Antoine Gigomas welcomes Jennifer Sitruk, Managing Director France & Belgium at EGYM Wellpass, in this new episode of MuzzOsphère. She joined the company, then called Gymlib, in February 2021, in the middle of lockdown, at a time when gyms were closed and its product was running at a crawl.
Head of Sales when she arrived, she took over a team of eight with a clear mandate: prepare the commercial recovery rather than chase immediate results. She grew it to around fifty people, structured the sales processes, went through the company's acquisition by the German group EGYM and led a change of billing model to align the interests of Wellpass and its clients.
Beyond the growth figures, this conversation looks at how to preserve a company culture after an acquisition, how to delegate without losing control, and how to build artificial intelligence into the day-to-day running of a sales organisation.
rebuilding a sales team in the middle of a health crisis
Jennifer Sitruk joined Gymlib in February 2021, during the second lockdown. Gyms were closed, and the product, a gym aggregator, could not run at full potential despite a fallback digital offering. The sales team, eight people split between BDRs and Account Executives, was demoralised: several had just come off furlough.
Rather than aiming for immediate results, impossible in that context, she set a medium-term course: understand the pre-crisis KPIs and sales ratios to rebuild a sales engine ready to run as soon as gyms reopened, or even before. To get the team back on board, she bet on total transparency rather than can-do rhetoric.
I'll tell you everything, and we'll get there together.
growing from eight to fifty salespeople
The team's growth rested first on tools and processes shared by everyone. A sales bible formalises objection handling, Cobra makes commissions and accelerator mechanisms visible in real time, and Mojo records calls so they can be used for coaching.
Hiring, for its part, is calibrated on culture as much as on skills: Jennifer Sitruk favours people who help each other over lone high performers, even if it means turning down a referral from a very good salesperson when the personal chemistry isn't there. Middle management, with team leads dedicated first to BDRs and then to Account Executives, was introduced as soon as the team reached about ten people, for lack of time to train junior profiles properly.
I want a team that really helps each other, I'm not looking for sharks working alone.
changing the billing model without breaking sales momentum
Gymlib originally billed its clients based on a number of subscribers estimated in advance, which could make the company lose money on some accounts or, conversely, make a client pay for subscribers it didn't have. Moving to billing based on the actual number of subscribers aims to align the interests of the company and its clients.
The change required an in-depth overhaul of the commission system, less favourable in the short term for salespeople used to a fixed amount at signing. Jennifer Sitruk supported the transition with concrete use cases, repeated kick-offs, and a temporary bonus on accounts signed under the new model rather than a ban on the old one.
Our interest today is clearly to say: tomorrow you roll out Wellpass, and I want it to be a huge hit at your company.
preserving the culture after an acquisition
The acquisition of Gymlib by the German group EGYM, which gave rise to EGYM Wellpass, could have shaken up the French team. Jennifer Sitruk saw the opposite: the two organisations shared common values, identified from the very first exchanges between the management teams, which made the integration easier.
Local habits, such as the two-hour lunch break tied to many salespeople's workouts, were kept despite different practices in Germany. On hiring, team members are systematically involved in the process to check cultural alignment with candidates, and a common interview framework is shared across countries.
We've managed to keep a culture that's still very similar to Gymlib five years ago.
delegating and putting AI to work for sales management
After the acquisition, her new manager gave her blunt feedback: she was on every topic, at the risk of burning out and depriving her middle managers of autonomy. She then delegated client meetings and some of the internal projects to her managers, while keeping a steering committee to make sure major decisions stayed aligned.
At the same time, she encourages the use of artificial intelligence at every level of the sales team. She built her own daily routine that summarises her priorities from her emails, Slack and her to-do list, and rolled out NotebookLM so her teams can query their sales materials and call recordings directly when handling an objection.
We're rolling out Claude, everyone's using it.
the guest: Jennifer Sitruk
Jennifer Sitruk built her sales career in international, fast-scaling environments, notably at Smartbox and then Edenred. She joined Gymlib, since renamed EGYM Wellpass, in February 2021 as Head of Sales, with a team of eight, in the middle of lockdown. She grew it to around fifty people, went through the company's acquisition by the German group EGYM and led the billing model change that came with this new identity. Now Managing Director France & Belgium at EGYM Wellpass, she has also launched a community for HR directors with her German management, to better understand the challenges of that function.
key takeaways
- Rebuilding a sales team coming out of a crisis means understanding the pre-crisis KPIs and ratios before aiming for post-crisis performance.
- Managerial transparency, saying what's working and what isn't, rallies a demoralised team more effectively than can-do rhetoric.
- Growing from eight to fifty salespeople requires shared tools (sales bible, call coaching) and middle management as soon as a team grows beyond about ten people.
- Changing the billing model to align interests with clients means overhauling the commission system in depth, not just the pricing.
- After an acquisition, a local culture is preserved through explicit shared values and team involvement in hiring, not by default.
- AI becomes a management tool in its own right when managers adopt it themselves first, before rolling it out to their teams.
