Meet the crew that will be tuning your sales engine.
Sales Engine is a tools and services firm founded on the principle that leaders should treat sales as the engine of their business.
“We got a group of sales leaders and sales professionals together worldwide to think about how we drive our sales performance and how we fine-tune our sales engine. Honestly, this is a group of people who thought they had it all figured out. And out of the session, out of the work we did with Craig, we realized that we should be doing a lot of things differently and we should be thinking differently, and particularly the way that we present, the way we talk about ourselves, and the way we articulate our stories to our clients. Truth be told, we have a lot to learn there. Craig and his team did a lot of work in challenging us and really thinking about how to do that effectively. And most importantly, what kinds of results that could actually mean for us. At the end of the day, we are working with Craig to change that. It starts with the way we tell our stories, and the way we think about our capabilities, and I look forward to partnering with Craig for a long time as it relates to the other aspects of our business.” – Byron Matthews, Global Head of Sales Effectiveness, Mercer Management Consulting.
Nothing happens until something gets sold. We all know this, but then why do we so often underperform our objectives? Because we often do not have the right sales process and tools in place and we do not have the right combination of knowledge, skills and discipline required for sales success.
Over the past twenty years, we have built a set of sales tools critical to building a high-performance sales engine. In recent months, we have been incredibly fortunate to work with some exciting, moving and shaking people and organizations such as Mercer Management Consulting, Driehaus Capital Management, American Institutes for Research, Weathergage Capital, and Iverify. These firms have either built or tuned their sales engines and are seeing the results on the top line.
Here are our stories…
Craig Wortmann, the Founder and CEO of Sales Engine has been a professional sales person for 20 years. He spent his first year in sales being trained by IBM Corporation in the classical selling style and was the #2 performer in his year-long sales school class. Post-IBM, Craig covered three-quarters of the country selling to large retailers for a division of Dean Witter. After finishing business school at Kellogg, Craig joined a midsize consulting firm called the Forum Corporation and quickly became the firm’s new product launch and client recovery specialist.
In 2000, Craig was recruited to join a start-up company called WisdomTools as its CEO. Craig ran and grew WisdomTools and then successfully sold the company to a larger firm in 2008.
After founding Sales Engine, one of Craig’s early projects was to become the interim CEO of an interactive marketing and web strategy firm called ClearGauge after being recruited by the firm’s venture backers. Craig executed a turnaround of ClearGauge by immediately building a sales engine and developing a new web presence as well as cutting significant costs. Craig then sold the company at a high valuation to a much larger agency.
From $250,000 computer systems to $1,500,000 consulting projects and from $20 books to entire companies, Craig has been a consistent high-performer selling products and services across the B2B and B2C spectrum.
Another of Craig’s personalities (one is not enough) is that of professor. He designed and developed a course that he teaches called Entrepreneurial Selling for the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The course has quickly become one of the most popular courses at the school. He also teaches one of the core entrepreneurship courses for Chicago Booth called Building the New Venture.
Craig’s final personality is that of author. His recent book, “What’s Your Story?” looks at how leaders and sales professionals use stories to connect, inspire, and overachieve. He is co-authoring his next book with Dr. Waverly Deutsch PhD., a former venture capitalist and professor of entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth. The book provides entrepreneurs and sales people the knowledge, skills and discipline it takes to succeed in the toughest, best job there is.
That’s it.
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Jenny Poore is the Director of Sales and Digital Strategy for Sales Engine. Prior joining Sales Engine, Jenny was the top performing sales rep in the merchant sales division at Perkspot, the leading provider of online benefits and employee perks programs. During her tenure, Jenny demonstrated that she is a master of the cold call, by consistently reaching an average of 125% of each quarterly sales goal. She sought and landed Fortune 500 and other affinity clients, adding over 60 new merchants to PerkSpot’s employee discount offering within 12 months.
Jenny is a native of the Midwest and a graduate of DePaul University’s International Studies program. While concentrating on environmental policy studies, she interned in the European Union in Brussels as the Representative Assistant for member, Lívia Járóka. Upon returning to the States, she then was recruited to serve as a Communications Intern at the Congress for New Urbanism, a Chicago-based organization dedicated to sustainability and urban planning principles. To promote the cause, Jenny relied on her multifaceted social media and marketing skills to bring results.
While Jenny spends most of her time in the “cloud” at Sales Engine, on the weekends she can be found on the ground running along the lakefront honing her hard earned Boston Marathon-qualifier time or working in coffee shops all over the city of Chicago.
