The Management Curve has an impressive lineup of contributors from the areas of sales management training and consulting, technology development, and sales performance research. It is doubtful of course that any reader of the blog would be familiar with every one of these contributors. So, let me take a few minutes to introduce you to each.
By the way, we're looking for a few more from each area to join the discussion. If you are a management or technology consultant, product developer, or researcher and would like to join The Management Curve's contributor panel, please contact me at [email protected].
Sales Management Thought Leaders:
Jonathan Farrington: Jonathan is CEO of The JF Consultancy and its parent, The Sales Corporation. Jonathan is a globally recognized business coach, mentor, author, and consultant, who has guided hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of individuals around the world towards optimum performance levels.
Formerly, he was the Managing Partner of The jfa Group, which he established in 1994. Challenging assignments took him from the Middle East and Africa to Europe and the USA, providing him with the opportunity to work with a number of the largest and most successful international corporations including IBM, Wang, Legal & General, Andersen Consulting, Litton Industries and The Bank of Tokyo.
Jonathan has authored in excess of three hundred skills development programs, designed a range of unique and innovative process tools and has been published extensively on a wide range of business topics including organizational and sales team development, leadership and the customer imperative.
Paul McCord: Paul is President of McCord Training; a Houston, Texas based sales training and management consulting firm. He has authored two best-selling books on sales, Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals which is recognized as the authoritative work on referral generation, and his recently released SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar.
Paul has invested over a quarter century selling, managing top producing sales teams and departments, training thousands of salespeople and managers, and consulting with companies on how to increase their sales department's effectiveness and production.
He works with companies of all sizes around the world including Microsoft, UBS, GE, Siemens, Merrill Lynch, and Merck.
James Obermayer: James is a principal in Sales Leakage Consulting, Inc., an Orange County, California based sales and marketing strategy consulting firm and a principal of Cerius Consulting. He specializes in helping small to medium-size companies identify sales and marketing leakage issues that stifle sales growth and waste valuable marketing dollars. Aside from consulting, his career has been equally divided between sales and marketing positions in business-to-business corporations.
Jim has served as Vice President, Worldwide Sales at an enterprise software company (Stac) an internet services company (Internet Products), Senior Vice President for two industry-leading inquiry management firms (IHS and AdTrack Corporation), and Vice President of Marketing for a medical device manufacturer (Brentwood Medical Products). He has also been Vice President of Sales and Marketing for a direct marketing agency (Kern Direct).
In addition, Obermayer is the author of "Managing Sales Leads, Turning Cold Prospects into Hot Customers" and "Sales & Marketing 365″. He is also co-author of "Managing Sales Leads, How to Turn Every Prospect into a Customer". In addition, he has written more than 80 articles on sales and marketing management. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and training seminars for such organizations as the Direct Marketing Association and the American Marketing Association to corporate sales meetings.
Silveraman Swaminatha: Swami is CEO of Customer Equity Solutions and has over 16 years of experience in one-to-one, relationship marketing across various industries like Automotive, Telecom, Retail, IT services, Banking & Financial Services & Insurance.
He was Executive Vice President & Head of iContract, a leading WPP one-to-one marketing services company in India. He has successfully implemented large customer relationship programs for leading companies like DHL Express, HSBC, HSBC Mutual Fund, Tata Indicom, VSNL, Shoppers' Stop, Wipro Technologies, Shell, Toyota, Bharti-AXA Insurance etc. He is a member of the Institute of Direct Marketing, London. He is also an avid blogger and runs his own blog on trends related to the emerging customer-controlled economy and how it is reengineering technology and marketing.
Jan Visser: Jan is Co-Editor of Sales Team Tools and Founder and Webmaster of Sales Marks. Jan's sales, marketing and management background have been solidly in the technology industry with over 10 years experience in various positions with Océ North America.
As co-editor of Sales Team Tools Jan examines and evaluates the various technologies used within the sales department, from CRM to social networking to blackberries, if it's useful to sales-or advertised to be-Jan is looking at it.
Michael Webb: Michael is CEO of Sales Performance Consultants, a consultancy working with companies to help identify and correct sales process issues.
Michael has helped business executives of both Fortune 500 and smaller companies apply the principles of Six Sigma and Lean to achieve greater sales and marketing results.
