businesses, these sanctions made a huge impact. Leaders needed to find a way to survive—and fast.

Marina Alex, founder of SWAY systems, shared the story of one business, a hotel, with the desire to survive and the willingness to change everything. The hotel was deeply impacted by sanctions that affected the tourism industry—TripAdvisor and Booking.com couldn't even list the hotel.

It was in this environment that Marina came onboard to lead a business agility transformation. Everything was designed to learn new ways to communicate to potential guests why they should come back to visit Crimea, including the creation of a "Department of Happiness" responsible for solving the problems of guests, changing the organizational structure to create a flat structure in the housekeeping team with no managers, and self-organizing teams across sales and marketing.

About Marina Alex:

As an entrepreneur, management consultant, agile coach and pioneer of Agile Sales, Marina specializes in building sustainable and robust agile organizations. She has a strong record of accomplishment with more than 10 years of sales experience. During this time, her sales teams regularly brought over $1.5 million per year; outperforming all other teams and meeting/exceeding their sales targets.

Over the last 4 years, she has developed an innovative sales technique based on business agility principles and practices; which she has successfully implemented in 4 major organizations across Russia. The most recent of these increased their sales performance from 43% target to over 120% of target.

Marina’s extensive sales background gives her a unique understanding of how business works – allowing her to uniquely solve complex cultural and business problems. During this time, she has launched more than 170 agile teams across various industries and worked closely with teams of managers in sales, HR, logistics, hospitality and medicine.

Marina is the author of SWAY (Sales with Agile system) which today helps many sales teams across the world.

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