During his highly successful sales career, Conrad Elnes analyzed the research that was
being conducted on America's top salespeople.  The result was his book, "Inside Secrets Of Outstanding Salespeople" (Prentice-Hall) that introduced him to salespeople throughout the world.  Dozens of his articles have been published in national sales journals, and many credit his ideas for increasing their sales to spectacular levels.  You can learn and employ his ideas to increase your sales and enhance your career.

Conrad earned his Master of Arts in Training (M.A.T.) Degree from Washington State University.  He has been the lead trainer for Sales Training Institute (STI) since 1988 when he authored STI's QUAD-TRAK® Consultative Selling Program, Major Account Selling Strategies and PHONE-TRAK Tele-Prospecting Program.  In addition, his Customer Satisfaction PLUS is employed by many top companies to improve their service groups.  His programs have established STI as a key player on the contemporary training scene.
Conrad is an interesting and humorous speaker who has addressed hundreds of groups, as diverse as sales representatives, bank officers and professional consultants.  He travels extensively in order to provide custom training for companies such as Motorola, Allstate, Milliman (Consultants), Alcan Aluminum and Polycom Videoconferencing.  Conrad is also Chairman of the Board for STI International®. 

"Your competitors are either a little bit ahead of you, or a bit behind and striving to surpass you.  Your choices?  Improve your skills, or settle for being second best.

Michael Hendren, author of Spiritual Capitalism and Sales Management Mastery, embodies a remarkable success story.  He grew up in abject poverty in the cotton fields of Atoka, Tennessee, a small country town of 113 people.  He lived in a house with no electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing and began working in the cotton fields at age seven.  He was severely abused during his childhood which included hundreds of beatings with different instruments, sometimes within a breath of his life. 

Yet he became the billion-dollar brain behind Ascend Communications, a small company that grew wildly under his maverick leadership.  While Ascend's CEO guided product development, Hendren served as the company's motivational master, field operations architect, and sales leader.  As Executive Vice President for World-Wide Field Operations, he made millions leading an organization that created the fastest growing company in the history of American business.  Against giant competitors, Ascend grew in sales from $12 million to over $1.6 billion in only six years, went from 30 employees to 3,000, was highly profitable, and created a market value of $24 billion. After the company was sold to Lucent Technologies, he retired to become a full-time Dad, study world theologies, and write about his unique life and professional experience. Spiritual Capitalism is his successful business roadmap. 

Hendren began his career in an administrative position with Honeywell's computer division.  But he soon became one of the company's top salesmen worldwide.  In his first management position, he took the poorest performing office in the country and, in only twelve months, transformed it into the top-ranked operation. His non-traditional approach to leadership launched him on a career characterized by achieving what others did not think possible.  He led successful corporate turnarounds before joining Ascend, where, he once again, worked his miracle and realized the ultimate confirmation of the power of his contrarian approach to building companies, a business philosophy he defined as Spiritual Capitalism.  Its universal application allowed him to replicate the success he experienced in the US market internationally in Germany, France, England, China, Japan, and South America.

While Mr. Hendren employs strong core competencies in building strength organizations, developing strategic and tactical initiatives, and quantum goal setting, what makes this innovator so different is his spirit and compelling love for others.  Business should not be about rules, policy manuals, and politics.  That road will kill the soul and minimize corporate performance.  He believes his philosophy of Spiritual Capitalism, which integrates the mind, heart, and spirit with business acumen, holds the key to quantum financial performance for the corporation and self-actualization for its employees. Certainly his unique life experience and professional accomplishments underscore the power and efficacy of this break-through business strategy. 

With over two decades of international consulting in sales and marketing effectiveness, LaVon Koerner is recognized worldwide as a leading expert in diagnosing and transforming sales and marketing organizations. LaVon passionately believes that companies and people can tap systematic disciplines and rigorous analysis to unleash profitable revenues and professionalize the business of sales.

LaVon co-founded Revenue Storm in 2001 to offer to companies worldwide a suite of comprehensive, proven tools and techniques for profitable revenue growth. As Chief Revenue Officer, LaVon helps organizations achieve revenue acceleration through demand creation and reap immediate, sustainable gains.

Prior to co-founding Revenue Storm, LaVon spent fifteen years with Holden Corporation, ultimately as its president. LaVon developed Holden’s core training methodology, which has been installed in hundreds of organizations worldwide. Called upon as both a thought leader and coach, LaVon traveled the globe to help organizations uncover the true cost of sales.

A major portion of LaVon’s work involves evaluating and assisting under-leveraged sales and marketing organizations, and analyzing market dynamics in a wide array of industries. As a result, he has helped create sales processes that reduce the cost of sales while increasing revenue through aggressive market share acquisition.
LaVon has been privileged to help many of today’s Fortune 500 companies achieve sales excellence, including EDS, Sun Microsystems, Ericsson, British Telecom, Ernst and Young, and Microsoft. He is uniquely positioned at the forefront of the design and installation of sales and marketing methodologies.
In demand as a speaker, LaVon’s passionate and entertaining style endears him to his audiences—whether at private workshops, executive coaching, annual sales meetings or industry conventions, including the Strategic Account Management Association and the International Conference on Organizational Development, where he spoke alongside former President George Bush.

LaVon is the author of numerous articles, papers and an upcoming book series. His article “Revenue Storm Sales Analysis of US Presidential Campaign” captured news media and analyst attention.

