Your Future in Sales & Marketing

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Part 3 of the special 150th episode 4-part series goes to the top seat. In this episode, host Mike Dickson revisits conversations with MDs from across the series, for the leadership lessons and career advice worth taking with you.

Hear from 12 leaders, including Trish Pegorer of Mutti Australia, Elizabeth Miller of Manassen Foods, Michelle Foley of Arnott’s and Colm Maguire of the AFGC, on what it takes to lead and what it takes to get there.

Follow along so you don’t miss the last of the series, with episodes released weekly.

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Part 2 of the special 150th episode 4-part series moves to the marketing seat. In this episode, host Ben Carnegie revisits conversations with marketing leaders from across the series, on the career moves that mattered and what they learned from them.

Hear from 10 leaders, including Derek Oliver of Blackmores, Jodie Lynch of Bayer, Florence Paoli of Reckitt and Serge Costi of Noumi, on the advice they’d give anyone working in marketing.

Follow along so you don’t miss the rest of the series, with episodes released weekly.

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Kicking off the special 150th episode 4-part series, host Andrew Cannock takes it back to where it all began: the sales leaders. In this episode, Andrew revisits six years of conversations with the sales and category leaders who have shaped the show.

Hear from 11 leaders, including Swati Prasad of Unilever, Dan Crabtree of PepsiCo, Ian Shedden of Real Pet Food and Tom Press of Key Pharmaceuticals, plus many more. 

Follow along so you don’t miss the rest of the series, with episodes released weekly.

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Recorded on 28 August 2026. References and observations reflect the context at the time of recording. In this episode of Your Future in Sales and Marketing, we're joined by Jodie Lynch, Head of Marketing ANZ at Bayer's consumer health division, to explore leading outside your expertise, building a career around purpose and how AI is reshaping marketing.

Jodie built her career across Church & Dwight, Schwarzkopf and Henkel before making the boldest move of her career: stepping into Head of Supply Chain at Henkel for around four years, including through COVID, despite having no background in the function. She later returned to marketing, leading a major brand transformation at Blackmores, before joining Bayer two and a half years ago. She now leads the entire ANZ marketing function, sitting on the senior leadership team, and has spent the past year rolling out a new agile working model that puts the consumer at the centre of how her teams operate.

In this episode, we explore:

- How to lead a team when you have zero expertise in what they do.
- Why the scariest move of her career became one of the most defining.
- What non-linear career moves can teach you that a straight climb can't.
- Where AI genuinely helps marketers, and where human judgement still wins.

Jodie's story is a powerful example of what happens when curiosity meets courage, and why the career move that scares you most might be the one that changes how you lead for good.

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On our first episode of Brand Manager and Beyond, a special mini series from [axr], host Ben Carnegie puts one question to four senior marketers: what actually makes a great brand manager? 

Seb Brandt, Serge Costi, Nick Cook and Florence Paoli, each bring a different angle, from knowing the numbers to backing your own opinion in the room, to staying genuinely curious about people and culture.

It's a short, sharp look at what separates a good brand manager from a great one, straight from four people who've done the job at the highest level. 

More questions, same guests, coming soon.

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This is a special crossover episode between Your Path to CEO and Your Future in Sales and Marketing. Mike Dickson and Andrew Cannock sit down together with Colm Maguire, CEO of the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC).

Colm's career has rarely gone in a straight line. He set out to join the Royal Australian Air Force, found his way into sports administration with Touch Football Australia, then spent years inside the highly regulated world of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, before taking the top job at the AFGC in 2024.

Colm, Mike and Andrew talk through the deliberate risks behind each career move, including one that looked like a step backwards at the time, what it took to earn trust in a new industry during his first six months as CEO, and why he judges his own leadership by effort rather than outcome. Colm also shares his read on the opportunities and pressures facing FMCG manufacturing in Australia, and the workforce agenda now shaping the AFGC's next chapter.

Worth a listen whether you're building a career in FMCG or in sales and marketing, and especially if you're weighing up whether your next move needs to look like a promotion to actually be the right one.

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A podcast special: two [axr] podcasts, one conversation. Andrew Cannock (Your Future in Sales and Marketing) and Dave Goldbach (From Go to CFO) sit down together with Chris Tucker, Sales Director, and Piyush Mittal, Finance Director at SC Johnson, to unpack what a genuine partnership between sales and finance looks like inside an FMCG business.

