Nic Read

Nic Read (Aldershot, August 14, 1967) is a British sales effectiveness expert, researcher, author and conference speaker.

Read was born in Aldershot in the United Kingdom in 1967 to Mary Dunn and Colin Read. His family were Ten Pound Poms who migrated from Southampton to Melbourne Australia in 1973 on the Chandris Line ocean liner RHMS Australis.

He is the founder and current managing partner of SalesLabs, a revenue growth advisory firm. His views on sales, management, employment and leadership have been featured in magazines and blogs by Forbes, the American Management Association, Inc. (magazine), USA Today, Entrepreneur (magazine), Agency Sales, Selling Power magazine, Employee Benefits Adviser, and in television interviews on American Broadcasting Company's Washington Business Tonight, 3KTVK, KDVR, and Business Day (South Africa).

Read is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a young man he served as a proselyting missionary in an area that included Queensland, Australia and Papua New Guinea. During this assignment he liaised with Meals on Wheels kitchens to cook and deliver meals to housebound and hospitalised elderly citizens in the community. He also coordinated blood drives with the Red Cross, plus clean-up projects in Gympie, Queensland after the Mary River rose to 21.40 metres and flooded the town in 1992. Other assignments he fulfilled in the LDS Church include serving as a Stake mission president in Germany, as a High Council member in Germany and Australia, and as a public affairs specialist in England.

In 2002, Read approached Dr. Steve Bistritz to partner on researching the genre of selling to executives. Bistritz had previously co-written a research paper titled Selling to Senior Executives How Salespeople Establish Trust and Credibility with Senior Executives. Read wanted to investigate if the findings of Bistritz's original research was specifically US-centric, or consistent across different business cultures. Between 2003 and 2007 more than 500 executives were interviewed or surveyed, making this study on executive buying behaviour the largest of its kind ever conducted. The business book Selling to the C-Suite: What Every Executive Wants You to Know About Successfully Selling to the Top is based on this research.

In the same period Read and his team at SalesLabs ran a parallel research project to understand how top sellers structured their Sales process when pursuing a simple product sale compared to a more complex solution sale. Instead of following the sales profession's ubiquitous sales funnel, top sellers were seen to use a less linear and more cyclical approach that emphasised customer intimacy. More importantly, the research documented specific approaches top salespeople applied which were not previously common knowledge. Other researchers and authors have drawn similar conclusions about the modern solution selling process. Read published the research findings in the McGraw-Hill business book Target Opportunity Selling: Top Sales Performers Reveal What Really Works.

In 2016 Read undertook research with to understand how to create high-performing key account management practices. The research focused on the UK IT industry, which declined between 2010-2016. The research was written into an academic paper titled 'How to create high-performing key account management: lessons from the UK IT industry'and accepted for presentation at the annual British Academy of Management conference. The research was then developed into an article for publication in Duke's Dialogue Journal, which provided insights for sales people globally.

Non-fiction

Read is the author of the following business books:

Selling to the C-Suite: What Every Executive Wants You to Know About Successfully Selling to the Top (McGraw-Hill, 2009). The term 'C-Suite' refers to business executives whose abbreviated title begins with a 'C', such as the CEO or CFO, but may also apply to other heads of departments and Board of directors members. The research and the book were published in response to the Financial crisis of 2007–08 which saw executives giving greater scrutiny to their company's purchases.

Target Opportunity Selling: Top Sales Performers Reveal What Really Works (McGraw-Hill, 2013). A 'target opportunity' is defined as a large Financial transaction between companies that may take months or years to win (see Closing (sales)), and so incurs a high Opportunity cost. The book was written to share observed Best practices drawn from field research on the subject matter.

Fiction

In 2008 he published the science-fiction E-book "Endworlds 1: Echoes of Worlds Past" as an exercise to prove if a work of fiction could find a fan base if it was guided by an analysis of plot rhythms from previous bestsellers. The book was co-authored in collaboration with Alan Dean Foster, the novelist of Spellsinger (novel), Midworld, Alien (film), Star Trek: The Motion Picture and the original Star Wars.

The E-book of Endworlds was the first of its type produced with a motion picture-quality soundtrack, scored specifically for the book by British composer Jamie Salisbury. This was recorded by the 70-piece City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra in May 2011 and mastered at Abbey Road Studios in London before being released as the E-book and a standalone music album.

Read has delivered keynote speeches and seminars in training workshops and conferences to audiences in more than 40 countries. Among these he has appeared on stage at:

• 2011 ThinkSales Sales Leadership Conference, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
• 2010 Sales Managers Forum, in Athens, Greece.
• 2010 Optimising the Sales Force, in Melbourne, Australia.
• 2009 Selling Power Sales Leadership Conference, in Miami, Florida, USA.
• 2005 International Corporate Training & Development Conference, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• 2004 HR Directors Forum, in Shanghai China.

In 2016 Read co-authored a paper titled 'How to create high-performing key account management: lessons from the UK IT industry'.The paper was accepted for presentation at the annual British Academy of Management conference, and developed into an article for publication in Duke's Dialogue Journal.

Read has been recognised with the following awards:

• 2005 Winner, Best Sales Trainer, International Stevie Awards
• 2010 Honoree, Sales Education Leader of the Year, Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service
• 2016 Third place, Best New Product, International Stevie Awards

Read was inducted as a Fellow of The Institute of Sales & Marketing Management in 2013.