Caroline Gattino is Head of eMobility Sales in France at Schneider Electric, contributing to expand electric mobility in her zone for a more efficient and sustainable transportation. Born in La Bretagne, France, she currently lives in Paris with her 12-years-old daughter and loves to walk around her beautiful city enjoying historic places like The Sacré-Cœur, her favorite one.
Her mission is very clear: build and deploy the strategy for expanding the electric mobility business in her zone, one of the key countries in Europe in terms of growth and market share (11.2%) with almost 200,000 EVs on the roads at the end of 2020. France takes clean mobility very seriously and some incentives initiatives have emerged lately to accelerate the electrification of transportation, such as €100M promised by the French government to companies investing in EV charging stations installations for speed charge on highways, targeting 100,000 charging points in 2022.
After more than 15 years of experience within the company, with a background in electrical engineering, marketing, and business, Caroline has been working as Sales Manager for Buildings and Digital Project Director since 2016. After four years, she accepted the challenge to join the eMobility team in the middle of 2020, with the pandemic disrupting everything around us. She believes that is an urgency to act against climate change and wants to be involved directly in it.
«A technological and environmental shift needs to be taken quickly if we want to reduce the carbon footprint and ensure a net-zero future mobility».
Electric mobility market confirmed resilience in 2020
Time demonstrated that electric mobility kept strong resilient last year, with a high increase in EV market share worldwide of 39% versus the decrease of 14% in ICE cars. However, despite the good shape seen in this industry, there are still some battles to face in a fast-paced evolving market: infrastructure scalability, regulatory compliance, and the need for energy management in buildings to support the rise in energy demand. Caroline is ready to confront all of them, helping customers with specific and right solutions to their concrete needs.
«To meet a strong need for EV infrastructure we must provide solutions for maximizing value for our customers and excel in user experience. A charging point yes, but not only: electric mobility is also energy management and electrical distribution».
She loves meeting and discussing with partners, now virtually most of the time, to find new players and succeed in innovating with them. Also, she enjoys managing her team of 17 people dedicated to eMobility in France, helping them to grow and working all together, along with partners such as electricians, automakers, retailers, Charge Points Operators (CPOs), eMobility Service Providers (eMSPs), and local communities, towards a winning strategy good for everyone.
«It is very important to understand what are the challenges which concern to the customers and to be very attentive to the opportunities to support them. This knowledge is key to guide my choices and actions».
The pandemic and the lockdowns have been very challenging, especially when it comes to working with the team. Caroline thinks that is essential to be very close to the people, listen to each person in the team to understand their needs and feelings. Plus, working at home for the last months makes it difficult to separate and balance work and personal life scenarios. Any secret? being very strict with schedule and time management, to be able to achieve professional goals and keep quality spare time for personal and family activities, such as sharing time with her pre-teen girl or reading Historic books, like the one currently on her bedside table about Versailles story.
Since International Women Day was around the corner by when this interview took place, we wanted to know any advice from Caroline to other women looking forward to being sales leaders in the electric mobility world. She remembers that statistic saying that a woman applies for a job only when she considers she’s at least 80% proficient with all the requirements meanwhile a man acts completely different. Women need to dare and be confident and believe in themselves.
“Each position makes us grow and we have to face our challenges”.
About Caroline: She is Head of eMobility Sales in France, with more than 15 years of experience at Schneider Electric, 12 of them in commercial positions.
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