John Flannery built a sales training company over 20 years by focusing on repeatable process for mid-size and larger organizations. His first major client, a life-sciences distributor, signed on 14 months in and expanded from 400 people to 1,100 over six years. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, he pivoted to virtual delivery and completed 15 of 21 planned workshops that year.
Questions this video answers
20 years (celebrating 20th anniversary).
About 14 months after launching the business.
A one-year agreement for 400 people.
It expanded into a six-year agreement training 1,100 people.
21 workshops planned for 2020.
Chapters
Hi, my name is Gerhard Schwartner and welcome to Selling Power tv. Today we have a very special guest, John Flannery and he is well dressed because he is celebrating his 20th anniversary of his company. Welcome, John.
Gerhard, thank you so much. Really appreciate you making the effort to help us celebrate 20 years in a row. It's just been absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for helping us to celebrate.
Let's start with the beginning. When you first had the idea to start a company, what went through your mind?
I had a company before in the wireless industry, the early days of digital wireless technology. And I had a great business with a partnership that didn't work out. We sold that. I went to work for somebody else. And that's a hard thing for some entrepreneurs to do once you've had your own business. And as I was running that North American sales organization for a company that we sold successfully, the gentleman who was training that company approached me and suggested I look at the business model he had in place for a successful sales development training organization. And I adopted his model 20 years ago.
What made you think that there's a niche in the market for sales process?
I knew the bigger the organization, the more layers and departments and divisions and things, the less effective the process was. I could see it in the companies that I was working for at the time. And then when I met this guy who brought in process to the mid size organization that I was working for, I saw the impact that it had. And what was happening at the time was the Internet was evolving quickly and things were really changing which was disruptive to sales process. So those two things really played the part that showed me that it was time to go in and refocus on sales process.
What gave me the confidence to pull.
It off at the time I had been 13 years in sales, so I felt like I had a good amount of experience in frontline sales in sales management. And I had also built quite a base of contacts of people in my peer group as well as those who were running organizations. I thought, you know, what is next here and what is it that I want to do? And my wife asked me the same question and she said, go do it. So I did. I just got after it. Reaching out to those sales leaders.
John, when you think back 20 years, can you pick out one most memorable sale where you really outdid yourself and got spectacular results?
As I began the prospecting, something I've always been good at doing is going out and finding new business. Was 14 months into the new business and we got introduced to the president of a company in life sciences, in scientific distribution. I got introduced to the president of that company on a referral and that was the anchor tenant that took us off. It really got us going. At the time it was a one year agreement for 400 people. It turned into a six year agreement for 1100 people that we put through our sales process workshop. So that was the one that really made everything stick. It gave us some momentum. I could bring other people on and really build out the team.
What was the low moment?
The beginning of the pandemic was a strange time. We built our business on face to face training. At the time we were using GoToMeeting for virtual. Now we're zoom teams, all these other things. So the unknown. I had a book of business at the time where I had 21 workshops planned for 2020. Well, March 12th I flew back from Philadelphia and on the 13th we closed. You know, the country closed per se. It all worked out virtually is where we went. We still delivered 15 out of 21 of those workshops in the balance of the year. But it didn't happen for a couple of months. But I would say that was the low. And we did adapt to the zoom. We had to get good behind the lights with the microphones. We did 15 trainings virtually in 2020.
When you think about that massive technological change that's coming with AI, how are you going to prepare yourself to be future proof?
I'm walking right into the answer. On February 26th and 27th, I'm coming to the Selling Power AI two day conference. We're working with a couple of companies right now. The mechanism where we see the most lift for AI in our industry is in the coaching capacity. I think our ability to take a and leverage those repetitive questions and situations that come up for our customers, managers, so that we can get the opportunities and the accounts in the pipelines further down the field before a live human gets on. That's what we're working on right now. That's where we see it. I'm sure in your sessions 26 and 27, we'll see other applications, but that's what's got us excited. And we're working with the company who's in development for that now.
