The Sales Development Blog

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How to Build a Launching Pad for High Tech Salespeople

Your first sales position should be a launching pad, and not merely a stepping stone.

With that belief as our guiding tenet, Marc Gonyea and I started memoryBlue in 2002. From the beginning, we felt that if we could create the sales positions that we wish existed when we graduated from college, we could build a company full of driven, talented people. In turn, those people would become the face of our brand, and help us provide superior service to the most sophisticated companies in the high tech industry.

To get there, our vision was to develop a high tech sales position that offered extensive and consistent training, enabling our people to build coveted sales skills quicker than anywhere else. Accountability, coaching, and mentoring would be paramount to our collective success, and we aimed to provide it in spades. For the last decade, Marc and I poured our hearts and souls into creating that reality.

Along the way, we realized that the development of sales skills was only part of the solution. What if we could parlay all the sales skills we were teaching with exposure to some of the industry’s most successful executives?  The opportunity to showcase one’s sales game in front of key industry players would be something special.

Our team would have the opportunity to connect with CEOs, VPs of Sales and Marketing, Sales Managers, and Field Sales Executives, all of whom would have a front row seat in watching our people flex their selling muscles. This would enable our folks to build a lucrative network of influential professionals that they normally wouldn’t have the opportunity to work with.

All the professional development and exposure would be great, but what good would it be if our people were forbidden to act on it?

We realized that we were still missing a piece of the ideal sales position: upward mobility.

Instead of holding our people back, we began encouraging them to go work directly for their clients or other industry heavyweights in roles that offered more responsibility and earning potential.

A decade later, we had achieved exactly what we had set out to do—provide a launching pad for high tech salespeople. More than 50 people successfully walked the path we outlined, validated the blueprint, and continue to serve as ambassadors for the company as memoryBlue Alumni.

What came next was a decision that would shape the future of our company and our people for the next decade and beyond.

 

Since cofounding memoryBlue in 2002, Chris has helped provide inside sales resources to more than 1,000 high tech companies, and has hired, placed, or evaluated thousands of high tech sales professionals. Chris spearheads memoryBlue recruiting services, and is passionate about developing sales talent that generates results.

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