From Art School to MBA- Mark Donnolo, Author of The Innovative Sale

So you mentioned that you went to art school. So you came at this from the other side. You were on the creative side, then you got your mba, and now you're involved in sales strategy. So how challenging was that for you to go from the creative to the business side?

Well, it didn't all happen at once. I was one of those kids when I was growing up that I could draw just about anything. I was the kid that I'd sit there and be drawing something, and people would walk by and they'd go, hey, Leonardo, what are you doing? That was a natural thing for me. So the natural thing for me to then do is to go to art school. So I did that. And I became a designer in New York back in the 80s, and I just dated myself there. But as I was working in design, I figured out that I really enjoyed the business side of design, the marketing side of design. And I thought about how I might get some more experience in that area. And as fate would have it, I was rooming with a bunch of guys that were Wall street stockbrokers. And around that time period, after they had been out of their undergrad school for a few years, they started to go back to business school. And I helped one of the guys move to business school. And as we were unloading the truck, I took a tour around the school, and I thought, wow, this is great. I really like this. And I said to myself, this is what I need to do. I need to better understand the business side. So I ended up going and getting an MBA to the dismay of all the. The people in the arts that I was friends with. They couldn't figure out why I was doing that. So what happened was, as I got out of business school, I had to take the whole design and the whole art thing, and I had to put that in the background, put it in the closet, if you will, because nobody interviewing somebody coming out of business school then would take the art guy seriously for a real business job. So I just put that away. So I did the business thing for a number of years, but what I realized was that a lot of the creative principles that I had learned in the design world applied to what we were doing in sales. And I was in a consulting role, working with a lot of different sales organizations. And I realized what we were doing was we were helping them to think differently, to come up with different answers that would help them in the market. And I said, hey, you know, this actually is something we need to talk more broadly about. It goes beyond just going through the numbers and looking for benchmarks, but it's helping them to think differently. So it wasn't all one step or all one process. It happened over a period of years until it finally came full circle. And I said, yes, this really does fit together. Hence the idea of sales innovation and the innovative sale.