Life After Lobbying: My Professional Pivot from Public Affairs To Sales
Q&A with Manfredi Minutelli, Head of International Markets at Versalis
Q: What did you find most striking about making the change to sales after a career as a lobbyist?
Moving from a public affairs role at a Chinese multinational technology company like Alibaba to managing international sales for Versalis, Italy’s largest chemical company, might seem like a radical change. In reality, it felt like a natural progression for me, a coherent continuation of a journey built around the same idea: understanding how decisions are made, whether for a government, or an international client.
During my years spent in public affairs, I learned to read markets through the lens of politics and culture. Working for a Chinese technology company meant operating in a complex, constantly evolving, and highly challenging environment, where every relationship was a balancing act between economic interests, geopolitical dynamics, and cultural sensitivities.
The challenge was not only to achieve concrete results, but to interpret the context, anticipate regulatory changes, and build trust in environments where trust is often the rarest resource.
During that time, I learned to map stakeholders, to mediate between different interests and visions, to translate corporate objectives into messages that governments, associations, and institutions can understand. In other words, I learned that the power of influence comes from the ability to listen and connect apparently different and distant points of view.
When I decided to take on this new professional challenge, managing international sales for Italy’s largest chemical company, many asked me if it wasn’t a leap into the unknown, a radical “job change.” In reality, the line between lobbying and sales is much thinner than it might seem.
The ability to read political contexts becomes a sensitivity to market dynamics, the ability to build consensus translates into negotiation skills, and experience in managing complex public interlocutors helps me to move with agility between clients, distributors, and international partners. Over time, I understood that the skills I had developed over the years spent in public affairs are not lost, they are transformed.
Q: If the differences are more superficial than some might expect, in your experience are these two worlds also more fundamentally alike than it might appear from the outside?
At first glance, of course, the first thing you notice when you make the change is that the language has changed: we no longer speak of policy briefs but of commercial offers; not of institutional stakeholders but of private clients. My interlocutor is no longer a regulator or policymaker but a customer, a distributor, a business partner. Likewise strategic analysis becomes market vision; institutional diplomacy becomes commercial negotiation… different at first, but look more closely, however, and the logic remains the same: understanding the needs of others, building lasting relationships, establishing trust and creating shared values.
And in both lobbying and sales, the complexity is likewise the same: understanding how people make decisions – be they public decision-makers or company managers – may vary from one place to another, but the dynamics of decision-makers per se remain the same.
A practical example: the variable and factors I have to consider and navigate across the industrial chemicals sector include environmental regulations, global supply chains, the green transition, and new technologies, as well as managing institutional stakeholders and economic interests. Does this sound meaningfully different than what my day-to-day practice or priorities would be in a public affairs role, as opposed to international sales?
And if there is the temptation to say, in theory no, but in practice surely there must be, then consider that both require:
- empathy, listening, and the ability to interpret nuances.
- they are based on long-term relationships, not one-off agreements.
- they aim to connect different interests in a spirit of mutual benefit.
- strategy is as important as execution.
And last but not least, consider the keystone of success at the end of the day: in both worlds, success ultimately depends on the same constant: trust, credibility, and – in short – the ability to keep one’s word.
Q: Setting aside the question of public affairs vs sales specifically, what has your experience of these roles been in the broader context of professional evolution?
The world of work is changing rapidly, and the boundaries between roles, sectors and skills are becoming increasingly blurred. Careers today are no longer linear; companies are increasingly seeking people capable of connecting strategy and operations, institutional sensitivity and a commercial mindset. Those who can navigate these worlds become bridges and, in today’s ever-changing and globalized environment, bridges are more valuable than walls.
In my professional journey, which has taken me from tech diplomacy to industrial chemistry, I’ve learned that nowadays skills are no longer as sharply defined as they were when I started my professional career over twenty-five years ago. Today it is better to talk about skillsets, and disciplinary horizons open for exploration – there is less of a sense of fixed, compartmentalized competencies, and more of evolving spaces of mastery and boundaries of adaptation. There has also been a shift in mindset, from ‘fighters’ to ‘bridge-builders’, where value is seen in knowing how to identify the points that unite rather than those that divide, and the ability to look for win-win outcomes beyond the initial comfort zone.
Looking ahead, I would venture that hybrid, lateral rather than vertical skills, will not be a deviation or exception but rather the norm for the future and that knowing how to adapt quickly to new scenarios helps us not only stay current but above all competitive.
