Nicholas Read's first book, Selling to the C-Suite (McGraw Hill, 2010), is the result of a 10-year global study — the largest of its kind — to learn how executives get involved in the corporate buying cycle, and what salespeople need to do to become Trusted Advisors at that level. Sales thought leader Neil Rackham (author of SPIN Selling and Rethinking the Sales Force) wrote the book's Foreword, citing it as “worth its weight in commission checks”. Global response to this book as a tentpole event for the sales profession marks it as something rare and welcome.
Born in the UK and raised in Australia, Nic anchored a suburban newspaper column at age 14 and planned a career in broadcast journalism. A summer sales job irrevocably changed this path when he became fascinated by the psychology, science and art of dealmaking. After an early career selling behind the counter, door-to-door, and on the showroom floor, he went on the road as an account director with an advertising agency, later moving into management.
At 21 he negotiated distributor rights with NEC and Motorola, and invented the model of selling mobile phones with a price tag of $10,000 through retail kiosks when they were a new technology, building the company one person at a time until it became a national enterprise. After selling this company to a global telecom brand, Nic hired several hundred telemarketers and opened a purpose-built call center for outsourced lead generation to the financial services industry, later acquired by a national financial services brand. His model for demand creation via a call center also became a template the industry adopted as a standard.
His middle career saw Nic headhunted by the chairman of The Pirbic Group, Britain’s oldest sales consultancy, where he worked across the UK with the Boards of private and listed companies to solve their revenue growth challenges. His work focused on executive mentoring, go-to-market sales strategy, demand creation, pipeline reporting, and re-engineering out-of-date sales and marketing systems, processes and skills. For several years he was based in Germany as sales operations manager for software giant SAS Institute, working across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
His later career saw Nic following the wave of globalization to Asia following China’s entry into the WTO, where he lived as a local and immersed himself in the business cultures of Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney, consulting to companies that include Celestica, Cisco, EMC, Fuji Xerox, KPMG, Microsoft, National Australia Bank, Schlumberger, Symrise and other multinational companies expanding in Asia and around the world.
Nic has served as visiting professor for the Hewlett Packard Business School in Beijing China, was retained as the Executive Director for Ernst & Young’s revenue growth & risk services practice, and has been awarded the International Business Award for Best Sales Trainer by a panel of judges that include Donald Trump, Gary Hamel and Tony Robbins. He has also delivered keynote and other presentations for the Strategic Account Management Association, the Selling Power Sales Leadership Conference, the HR Directors Forum, the Sales Leadership Summit, the Human Performance Institute, the Ernst & Young CEO Revenue Growth Series of Seminars, and other public events for the past 20 years.
Author of award-winning sales training workshops sold in more than 40 countries, Nic now runs international consulting firm SalesLabs from New York. He also serves on the board of HE3, a cleantech company developing technology to harvest potable water from the atmosphere to solve the world’s water crisis, and is advisor to the HopeDolls Foundation, a not-for-profit children’s charity.
Selling to the C-Suite: What Every Executive Wants You to Know About Successfully Selling to the Top