Chris and Piyush trace very different paths to the top of their functions. Chris rose through a linear sales career at PepsiCo before moving into SC Johnson's Australian sales leadership, including a global customer marketing stint in the US. Piyush has spent 23 years at SC Johnson, moving from commercial finance in India, to supply chain in Malaysia, to finance leadership in Australia. Both land on the same lesson: breadth across functions, markets and cultures builds better decision-makers.

The conversation moves into SC Johnson itself, a 140-year-old, fifth-generation family business behind brands including Glade, Raid, Ziploc, Drano, Windex and Sun Bum, and what it means to make long-term calls, on sustainability, on investment, without the pressure of quarterly reporting. Chris and Piyush are candid about where sales and finance pull in different directions, and what keeps that tension productive rather than destructive: shared visibility of the full P&L, finance in the room from the start of a proposal rather than at sign-off, and a habit of weighing 'the cost of doing nothing' alongside any ROI case.

They close with the advice they'd give their younger selves: get broad experience early and surround yourself with people you can learn from.

If this conversation has you thinking about your own next move, in sales, finance or leadership, get in touch with the team at [axr] Recruitment & Search.

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In this episode of Your Future in Sales and Marketing, host Andrew Cannock sits down with Sheri Juchau, Director of Category and Trade Marketing at Ferrero, about a career built on curiosity rather than a fixed plan.

Sheri takes us from a marketing degree she didn't know existed until university open day, through the Unilever graduate scheme, a posting in London, a formative stretch at Arnott's, and a bold move from PepsiCo into a smaller, faster-moving distributor, Stuart Alexander. She's since spent several years at Ferrero, where she leads a growing team across category, shopper and trade marketing.

Along the way, Sheri talks about imposter syndrome, the moment a mentor convinced her to take a role she didn't think she was ready for, and why she believes breadth of experience, not a narrow specialism, is what makes a career (and a CV) stronger. She also shares her view on where category management is headed as AI reshapes the analyst's toolkit, and why she still believes the best results come from 'human plus machine', not one replacing the other.

Whether you're plotting your next move or building out your team, this is a conversation about backing yourself, staying curious, and knowing you don't need to see the whole path before taking the next step.

If this episode has you thinking about your next move, or your team's, get in touch.

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On this episode of Your Future in Sales and Marketing, Andrew sits down with Kylie Gleeson, Global Group Executive & CEO - Consumer and Retail at Quantium, who has built her career across some of the most demanding commercial environments in the world, from graduate rotations at Coca-Cola and Nestlé, to strategy consulting at Kantar, to leading commercial teams across Asia, Africa and the Middle East at FrieslandCampina, to the sharp end of AI and advanced analytics at dunnhumby and now Quantium.

Kylie knows what the top job looks like and what it takes to get there. 

In this conversation she talks about why curiosity has overtaken academic pedigree as the trait that separates the people accelerating fastest inside AI-driven organisations. 

Why 3 and 5 year strategies are losing their usefulness. 

What CEOs who are actually getting ROI from AI are doing differently from those who aren't. 

And why the competitive threat to your career isn't AI — it's the person next to you who's using it better.

There's also a sharper conversation in here about leadership: what authentic leadership actually means across cultures and contexts, how to build commercial acumen early, and the leadership lesson that took the longest to earn.

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What actually separates a sales director from a chief commercial officer? For Tanya Pitchforth, it's courage, clarity and humanity, not just hitting budget. 

Tanya is Chief Commercial Officer at McPherson's, the ASX-listed company behind Lady Jayne, Manicare, Swisspers and Dr. LeWinn's, and spent over a decade at Danone building new growth spaces across Paris and Amsterdam before that.

In this episode of Your Future in Sales and Marketing, Tanya talks to Mike Dickson about:

• Why she chases a trajectory, not a destination, and what that's meant for her career choices
• Building a career like a spider web instead of a ladder, and why the pivot is often smarter than the promotion
• What actually separates a sales director from a chief commercial officer
• Leading teams across Europe versus Australia, and the gender diversity gap she thinks Australia still hasn't closed
• Turning down her own dream role in Paris to come home to Australia, and what that transition really cost
• What to do when a career move doesn't go to plan, and why the next step doesn't always have to be up

Sharp, specific and genuinely useful for anyone weighing up their next career move, lateral, sideways, or nowhere near where they expected.