Welcome Christi Schaufler to the BTM team

BTM has a new contributor, and her first post can be found here and her second here.

Please welcome Christi Schaufler to the BTM ( Building the Sales Machine) team!  She’ll be joining us in as a Sales Leader in Residence to bring a fresh new perspective to the site.  The goal of this program will be to bring in senior sales leaders with recent experiences building sales machines, to share their leanings with the community.

I first met Christi when I was working in Paris for LivingSocial on the integration of a local startup they had just acquired.  Christi popped into the offices while she was on vacation, and right away started to ask questions about the sales team and the front line management structure.  In the early days of a sales team, things can be pretty messy, and Christi had no patience for that.  We immediately reviewed the tools that the sales team had access to, and the cadence that managers where using to meet with their team members.  I won’t go into the details of the changes that where made, but it was crystal clear that Christi had an eye for turning a mess into a sales machine, and I had a ton to learn from her.

Our second encounter was almost 12 months later.  She had taken a deployment with the international sales team to Australia, and we were both being assigned to work out of the UK office.  Yet again Christi showed her ability not only to get in the weeds and attack front line sales problems such as prospecting , salesforce training, aligning value props, closing, etc.  She also showed the ability to roll-out large scale projects such as an initiative to shift the percentage of deals signed with restaurants across the entire UK business.

Hopefully it should be clear by now why we think Christi will have a lot to share with the sales leadership community.  After her time in UK she went on to be the Sales Director and eventually Senior Sales Director on the east coast, where she drove revenue for some of LivingSocial’s largest markets.  This career trajectory from front line selling in a small local market to large team leadership at the highest levels is precisely the focus of many of our posts here at Building the Sales Machine. So please check out her first and second posts, and come back often to read her thoughts on developing sales people, motivating teams, and leading large outside sales teams!

 You can find her on Twitter here.  Or on Linked in here.