While my basic sales training started as a child in my father’s lumber yard, my REAL sales career began when I started in the insurance business. Right from the start, I was constantly in the top 15 out of 1800 sales reps in the company. I credit my success to the fact that I threw out the company's "canned" sales calls and created my own that worked better for my own personal style.
In 1992 I joined a multinational advertising company as a salesperson in Toronto, Canada and was promoted to Branch Manager just 9 months later, in March/1993. It was the worst producing office out of 47 offices. That year at the Company Convention, I was awarded the Most Improved Office award taking the Toronto office from 47th to 3rd place in just 9 months. At that meeting in Los Angeles, they promoted me to National Sales Director and I was told to go to all of the other offices and do “whatever the H*** you did in Toronto!”. I travelled all over North America and we spent a lot of time and energy training people the right way to do things and got rid of a lot of bad habits. We went from $28M in sales to $98M in six years!
In 1998 I started my own publishing company and I spent all of my time training and working in the field with salespeople. I sold the company in 2007 when I got an offer I literally couldn’t refuse.
There are three critical ‘apex’ points in a sales call that salespeople struggle with. The first is getting past the Gatekeeper, the second is having a “qualifying” conversation with the decision-maker. The third - and some salespeople struggle with this - is actually asking for the sale.
Over my career I have owned eight businesses in eight industries. From retail, to manufacturing, logistics to advertising. The result is that my training sessions are custom designed for your industry.
I've been doing this long enough to know how to adjust my training to the type of business you are in, the type of client you are looking for, and making the sales call a lot more 'personable' than a canned approach.
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