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. The company provided expertise and assistance to their clients in these, among other critical areas: hiring of top sales professionals; more effective positioning in the eyes of industry analysts; development of corporate and selling strategies to overcome tough competitors; increasing compliance by their sales organizations to sales methodologies that were installed; and re-engineering their selling efforts to achieve new levels of credibility and differentiation with higher-level customer executives. Among the many companies with whom Dave worked are: ALLTEL Corporation, CGI-AMS, ASAP Software, AT&T, BASF, Bayer, Cardo, Centra Software, Inc., Convergys, Enterprise Ireland, Hewlett Packard Company, Honeywell, IBM Corporation, Infor, Intermec, The Irish Software Association, Global Crossing, Ltd., Hall-Kinion (Kforce, Inc.), Kronos, Lorentzen-Wettre, MCI, Manugistics, Inc., MAPICS, Inc., Matrikon, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Microsoft, NEC Japan, NPD Group, Oracle Corporation, Pitney Bowes, Progress Software Corporation, RCM Technologies, Richardson Electronics, Inc., Siemens Energy and Automation, Standard and Poor's, SunGard, Towers Perrin, Unisys, United Technologies, VSP (Vision Service Plan) and Xerox Office Systems.

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. Dave understands what works and what doesn't when it comes to the ever dynamic challenges of gaining and maintaining competitive advantage through sales organization effectiveness.

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. Dave is a professional member of the National Speakers Association as well as a member of Sales and Marketing Executives International (SMEI), NASP, ASTD and AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association). He is a member of the Executive Advisory Board of the Fisher Institute for Professional Selling, one of the many institutions of higher learning where his book, How Winners Sell is being used.

Ed Shineman is a consulting authority and thought leader on how to more effectively market and sell education-related products and services.
Ed's 30 years of training marketing and general management experience include chief marketing officer and division VP assignments with Xerox Learning Systems and Learning International and U.S. sales & marketing responsibility for Digital Equipment Corporation's $300 million customer education business.

As founder and CEO of Xerox's Personal Learning Systems business, Shineman introduced subscription-based desktop learning, pioneered in multimedia and computer-based instruction, and was responsible for coining the now ubiquitous term "Discovery Learning." Later, at Digital he invented subscription-based volume purchase plans blending classroom learning, technology-based training and consulting services.

FUSION, the consulting organization Ed founded in 1992, works with many leading education firms including Pearson Education, Learning Tree, AchieveGlobal, Advantage Performance Group, Communispond, DDI, IIR/Informa, Huthwaite and NETg. In addition he has worked with Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Business Objects, PeopleSoft, Parametric Technologies and other high tech customer education organizations. For a more complete list, please see the FUSION training marketing clients page.

Client assignments have included: competitive positioning, lead generation, event promotion, new product launch, media advertising, Website development, solutions pricing, direct marketing, teleselling, sales potentials planning, new venture assessment, competitive benchmarking and strategic planning.

A graduate of Cornell University, Ed Shineman began his career with several leading Madison Avenue ad agencies, where he was awarded ANDY and EFFIE awards for creative excellence as well as a gold medal from the International Society of Business Communicators. He has spoken on marketing topics at the International Direct Marketing Conference, the Direct Marketing Club of New York, the Instructional Systems Association and at Harvard Business School. He has twice been honored to serve as a direct marketing industry John Caples Finals Awards judge.

As part of his training marketing practice, Ed Shineman publishes Training Business E-Visory, an e-mail advisory service that reaches more than 3,000 education company owners and executives.

An avid musician and tennis player, Ed resides with his wife Jan and four children in the Boston suburb of Sudbury, Massachusetts.

Prior to creating Action Selling in 1990, Duane Sparks owned and managed a computer company named Currentech.  During the 1980s, even though the computer industry as a whole was growing at exponential rates, Currentech grew six times faster than the industry average. This was only possible because of the way Duane taught his people to sell. In 1989, he sold the company and decided to package Action Selling into a sustainable way to boost the performance of salespeople in any industry.

Five years of initial research focused on developing a clear understanding of exactly which selling skills had the greatest impact on performance change. Five Critical Selling Skills emerged: Buyer/Seller Relationship, Sales Call Planning, Questioning, Presenting and Gaining Commitment.

Research into the sales-training industry turned up another key fact. The greatest weakness of Action Selling's competitors was their failure to ensure that skills and knowledge learned in class actually got applied on the job. Two decades later, that is still our competitors' biggest weakness. In learning theory, it's known as the problem of "transfer." You can teach people to do something in class, but getting them to do it that way in the field is a different thing altogether.

In 1995, Action Selling began assessing the skills of salespeople with the use of its validated Selling Skills Assessment. This assessment technology has been continually refined. To date, more than 300,000 salespeople have been assessed, trained, certified, and measured against standards of performance change. No other company has developed anything remotely comparable to this database of skill measurement and corresponding performance change.
The knowledge we have gained has been completely incorporated into the Action Selling sustainable sales training program. That is why Action Selling can claim these major sales training innovations:

1. When we say that Action Selling teaches the Five Critical Selling Skills, this is not just a marketing boast. These skills are trainable, measurable, and have the greatest impact on performance change. We have the research to prove it.
2. Action Selling transfers more skills into the field than any other training methodology.  This is ensured by our LearningLink™ technology, which incorporates proven adult-learning principles for reinforcement, measurement, customization and Best Sales Practices.
3. Research proves that once salespeople become certified on Action Selling, their performance improves at six times the rate of salespeople who are not trained on Action Selling.

The Action Selling sales training program trains and certifies salespeople in the critical selling skills that have the greatest impact on sales performance. And from the ground up, our programs are designed to ensure that those critical selling skills are not only "learned" but used, consistently, in the field.