Why I Decided to Join the SPARXiQ Team

[NOTE: This post was originally published in late November of 2018. I have updated it to reflect a few changes, including the company rebranding, my title, and some cool new solutions that we offer.]

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The position change announcement feature on LinkedIn has become the birthday announcement on Facebook. Except for anyone with a large network, it’s 10 times more overwhelming.

Thank You!

That probably sounds like a complaint, but I’m actually very grateful for the outpouring from my network of friends, connections, and followers who offered their congratulations and best wishes. If you’re among those people and are reading this, please accept my sincere thanks. If I was unable to respond to you personally, know that your message, like, or email meant a lot to me. Thank you.

Amid those congratulatory messages (which, humorously for me, included a fair number of contacts who saw it as a trigger event to try to sell me something), I’ve also gotten a lot of sincere questions (privately, not openly on LinkedIn) about why I decided to pause growing a very successful sales consultancy to join another company.

Fair question.

Life at Transforming Sales Results Was Good

Transforming Sales Results was doing quite well. I had more business than I could handle personally and was currently working with a very large, enviable client. I was building a series of strategic partnerships to farm out the leads that kept coming my way to other people I trusted to do a great job for these clients. I had begun to speak with other independent 1099 consultants about doing work for me, under the TSR brand. I had an opportunity to publish my IP and turn it into eLearning courses that would be distributed on another platform. And, of course, I was working about 80 hours a week (which is just about right, at least according to Elon Musk).

SPA & SPASIGMA (Now SPARXiQ) Have Done Impressive Work

When the CEO of then SPA & SPASIGMA (which have now merged into SPARXiQ; pronounced Sparks’ Eye Cue), David Bauders, and I first connected, the goal was a strategic partnership. I first became aware of the company at Gerhard Gschwandtner’s Sales 3.0 Conference in Philadelphia this year, where I attended and led a post-conference workshop on Sales Coaching Excellence. David was interviewed by Gerhard, shared some research, and demo’d some of SPASIGMA’s “binge-worthy” eLearning. I was impressed. What did I see?

• High-quality video production (filmed in Hollywood-quality)
• Professional actors and trainers combined
• Good writing (former HBO script writers, natural-sounding conversations, utilizing some comedy for attention and “edutainment”)
• Sound instructional design for eLearning with bite-sized nuggets of microlearning that could be combined into structured curricula
• Excellent, high-value content:
  • Negotiation skills (under-taught in most sales curricula today)
  • Business acumen (grossly under-taught in most sales curricula today)
  • Relationship selling (not dead by any means; people make decisions emotionally)
  • And, how to work more effectively with people whose personality type, working style or communication preference is different than yours (a form of adaptive selling in a multi-threaded deal, that is helpful for enterprise-level B2B complex selling)
  • 2022 Update: We have now launched: Modern Sales Foundations, which is a buyer-centric, consultative, value-focused, and outcome-oriented sales methodology, delivered in the innovative SPARXiQ style, with spaced repetition and front-line sales manager support, and Sales Coaching Excellence, which is designed to help front-line sales managers become extraordinary field trainers and sales coaches. We also offer solutions to diagnose and improve your sales force’s effectiveness and hire more effectively.

I also learned about:

• The Empower platform, powered by our partner, Allego, where sales reps can not only access the “snackable” microlearning nuggets but also create videos where they discuss or share best practices related to what they learned and how they used it (best-practice sharing, crowdsourcing, and social learning, all rolled into one). Empower also provides a virtual coaching platform, sales content management, digital sales rooms, and conversation intelligence features.
• The other side of the business, originally Strategic Pricing Associates, dedicated to helping companies manage complex pricing scenarios and improve profitability through sales analytics to optimize profitable growth.

Fads, No. A Performance & Outcome-Focused Approach, Yes.

For those of you who follow my work, you know I’m not one to jump on fad bandwagons and have expressed more concern than excitement over trendy things like microlearning, social learning, and the like. My views haven’t changed. I hear a lot of talk on these topics, but I haven’t seen a lot of performance-centric or needle-moving application of these concepts.

And that’s what excited me more about the SPARXiQ approach. They’ve had a great degree of success already, but more exciting for me – they want to build on that and find a way to marry my work with Sales Training System (applying systems thinking to sales transformation work), my Building Blocks of Sales Enablement, and my content (Buyer-Oriented Selling Systems, Adaptive Selling, and more), and create a platform that can truly help clients change their sellers’ behavior to radically grow their business.

So, when the discussions turned from strategic partnership to “come be a part of the team,” it was too good of an opportunity to turn down. It was fun doing my own thing, but I really enjoy being part of an aligned team with a shared vision and big goals.

On December 3, I will be the Vice President of Sales Effectiveness Services for SPARXiQ, where I will expand sales effectiveness services to drive profitable growth in our core distribution and manufacturing verticals, foster expansion into other vertical industries, as well as drive the expansion and success of their virtual training content and Empower platform.

There’s a lot more I could (and will eventually) say about all this. For now, I need to get back to my client transition work and get ready for Monday.

Thanks again for your well-wishes and questions, I appreciate your support. And keep an eye on SPARXiQ and what we’re up to. I promise we’ll bring you great content and exciting things in 2019 and beyond!

Get Connected with SPARXiQ!

• To learn more about the companies, visit our website at SPARXiQ.
• You can follow us on LinkedIn as well at SPARXiQ on LinkedIn and follow our Modern Sales Foundations page.
• And you can follow my posts on our blog, here.

As always, thanks for reading, be safe out there, and by all means… let’s continue to elevate our sales profession!

Mike