Sellex and Plans with Purpose form ESG partnership
Retail consultancy Sellex has formed a new partnership with sustainability advisory firm Plans with Purpose. The collaboration will help support clients in the fast moving consumer goods sector to put ESG at the heart of their organisations.
One-in-three UK consumers has stopped purchasing certain brands or products because of ethical or sustainability-related concerns. At the same time, each year, a higher proportion of consumers stops making purchases particularly in grocery, beauty and hospitality due to such concerns.
Launched in 2002, Sellex is a commercial training and consultancy business specialising in customer development expertise within the retail and fast moving consumer goods industry. As the firm looks to help its clients retain their customers, amid this changing customer sentiment, it has announced it is teaming up with Plans with Purpose.
Anthony Carr, managing director at Sellex said, “We recognise that the world of work has changed dramatically over the last five years. Sellex has championed the cause of developing Commercial Confidence for over 20 years. However, the focus on ESG and EDI in the way teams will need to collaborate and the expectations of customers for those commercial teams, has not been supported in organisations to the level which ensures people can genuinely call themselves confident in these spaces. Balancing People, Planet and Profit is a difficult path to navigate. We owe it to everyone in the industry to be able to have these conversations with confidence.”
Founded in 2017, Plans with Purpose is on a mission to put regeneration and distribution at the heart of business progress. Looking ahead, it will work with to support businesses in the food and drink and health and beauty sectors achieve the challenging balance of doing right by people and planet with the ever-increasing demands on commercial delivery.
The collaboration will involve Plans with Purpose supplementing the existing Sellex Training Academy with additional training offerings. These will include: environmental, social and governmental fundamentals; equality diversity and inclusion fundamentals; carbon literacy for sales; and ‘donut economics’ for sustainable business success.
In addition to the capability collaboration, Plans with Purpose founder Ali Fisher will also act as a board advisor to Sellex to ensure that the business is run in a way which is aligned to its own purpose, namely building commercial confidence in the industry, paving the way for a new generation of leaders. It’s what it describes as People and Planet and Profit in equal measure.
Fisher commented, “Commercial teams can and should play an extremely powerful and impactful role in ESG which we have yet to fully realise. The proximity of commercial teams to consumers, alongside the depth and richness of shopper insights, puts the commercial function in a fabulous and enviable position to create citizen behaviour change and thus systemic change that will shift the way we live, shop, consume and work for the better. I’m delighted to be using my more than 25 years of experience across business and sustainability in partnership with Sellex to do justice to this exciting opportunity.”
