Thirty-three years of experience, twenty-two of those selling and leading client projects with Mercuri, has made Barry a sought after Subject Matter Expert in Sales. Find out more about Mercuri’s Apprenticeship Managing Director including his previous life as a musician!
With over 3,000 days of delivery experience, Barry has worked in most sectors and on five continents conceptualizing and managing sales growth programmes. Working with clients as diverse as Electrolux, Booking.com, Royal Mail, Lufthansa, HSBC and Schneider Electric he has supported sales process, leadership and behavioural improvement programmes by adapting unifying concepts to meet local market conditions and demands.
Barry’s current role is synthesizing Mercuri’s vast sales expertise into the ground breaking Sales Executive Level 4 Apprenticeship qualification. Through intimate knowledge of the standard and the EPA criteria, Mercuri has crafted the content around learner needs whilst maintaining focus on the commercial realties facing employers. Barry’s perspectives on how best to utilize the massive opportunity offered by this qualification is much sought by both learning professionals and resource owners.
Insights from Barry
Rather than give you a potted history of facts and figures about Barry, we thought we’d give you an insight into his views and opinions on the following pertinent topics.
Choosing Sales as a Profession
Sales is an accidental profession. I stumbled into it after a career as a musician. Most successful sales people originally wanted to be something else! It suits a certain type of individual. Independently minded, goal driven, resilient, passionate and energetic are characteristics commonly found in the DNA of salespeople. Success in sales balances optimism with realism. Spontaneity with method. Creativity with process. Passion with discipline. The highs of sales success supercharge individual and collective motivation. The challenges can always be weathered if you have a grip on the process. The rewards can be astonishing. My temporary career in sales started thirty five years ago.
Professionalizing Sales
The days of the Lone Wolf are over. Today’s selling environment requires coordination and a team approach. At last, a nationally recognized qualification places sales where it has always belonged – amongst the top professional disciplines on which a successful G20 economy is built. Sales is now in the digital age and that, requires new skills, tools and processes. Technology is not subsuming traditional sales behaviours, it is transforming them. With professional sales leadership and steering, sales teams are now poised to lift the professional standards even higher in England through the Sales Executive Level 4 qualification.
Always learning
Is twenty years of experience in a job just that or, one year of experience repeated twenty times? The impact of technology has re drawn the sales map. Old behaviours and processes are no longer fit for purpose. This is a time for renewal and challenging old and outdated methods. Salespeople must always be learning because if you are standing still, you are actually going backward.
Commercial challenges facing businesses as we move into 2021
Commercial challenges facing businesses as we move into 2021 – 2021 will be a year like no other. An unstable market, short termism, herd anxieties, risk aversion and ring rusty organizations trying to recover match fitness whilst competing over valuable sales opportunities. If ever there was a time for clear, confident leadership, energized and athletic mental attitude and good sales planning, this is it. The starting gun for 2021 was fired weeks ago. Are you in the race yet or, didn’t you hear the bang?
To have a fighting chance of success in 2021 and beyond, we as commercial leaders and sales professsionals need to:
- Accept the new sales world is different to the old.
- Make technology a selling norm.
- Create differentiation on a level playing field.
- Strengthen the Value message.
- Handle increasing levels of buyer sophistication.
- Be a business person first and a salesperson second.
Two interesting facts about Barry
- I write books and papers on 17th century military history.
- I recorded an album in the late 80s