Michael delivered the keynote address to the first two conferences ever held on applying Six Sigma to marketing and sales. Michael has helped companies such as MAQUET, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Marriott, WaterFurnace, DDI, and many others to improve their revenue generation by identifying bottlenecks, changing behaviors, increasing close ratios, and improving forecast accuracy. He also has extensive sales training facilitation and field coaching experience with hundreds of sales people and managers in the U.S. and Canada. Michael is the author of "Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way" (Kaplan, 2006) and numerous articles. He holds several professional certifications.
Product Developers:
Razi Imam: Razi is President of Landslide Sales Workstyle Management. Razi has over 18 years experience in global marketing and business development, as well as over 10 years sales and sales management experience where he adopted the consultative and solution selling approaches. He has hired, trained and implemented a global sales force, developed a global distribution channel, and formed strategic partnerships with leading system integrators.
Razi has held executive positions with Wang Labs, IRIS Technologies, Display Systems, CoManage, and Cramer Corporation.
Patrick Stakenas: Partrick is President of ForceLogix, a Sales Performance Management system developer. Patrick has over 20 years of industry executive and entrepreneurial experience and has served as Senior Vice President of Sales and Operations at CCC Information Services, FileNet, and OpenText. He also started the US Operations for an international CRM company, where he successfully grew annual revenue to $14 million within 18 months which led to a successful acquisition. Earlier in his career, Patrick served for 13 years with Moore Corporation in various sales management and executive roles where he created the foundation for what is now ForceLogix' industry leading Sales Force Optimizer suite of solutions. He is a frequent guest lecturer on sales performance management, customer relationship management and the importance of creating customer-centric organizations.
Patrick earned his B.S. Business Administration and Marketing from Ferris State University and holds an Executive Management Certificate, Northwestern's Kellogg School of Business
Alan Timothy: Alan is Chief Scientist at i-Snapshot, a UK based Sales Performance Management system developer. Alan has degrees in Medical Bacteriology, Mathematics and an MBA form UCLA and has published extensively in Europe in the field of Data Analytics. He has been consistently named in the 50 most influential people in data in the UK.
Following a marketing analytics project in late 2005 Alan was asked by the client to apply the same quantitative approach to improving field sales performance. After investigating the likely solutions and buying every book from Amazon with Sales Management title, Alan found that nothing existed to answer the 'Sales Management' question, the client offered to assist in the development of a solution. From that assignment came i-Snapshot, launched in 2007. I-Snapshot now has clients in 8 countries and has just launched its North American operations.
Sales Performance Research:
Dave Stein: Dave is President of ES Research Group, Inc., a industry research and advisory firm focused on sales performance improvement programs and products and the companies that provide them.
After an early career as a professional trumpeter, Dave Stein held many diversified technical, sales and executive positions: programmer, systems engineer, sales representative, sales manager, director of worldwide sales development, VP of sales, VP of international operations, VP of client services and VP of strategic alliances. He worked in the technology sector for Fortune Systems Corporation, Datalogix International (acquired by Oracle Corporation), and Marcam Corporation (acquired by Invensys, plc).
In 1997 Dave founded the sales consultancy, The Stein Advantage, Inc. Through Dave's past work as a sales consultant, coach, and trainer, he has a unique view of sales methodologies, sales training approaches, and the cultural as well as business changes required for corporations to excel at the sales function.
In 2005 Dave, along with former Gartner president of research, N. Adam Rin, founded ES Research Group, Inc. Dave is quoted and recognized in leading business magazines and websites, including Fast Company, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Inc., Fortune, and Forbes. He writes the featured monthly column for Sales & Marketing Management magazine. In April 2008 Dave was appointed as Visiting Professor of Sales and Sales Management at the Dublin Institute of Technology, where he delivers seminars on the subject of international selling.
I'll introduce our new expert contributors as they come on board.
The Management Curve is a blog dedicated to discussion and debate about the impact sales metrics programs such as CRM, Sales Performance Management and Sales Force Automation Programs are having and will have on how the sales function is managed. Hosted by Paul McCord, the blog also features articles and commentary by other sales trainers, consultants, product developers, and the sales managers and salespeople who actually use the products.