Alumni Spotlight: Michael Breslin Blazes a Path

Michael Breslin currently serves as Director, Corporate Accounts, for CenTrak, one of the fastest growing healthcare technology companies in North America. He has close to a decade of high-tech sales success under his belt and is the reigning 2019 memoryBlue Alumni of the Year award winner. We recently spoke with him to gain insights on just what it takes to make it in professional high-tech sales – and his sage advice simply cannot be ignored.

Alumni are a big part of what makes memoryBlue tick. They have helped make memoryBlue one of the leaders in the outsourced sales development industry and this thundering herd of highly accomplished sales pros continue to support the company long after they have moved on in their careers.

Within this distinguished group, the company holds a very special place of honor reserved for some of the biggest achievers – namely, the winners of our annual Alumni of the Year competition. This award recognizes individuals who put together a “career year” in professional sales and routinely draws 35-50 well-qualified applicants every year.

Michael Breslin, the 2019 Alumni of the Year award winner, is a shining example of just how well the memoryBlue model can work for aspiring overachievers.

After a strong run as an SDR, Breslin left memoryBlue in early 2013 after being hired out directly by his high-tech client. Excited to tackle this great new challenge, things took an unfortunate shift for Breslin when a major downsizing resulted in the company cutting over three quarters of their workforce.

Due to the difficult business circumstances, he parted ways with the firm and landed a job at CenTrak later that same year (the company he has now been with ever since). No matter where he has gone, however, the training he received at memoryBlue has played a big role in his career and his professional development.

“memoryBlue is really all about learning that base, building that foundation — it is teaching you the fundamentals of selling,” Breslin said. “That, as it translates to your next step, is you now know what it takes to work, what it is like in a grueling environment and what it means to hustle.”

“I loved the book clubs, where we were assigned a book, and someone would have to present on that book. Reading those books and gaining that knowledge is something I didn’t do before working at memoryBlue, and it was inspirational. Today, I have a whole collection of books on my bookshelf that are now a huge influence on my life, and I would say memoryBlue gave me that foundation.”

Unlike many new hires at memoryBlue, Breslin had previous sales development experience. He worked for a company that handed him a piece of paper, told him to stick to the script, and call sales prospects all day long. He described it as “chaos” and realized how beneficial it is for a person’s career to receive memoryBlue’s training straight out of college.

Another thing that Breslin believes is beneficial to a person’s career, regardless of career field, is mentorship. Finding mentors throughout his career has been one of the best avenues for continued learning for Breslin.

“When you are at memoryBlue, you are with a lot of like-minded peers and people that are close in age to you,” Breslin said. “When you move on to new environments, there can be people that have 30-plus years of experience in your career field. For me, mentors have provided the best value from an educational and learning experience.”

The continued learning Breslin has received throughout his career has helped him move up quickly at CenTrak, where he is now the Director of Corporate Accounts.

One Step at a Time

Breslin oversees a team of sales executives tasked with ensuring steady revenue growth for one of the largest IT providers to the healthcare industry. Under his watch, Breslin’s team has closed some of the biggest deals in company history, helping surpass their annual quota goal in the last fiscal year to the tune of a whopping 215% of quota met.

Most deals Breslin is involved in are considered “Enterprise” deals – these are deals that have sales cycles which can last more than a year. Breslin, specifically, focuses on sales cycles that average a minimum of 24 months. Enterprise sales is a big-time goal of many memoryBlue employees, and Breslin knows what it takes to get to that level in the sales world.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” Breslin said. “People get so stuck and hung up on where they are, how they are going to get on to bigger and better things, and listening to the different things that people are telling them they have to do as it relates to their day-to-day work.”

“All that stuff is really meaningless. If you can focus on what the real goal is, everything else will go away. Whether the real goal is to hit your quota and get to the next position, or to earn an enterprise sales role, focus on that and don’t worry as much about the if, how, when and why aspects.”

Breslin still stays involved with memoryBlue, talking with current and former memoryBlue employees regularly. He attends company outings, one of the best elements of being a part of the memoryBlue alumni network, on a regular basis and is always willing to help anyone however he can.

When looking back at his time at memoryBlue and how it has shaped his career, Breslin believes that the company played a major role in his current success. From helping him learn the foundations of sales to teaching him how to work hard every day in order to win, Breslin constantly utilizes skills he learned at memoryBlue.

Back when Breslin first entered the sales world, he didn’t exactly know what he wanted to do within the technology sales industry. That’s common for early-stage sales pros. In fact, often times, newcomers to sales aren’t even sure if they want to do sales at all. For those that are in the same boat as Breslin was when he started in sales, evaluating if memoryBlue is the right place to launch a sales career, he has one emphatic piece of advice:

“Do it.”

To learn how memoryBlue helps highly motivated individuals like Michael launch lucrative careers in professional high-tech sales, visit our Careers section now.