David Masover is an independent sales force development consultant and author currently based in Budapest, Hungary.  David has been working in sales and sales related projects for over 20 years.  While there are no shortage of details, tactics, methods and strategies that David has acquired, used and developed in this time, there is also a core philosophy that permeates the complete range of his professional endeavors:

Success is most likely to come when:

• • • • People with the right skills
        Execute those skills with discipline
        Within the context of a well defined process

David’s new book, Mastering Your Sales Process, the books in his pipeline, his consulting practice and his entrepreneurial endeavors all revolve around these core principles.

David often reminds his clients, colleagues and friends of the scene in the movie The Matrix where Neo starts to see the world around him as the flowing green numbers, after which his can execute within his world at a supremely high level of effectiveness.  David asserts that this is a great analogy for all endeavors.  Whether it is playing a musical instrument, a sport, parenting, investing or an occupation, there comes a time (after a huge amount of practice, refinement, improvement, etc.) when what once seemed difficult and fragmented comes together in a core philosophy of clean simplicity.  The philosophy provides a context for all individual actions, and a cohesiveness around the bulk of the activity.  Warren Buffet said it well about investing:  It is simple, but not easy.

Sales is also simple but not easy, according to David.  The book(s) and all of Davids work is anchored in this perspective, a perspective borne of a 20 year career filled with experimentation, refinement, execution, adjustment, and the satisfaction of living a life of self-defined success.  Here are some of the professional influences over that 20 year career that led David to reach these conclusions, and which allow him to provide the value of his experience though his books, his consulting practice and his entrepreneurial collaborations:

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS OF DAVID MASOVER

1989
David gets his first “real job” after graduating from college.  The job included purchasing office supplies and equipment for a medium sized company.  David quickly came to realize that some of his suppliers had sales people who were good resources for him as he learned his new job, and some that offered no help at all.  David worked with several effective, helpful sales people to arrange long term purchasing agreements that saved his company thousands of dollars each month.  He then parlayed those savings into a doubling of his salary by negotiating with the president of the company.  David realized that sales and negotiation were much more fun than purchasing and facilities management.

1991
David gets his first sales job for a distributor of computer supplies.  His sales training there consisted of two days of the president of the company telling him the mechanics of how a computer floppy disc worked, and how a laser toner cartridge could be refilled.  He was then shown his desk, phone, and the rolodex of the person who left and made a place for him there.  That was it.  David struggled in this first job in sales, but the poor training he got, and the incremental success he found by reading sales books on his own time laid the foundations for future success, and a perspective on sales, sales management and sales training that continues to serve him well 20 years later as an author and consultant.

1992
The computer supply company job was short lived (beyond the bad training and poor management, the product was a simple commodity, and not to much fun for a rookie sales person to sell).  After a brief engagement in print advertising that ended abruptly when David’s sales manager tried to cheat him out of his first commissions, David discovered the Promotional Products industry.  It was love at first sight.  Gazing at the corporate logo’d merchandise in the showroom of his first employer in the business, David knew this was something special.  He did not yet know why and what to do with it, but there was a strong gut feeling, and it turned out to be right!

David spent the next 7 years working in the Promotional Products industry, learning everything he could about how to imprint items, how to use them in a variety of programs, how the industry worked from every angle.  This along with a continued study and refinement of sales techniques and processes was the key to David’s increasing success.  The macro lesson was that if a sales person could provide service and expertise, the customer would buy from him, not focus on price, and come back for additional purchases based on the value that the sales person added to the transaction.

It also struck David that very few other sales people took such a disciplined approach.  Among his peers, David was one of the few who regularly attended not only trade shows, but the conferences where issues related to the industry were explored.  He was one of the few who read the industry publications, visited manufacturers to learn how they worked and what was important to them when receiving order instructions, and reading sales books to improve his skills and execution.

1999
When the “dot com” wave swept over silicon valley, where David worked, his disciplined approach to promotional products paid off.  A staff member of a former client company decided to pursue venture capital funding for an online promotional products company.  This staff member asked the marketing manager if he knew anyone in the business.  David lost the account when the new marketing manager came on board, because this marketing manager had a father-in-law who sold promotional products.  In spite of this, the marketing manager suggested David for the dot-com adventure, because he knew that the needs of the start up company included the kind of knowledge that David had worked to acquire and had demonstrated to the client during the time they worked together.

In the first half of 1999 David helped a group of entrepreneurs brought together for this project to build a business plan and to raise venture capital.  In May of 1999, Branders.com was born with it’s first capital infusion of $2 million dollars.

Over the next five years, David worked with vendors, customers, the sales group and with senior management to help guide Branders through the first dot com bust, and into the current position of the largest and fastest growing online provider of promotional products. 

2002
Still with Branders.com, it became clear that sales was a key component of success, and after many experiments in management, compensation and hiring, a good system for those three elements had been established.  The company hired 80 new sales people in a year, and David quickly saw the key gap.  The new salespeople were getting on the phone with clients and had no idea what to say.  They lacked the expertise in both product and sales process that led David to his own personal success in the industry.  After arguing with the CEO, who wanted David to remain focussed on the front lines of the sales organization, David was granted the opportunity to pilot a home grown sales training project.  A year later, the data was evaluated, and David was made the full time sales trainer based on the measurable results of his self-developed programs.

2004
Along the way, David spent a little bit of time not working, and during this time he met, married and had a son with Kata, his lovely wife from Hungary.  David and Kata decided to try living in Hungary, which was something that Kata had not experienced since she was a teenager.  David decided to continue his career in his new home as a sales trainer.

2005
David was pleased to learn that sales problems in Hungary were pretty much the same as they were in America, and he was able to provide value to clients in Hungary with his training programs.  However, he soon realized that sales training alone was not enough.  If the sales people in the room were the wrong people, had the wrong skills, were poorly managed or compensated, were not held accountable for results, etc., then no amount or quality of sales training would help. 

2006
As a result of his learning and his experiences, David expanded his offering to include sales force assessment and consulting services.

2006+
As a consultant, David worked not only with direct sales organizations, but also with several entrepreneurial start up companies including an online sales recruiting company, a software development company, an online auction company  and a light bulb manufacturer.  This allowed experience in such new and diverse subjects and international negotiation, online marketing, corporate governance, offshore corporate structures, manufacturing issues, international distribution,

2008-9
The core idea for Mastering Your Sales Process was born and executed, and with more books in the pipeline, and new entrepreneurial adventure underway in Medical Tourism, and an economic crisis to help clients manage, the journey continues....

End of 2009
Mastering Your Sales Process is (to be)released, and the story continues on the blog.  Follow me on Twitter to be sure to stay current on blog posts!